A Wasteland Companion, the new album from M. Ward, comes out in April, and this is one of my favorite tracks from it. Enjoy!

Watching Hodgy Beats ride through the suburbs, shooting lasers from the crotch of his Starship Troopers spacesuit, hitting patty-cake-playing white girls and turning them into cats, makes it very, very difficult to believe that the Odd Future crew is not thinking beyond whatever controversy and "troll-gaze" labels people put on them. I think they're having fun; largely innocent fun. And making good art ("violator art," maybe, though my head starts to swim with the word salad of critical terminology.) But I do think it's art that says, or is at least trying to say something about the world we're living in. And even if that something is nothing more than "everyone should lighten up a little bit and listen to what we can do with words and beats, watch what we can do with popular-culture imagery"—we should. Tyler the Creator is a coke-sniffing centaur. Yes. I prefer to err in the direction of giving artists the benefit of the doubt. Ice-T once said, "Rap is funny. But if you don't know it's funny, it'll scare the shit out of you." I think that's still the point.

Happy President's Day. I hope you're not at work. But if you are, stop what you're doing and let Eric B. make you clap to this vintage clip of him and Rakim performing on "Yo! MTV Raps" in 1992.

What's your favorite cover of The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes"? Mine is probably the Marisa Monte version, followed closely by the sloppy R.E.M. rendition. Anyway, here's The Kills. [Via]

"The more positive attitude toward intermarriage represents a sharp break from the recent past and parallels behavioral change: about 15 percent of new marriages across the country in 2010 were between spouses of different races or ethnicities, more than double the share in 1980. The researchers presented the acceptance of interracial marriage as 'the fading of a taboo.'” READ MORE

When I was in college, a guy I knew had a really bad day when, at the behest of two platonic girl friends, he drew a picture of where he thought the clitoris was located in relationship to the vagina. He drew it at the bottom. And the girls told everybody. First of all, I swear that I am not the guy in this story. Secondly, too bad Maybach Music Group singer Masspike Miles wasn't around back when we were in college, because he has apparently invented a device designed explicitly to locate hard-to-find features of the female anatomy. I would quote the lyrics to this song, which are actually far more embarrassing than not knowing where the clitoris is when you're in college. But I will just let you listen for yourself. Wait for the chorus, it's worth it. (Then, by all means, stop listening immediately. Although the beat is nice and luxurious and the video shows pretty pictures of Thailand.) Oh, warning: there is a brief appearance of a naked woman's nipple around the 2:00 mark.

Part of me wishes that Jack White had stopped in the middle of his new single and broken into Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption," but this mellower, Dylan-and-Emmylou thing is working pretty good for him, too.