Woodie Guthrie rocked a sticker on his guitar that read, “This Machine Kills Fascists” while singing songs of peace during WWII. Bob Marley crooned, “hit me with music” in “Trench Town Rock,” his tribute to the birthplace of reggae, which had at the time become unstable and plagued with violence.

And in the midst of a hot national debate over gun violence following multiple tragic shootings, Wyclef Jean apparently thinks his “gat-ar” is a way of following the footsteps of politically minded artists who came before him.

TMZ spotted 'Clef in Manhattan this week and he happily pulled out what appeared to be an AK-47 assault rifle for their camera. It was the same item that appeared in a recent Twitter photo of the singer with his entourage.

“I gotta reveal my new 'gat'-tar,” he told TMZ, pulling out the gun-shaped axe.

“The idea is we convert weapons into music,” he explained. “Because at end of the day you got these kids all over the world and it’s all about this gun control. So what my movement is, we start converting weapons into musical instruments.”

But doesn’t making a gun into an icon of rock do more to glorify assault weapons than protest them?

‘Clef isn’t answering that one yet.

What we do know, however, is that the gun appears just in time for the launch of his new album’s promotional campaign -- and that the disc, “April Showers,” includes a track called “Bang, Bang, Bang.”

 
 

Do you enjoy sugary baked goods? The occasional insider-trading scandal? Then you're in luck! Martha Stewart is now looking for love on Match.com (yes, really).

 

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On Billboard this week, perilously-close-to-​middle-age "boy band" 98 Degrees debuted a new single off "2.0," their first full-length studio album in 10 years. The release comes just ahead of this summer’s The Package tour, on which 98 Degrees and Boys II Men will support New Kids on the Block.

The new track is called "Girls' Night Out," and it appears to be sung from the perspective of the old dude in the club who, based on the amount of time he has to croon on about how many females are in the house, we'll guess is rollin' solo.

And the more we listen to the lyrics, the more we get the feeling that the song's protagonist -- let’s call him Mr. 98 Degrees of Creepy -- is gonna leave the club solo, too.

For one thing, he must have some more phone hacking to do:

"She don't wanna wait no more / Ready to get on the floor/ It's hot tonight / Calling up all of her friends …"

And what's up with the Jar-Jar Binks speak?

"Look how she do that sexy dance ..."

Plus, he's totally misreading the point of a girls night out:

"She got her girlfriends all around / Looking good and getting down tonight / I really think I love girls night out"

Besides, if you hafta point out that your interest level is beyond normal and 'not a crime' ...

“And that one’s looking dangerous / But I'm kinda curious, it's not a crime / Look how she move her body slow”

Not to mention, dude sexy-talks in Charlie Sheen meltdown quotes:

"Look at them brunettes and blondes / And every other style women / Short, tall, thick, small / All of them winning"

And. Um. Everything about this:

 "I’ll have you all and I can’t get enough"

Check the track for yourself and see if "Girls Night Out" is a sweet ode to lovin' ladies (all the ladies), or if it's time for the guy in the song to go home and creep on his wife (and maybe rub some Ben-Gay into his middle-aged muscles) for a while instead ...

 

Sure, the characters on "Mad Men" boast hooch-guzzling skills that would have made Nicolas Cage's "Leaving Las Vegas" character cringe. But at least their concomitant behavior is as depraved as you'd expect from stressed-out high earning types prone to morning vodka binges.

Those loveable substance abusers on "Friends," on the other hand? It seems their not-hospitalized, not dead, not even that tweaked out characters shielded the public from the ugly truth about their collective caffeine addiction.

In a new "study" (kinda) from Scientific American, Kyle Smith deduces that if Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross actually drank the amount of coffee they appeared to on "Friends," they would probably all be goners -- or at least really, really ill.

To wit:

"If each friend drank two [20-oz.] mugs of coffee over each episode, the whole gang downed, in total, 445 gallons of coffee ..."

That apparently works out to "three whole pounds of caffeine over their 10 seasons." And it's a lot worse than it sounds. Smith continues:

"If you distributed all the caffeine the friends ingested over the decade at Central Perk, it would be enough of the drug to send almost 300 people to the hospital—if not outright kill them."

But wait! "Friends" only came on once a week, so each episode covered more days than one.

"If each episode represented a week of time, on average, then these java junkies downed nearly 3,100 gallons of coffee — enough to fill over half a freight container. This amount of joe could send over 1,900 people to the hospital.

And yet, a visit to Central Perk was never a one-way ticket to emergency medical care. It was just a place where Joey played dumb, Rachel played with her hair and Ross played the sad sap you always knew he was.  

We're not sure what the lesson here is but the revelation sure does make Don Draper's office bar look a wee bit less dangerous ...

 

Say a hallelujah, people, because Johnny Depp hasn't lost the hot. It was touch and go there for a while, what with his accessories addiction and apparent reliance on styling tips from Handsome Hobos magazine. But when the actor stepped out of his trailer on Monday on the Los Angeles set of "Transcendence," his usual scruff was gone, replaced by shorter hair and a distinct lack of necklaces, bracelets, rings, hats, scarves and other accoutrements one tends to find in a New Mexico gift shop. More impressive: His dirt-stained white T-shirt actually enhanced his cleaned-up look. So much better than jangling when he walks ...

 

We're no security experts, but we figure one of the basic rules of personal protection is this: Don't lead your boy band-fronting client into a pack of hormotional fangirls. But that's the scene that played out Monday in Paris, as Harry Styles made his way from his Paris hotel to a waiting car. All that separated him from his ride was about 20 feet and several dozen frenzied female fans (and one alarmingly deep-voiced French dude shouting "Arry! Arry!'). The short journey cost him his blue beanie and a few pieces of his soul. Watch it ...


 

It's a little hard to take Selena Gomez seriously as a fully realized sex symbol when she's still snuggling up to a tantrum-prone teenager with an ever-growing collection of unsightly tattoos. But that doesn't stop the sometime squeeze of Justin Bieber from trying. Hard. Case in point: She perfects an open-mouthed, closed-eye, moist-lipped sultry-face in her forthcoming video for "Come & Get It."
Selena, 20, who on Monday tweeted the above photo from the shoot, writhes in and out of the water with siren-red lips and flowing gowns during the Bollywood-esque vid, which debuts on May 7 on MTV. Check out the teaser below …

 

Duuuude!

National Weed Day 2013 may have passed, but by some grace of astral alignment, it turns out that the same day Cheech and Chong were at Sirius' studios last week, another lover of the sticky-icky was on-site, promoting his new album.

Yep, Snoop Lion crossed paths with his smoky pop culture heroes, sitting in on part of their "Town Hall Fan Q&A" with Artie Lange to introduce himself.

Mostly, Snoop was humble in the presence of 420 greatness, declaring “I wanted to be Cheech & Chong when I was younger," and thanking them for "showing me the way" in his youth.

He also revealed the origin of his smoking habit, which he apparently picked up at the ripe old age of 9.

The former Dee-Oh-Double-Gee went on to discuss how marijuana helped him be “laid-back” when he first started rapping -- an artistic choice that did not go unnoticed by Cheech Marin.

“Snoop was the first one I heard to incorporate a melodic line in the rap,” said Marin, explaining why he couldn’t get down with rap artists like Public Enemy, and then segueing into an admirably off-key rendition of “Gin & Juice.”

The banter aired over the weekend on “SiriusXM’s Town Hall with Cheech & Chong,” but you can peep a video clip from the marijuana-loving meetup below ...