Fans of Biggie will remember that the late but relentlessly beloved rap icon often remarked on his hardscrabble younger years in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he grew up in an apartment with a single mother. Now, 41 years after Christopher Wallace was born, and 16 years after he was murdered, the Notorious BIG's childhood home is up for sale. But things, it would appear, "done changed" since Biggie lived there.

Pitchfork is streaming the new Knife album early. The display is seizure-inducing, so you'll definitely feel something.

Proving that even at his worst, he is among the best, impish rapper Lil Wayne appeared on L.A.'s Power 106 to discuss his new album, I Am Not a Human Being II, and not dying. Wayne added his voice to the chorus disappointed by his new set of songs — Human Being II has received mixed reviews and is one of the most tepidly received releases in the critical darling's oeuvre.

Lana Del Rey released her latest video on her Twitter account last night with the caption "new video," and it turns out the description signaled a pared down aesthetic for the chanteuse. After a series of music videos marked by their retro melodrama (or tigers or A$AP Rocky or aged bikers), Lana del Rey might be moving towards the simple.

Chris Brown wants you to know that he is a passionate, positive, self-actualizing young man. In a series of in-studio interviews he arranged in advance of his upcoming single, he sold this nice-guy image hard.

Kanye West reportedly is considering I Am God as his next album's title, just in case you had any doubts.

Last week songwriter Tracey Thorn, who's best known for her work in the musical duo Everything But the Girl, released her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star in the U.S. It's a witty and charming chronicle of a career full of happy accidents and success found in the least likely of places — like clubland, which the formerly acoustic-based duo took by storm in 1995 when legendary house producer Todd Terry remixed their "Missing" and the results yielded a global smash.

The musical equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys burying the hatchet (or Itchy and Scratchy burying the butcher knife) occurred Saturday night when Oasis' Noel Gallagher joined Blur's Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon onstage at London's Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust benefit show. Rock legend Paul Weller (of the Jam, among things) and poet Michael Horovitz also shared the stage. They played Blur's 1999 single "Tender," one of the happiest sad songs ever written.

On last night's Unsung, TV One's Behind the Music for R&B and hip-hop acts that never quite crossed over into pop megastardom, New Edition's Johnny Gill discussed his life and career. The show regularly examines gay rumors that its subjects have faced (Freddie Jackson and EPMD's Erick Sermon both denied such rumors on past episodes), and Johnny Gill's profile was no exception. That's doubly unsurprising given the reach of the rumors that he and his good friend Eddie Murphy were romantically involved. As usual, Gill denied that there was any truth to the talk, calling himself, somewhat hilariously, "150,000 percent heterosexual."

Beyoncé is so cute when she gets angry: If the art accompanying her new song(s) "Bow Down / I Been On" is any indication, she looks like her prepubescent pageant-girl self Photoshopped onto a picture of her old living room/trophy display area. That's only the first indication the weirdness of the release, which came via Beyoncé's Tumblr yesterday. The song amassed over a million streams on Soundcloud in less than 24 hours, which must be some sort of record.

Hyper-prolific rapper Lil Wayne is currently being given his last rites at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Hospital after suffering a series of seizures, if TMZ is to be believed. But close friends of Wayne's say Weezy is "alive and well." As the world awaits more news, here is the gist of what's happening.

Justin Timberlake's third album, The 20/20 Experience, would be a disappointment were we not adequately prepared to be underwhelmed. This is the kind of album whose mellow, nothing-more-than-nice first single is puzzling until you hear the rest of the album and realize that it's the most commercial pop on a collection whose musical m.o. is to be nothing more than nice. "Suit & Tie," at least, has a sense of spunk, which is more than can be said for most of 20/20. The album sounds like a conscious attempt at musical maturity that is never quite earned or fully realized.

While performing the musical equivalent of twinkletoes, "Suit & Tie," on Saturday Night Live this weekend, Justin Timberlake altered one of its lines in an apparent jab at Kanye West. "My hit's so slick got rappers acting dramatic," sang Timberlake instead of the usual, "Shit so sick got a hit and picked up a habit." Oooh, burn. Calling Kanye West dramatic is like calling him a rapper or an oxygen breather.

To hear others tell it, Woman, the acclaimed debut album from L.A.-based sleepy pop duo Rhye, is the perfect choice for sex music. "Woman is bound to become fodder for a tasteful boudoir soundtrack," says Pitchfork. "The kind of album that can only be made in the feverish early stages of all-consuming eroticism and adoration," says Spin. "Now the pair may be destined to take on the mantle, for a smaller crowd, that Sade has held for millions around the world. Is Rhye prepared to be indiedom's baby-making soundtrack of choice?" says the New York Times. "A blush to the cheeks means the music is working," says FILTER.

During Saturday Night Live this weekend, a 15-second spot advertising the upcoming Daft Punk album aired. If the music debuting in the clip isn't a collaboration with dance-music legend Nile Rogers, who will have some hand in the full-length (the extent to which is as yet unknown), it sure wants to sound like it: It chugs along like Rogers' band Chic with the kind of lite cheese that Daft Punk so expertly sprinkle on some of their work.

If we've said it once, we've said it, oh, at least a handful of times by now: don't make that rap video.

"Attracting Flies" is another brilliant single from British R&B future-retroists AlunaGeorge. With each track (including my favorite single of 2012, "Your Drums, Your Love"), they hone their craft of sounding simultaneously familiar (like from the early '90s) and alien. It's true for their production and their lyrics, which are based on cliches to form something slightly more abstract. Instead of saying, "You're talking shit," in her naturally speedy voice, Aluna Francis sings, "Little gray fairy tales and little white lies / Everything you exhale is attracting flies." So Britishly polite.

Kanye West concluded his Sunday concert at London's Hammersmith Apollo by repeatedly howling, so you know it was a great show. He was performing 2006's formerly breezy single "Touch the Sky" when he unleashed and then threw down his mic. Apparently, this made as little sense within context as it does without. Says GQ UK:

New chart rules incorporating YouTube streams make Baauer's "Harlem Shake" No. 1 in the U.S. Gee, thanks, Billboard.

Stereotype.fm has discovered (and curated) a series of very strange connections between music taste, habits, and personality types. The website is the brainchild of the crew at Tastebuds and is the result of a "hack weekend" project, taking them less than 48 hours to create and launch.