Whoa, flop: The hit-less R&B artist the Weeknd is set to debut higher on the U.S. album chart than Christina Aguilera.

...In which Little Dragon's 2007 piano ballad "Twice" gets an atmospheric R&B makeover from Ohio's Freeze-Tag. This is a security blanket of a remake. Comforting.

A non-story has emerged as a result of Andy Cohen referring to a members of the boy band One Direction as "twinks," a term used primarily by gay men to describe other boyish, usually young, usually gay men. The band and the Bravo host/exec who's addicted to telling everyone how talkative he is were both on Today yesterday and he tweeted this regarding his initial encounter:

Björk's "Mutal Core" video is her best in about a decade. Seismic.

The music of Norway's disco-and-then-some producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is often designed to make people move, which falls in line with his own refusal to stay in one place for too long. In addition to sleek, spacey disco, he's dabbled in folky territory, he's done Kraut-y stuff and earlier this year he released an insane album, Six Cups of Rebel, that had the freaked-out maximalism of Parliament Funkadelic and/or a carnival.

Brooklyn's Midnight Magic is a nine-piece contemporary disco band, complete with a horn section and a theatrical frontwoman, Tiffany Roth, whose combination of chops and camp resembles an off off off Broadway Bette Midler. Their debut album, Walking The Midnight Streets, is out today (via a PledgeMusic donation) and includes their best-known song "Beam Me Up," which has knocked around for over a year, though it sounds like it's been decades.

Rihanna and Chris Brown are collaborating on a song called "Nobodies Business." It's about a start-up owned by nobodies.

Last night, E! premiered the first episode of the three-part mini-reality series Nicki Minaj: My Truth, which chronicles the pop star/rapper's recording of her upcoming Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded rerelease, the prep for her first wide-scale tour and the first days of her (supposedly tumultuous) stint as an American Idol judge. Generally, we saw Nicki being one of two things: a whining, demanding diva over the most frivolous things (clothes, for example) or an egomaniac convinced that she is doing so much for the world (she called her Pink Friday fragrance a "milestone for hip-hop"). Ninety percent of what she says is in a cranky croak and she smiles only occasionally. She seems like the last person you'd ever want to spend time with.

I'm bringing the sound of real music back…I think Adele does a great job - they are catchy pop songs, but it's real music and there are instruments. I want to bring a lot of that back.

"Dubstep" (or EDM) is generally terrible music beloved by America's teenagers. These children go see their favorite DJs in arenas or at festivals, where they chug liquor out of water bottles and/or take various forms of MDMA and whatever else gross adult drug dealers sell them. The problem is that teenagers don't understand how to take drugs without nearly killing themselves, which means that things like this happen at events like Haunted Coliseum at the Nassau Coliseum.

I had no idea that the person that I dismissed immediately upon hearing the sundresscore "Put Your Records On" was capable of soul so gut-wrenching. This reminds me of Isaac Hayes without all the sonic humidity or maybe Portishead invoking Isaac Hayes. Whatever, it's an absolute highlight of the vintage soul-obsessed The Man with the Iron Fists soundtrack, which was exec. produced by Wu-Tang Clan's RZA.

On Sunday, Stevie Wonder's prescient, perfect Talking Book turns 40. To celebrate, avoid Macy Gray's album of TB covers.

Spotify is expanding its extracurricular pursuits past annoying you with their house ads until you get frustrated enough to go premium. The company is now commissioning sexy studies on people, specifically a group of 2,000 British men and women who claim their favorite seductive music is the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

Kiki's over, kids. The Scissor Sisters announced an "indefinite hiatus" at their show last night in London.

Frequent Jean Grae and Pharoahe Monch collaborator Mela Machinko has devised the most reverent Jay-Z tribute since Destiny's Child's "Cater 2 U." Her Hov Said It Best project "uses Jay-Z lyrics, concepts and even ad libs and cadences to craft entirely new songs that tell my stories. On the project, Hov Said It Best is a television show, sort of a This Is Your Life game show, but based on Jay Z, and I am the day's contestant on the show."

The major-label debut from the 25-year-old, Dr. Dre-endorsed Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city, is the Dark Knight of albums: led by a conflicted hero, it is rich, brainy enough not to be too brainy and utterly crowd-pleasing. Billed on its cover as "A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar," it's actually a feature-length narrative through his youth in Compton. The songs are so conversant with one another that Esquire even posted a sort of Cliff's Notes plot outline.

An email arrived in the Gawker inbox from a reader named John H. who was deeply concerned — disturbed, even — by what's become of Axl Rose, the puzzling and frustrating lead singer of Guns N' Roses, the band most Americans between 30 and 45 still consider rock's greatest tragedy due to their unwillingness to reunite properly. John, thankfully, appears to have been less than engaged with G N 'R's many trials and transmutations after the Use Your Illusion albums (circa 1991), so he's in the darkest corner of a darkened room when it comes to W. Axl Rose:

How do you make music about war? Tchaikovsky asked orchestras to drag cannons along with them — to reproduce the actual sounds of battle. There aren't any cannons on Desert Strike, producer Fatima Al Qadiri's new EP — one track opens with a gunshot — but the album is just as interested in the experience of war than the 1812 Overture was. It just borrows heavily from a different, though no less relevant, sonic palette: video games and popular music.

Christina Aguilera's sixth studio album, Bionic, sold a little over 300,000 copies in the U.S. in total. which is terrible even for a time when nobody's buying albums (to contrast, P!nk's The Truth About Love sold over 280,000 copies its first week after it was released last month). Bionic had no real hit singles, either.

Every subgenre needs its classic, and so Spike Lee's Bad 25 is what amounts to the greatest Behind the Music episode of all time. Frenetically paced, ingeniously constructed and brimming with hilarious anecdotes, the look back on the creation of 1987's Bad (the one that had the enormous task of following Thriller), elevates the rock doc to an art form. At over two hours in length, what could have felt like a bloated obituary is unmistakably alive. Although it's unlikely that it would have been assembled were it not for the death of its primary subject, Bad 25 proves that Jackson's legacy has nearly made him immortal.