Arthel "Doc" Watson, the legendary (and blind) American folk guitarist and songwriter, died in a hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Tuesday. He was 89 years old.

Swaggy Doo can stop releasing this intoxicating ear candy and go back to releasing the crappy ear candy that he used to any time now. Why's it gotta be a Take 5, Justin? Why couldn't you just stick to those hard sugar dots glued to a streamer that yielded as much paper as candy for consumption? WHY?

One night last week, Houston rapper/viral phenomenon Riff Raff was sitting in my living room in Brooklyn, eating a bag of Wise BBQ potato chips. The day before, he'd flown to Daytona Beach, Fla., to shoot a music video with 19-year-old viral rap ingénue Kitty Pryde, and now he was in New York to do photo shoots and interviews for two major rap magazines. He was scheduled to play The Bamboozle festival in New Jersey the following day. He sat on the couch next to the two attractive women that he'd brought with him—"my girl and her friend," he explained—and while his girl's friend rolled a small joint, Riff Raff and I played NBA Street Vol. 2 on my PlayStation 2.

As tied up as we are in waiting for legislation to catch up with our humanity, being a gay man can be supremely liberating. This is especially so on a behavioral level. (I assume this is similar for queer people of all and/or no genders, but I'm just speaking from experience here.) To be at peace with your queerness is to allow yourself to do whatever the fuck. We're not really expected to adhere to the heteronormative confines of masculinity, so why should we? Getting over the fear of being called a faggot really opens up the possibilities of how you represent yourself – you can be as masculine and/or as feminine as you are and/or see fit at a moment's notice. We still have to mind our environment (so, like, ease up on the lip liner in Uganda), but given the right place, we are freer than most.

TMZ reports that premier disco queen and conduit for decades of dance-music advancement Donna Summer died today at age 63. She had cancer.

There are a slew of young, talented rappers coming out of New York these days, but none of them sound very "New York." The A$AP crew of Harlem, which recently toured with Toronto's Drake and Compton's Kendrick Lamar, have a "placeless and universal" sound that seems more influenced by Houston's chopped and screwed beats than DJ Premier's horns; Azealia Banks has a distinct enough flow, but her tracks are more electronic than anything practiced by New York's hip hop gatekeepers. And out of Brooklyn, Kilo Kish has outsourced beats for her casual, monotone rhymes to The Internet, Syd the Kid's spaced-out L.A. duo.

The Epic debut of irritating viral duo Karmin, Hello, arrived this week to little fanfare. The only major music publication to have reviewed it is Rolling Stone – Jody Rosen's brief, one-and-a-half star review says it well: "Karmin can make you hate pop music." The New York Times finally got around to writing about it yesterday, and Jon Caramanica is equally dismissive if slightly less savage. On the group's assault on pop, which has found them racking up disgustingly massive numbers for covers of Chris Brown's "Look at Me Now" and Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass," Caramanica writes, "by delivering [these covers] in exaggerated styles more notable for their affectations than for their execution, it in effect renders its source material as a punch line, something not deserving of respect. It's the bad kind of irreverence."

Speaking of male R&B crooners, here's something more sleazy than soulful from Usher's forthcoming, inanely named album Looking 4 Myself. Despite the tactile production of satisfying synth smears, tough thwacks and insistent ticking, the track kind of falls apart when Ursh flips out of his longing falsetto to a whining lechery. This comes after the underwhelming release of the by-the-numbers house of Usher's "Scream" — here's hoping that Looking's first single, the lovely, Diplo-produced "Climax" is, isn't in fact its climax.

It was down to four on last night's season two finale of The Voice: Team Christina's mom-popper Chris Mann, Team Cee-Lo's Juliet Simms, Team Blake's soul crooner Jermaine Paul, and Team Adam's wind-up dancing troubadour Tony Lucca. One won. It was...

As part of our ongoing project to catalog the 2012 presidential election from a metal point of view, we've been soliciting presidential endorsements from noteworthy American metal musicians. Today: Chrome Waves.

Springsteen played in Newark last night, and while some of us didn't get to go, at least we've got a pretty good video of his heartfelt tribute to the late Levon Helm — a cover of the Band's classic "The Weight." [via @NickBaumann]

Chief Keef, the 16-year-old unsigned rapper from Chicago, is still on house arrest at his Grandma's, but now he has a Kanye West remix to his name, because technology has had something of an effect on musical collaborations. Instead of recording in the studio together, Kanye sent some producers from his new label, G.O.O.D. music, to Keef's home in Chicago, where they set up a laptop and a microphone. Keef typed out a verse onto his iPhone on the spot, then yelled into a microphone for a few minutes, and this banger of a street remix was born.

Mike Silver first started making music on his computer when he was 12, and for much of his life kept it fairly private. In 2008, he won a remix contest and slowly began to take his music public, culminating in a series of orignal albums and EPs (his latest, Exercises, was released on Tuesday). Under the name CFCF, he's built an impressive and wide-ranging body of production (he calls his genre "atmospheric electronic music with cinematic undertones"), but his music still retains a certain bedroom quality — an implied quiet, a sleepy intimacy, the close-quarters sensation of a private conversation.

Where is the G-spot? No one seems to know for sure, except for a gynecologist named Adam Ostrzenski, who examined a dead lady's vagina and found "grape-like clusters of erectile tissue" in a one-centimeter sac in between the fifth and the sixth layers of the dead lady's vaginal wall. This grape-like formation, Ostrzenski says, is the G-spot.

Last night, hard-up R&B diva Brandy Norwood was profiled on VH1's Behind the Music. The episode spent a lot of time discussing the 2007 car crash that she maybe caused on a Los Angeles freeway. (It resulted in the death of a mother of two.) Calling it a "blur," Brandy didn't recount the incident (instead, police reports stating that she slammed into a car while driving 65 mph were cited). She spoke vaguely: "I was driving home and it happened." Also: "Regardless if it was my fault or it was not my fault, I was involved in something that cost someone their life. Whoever fault it was, I was in it." More curiously: "A murderer is someone who premeditates it. I didn't wake up that day to be involved in a fatal car crash. I didn't plan for that." Uh, OK? So...what now?

Ten years ago today, the world lost TLC's Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. She lived a crazy life—the "crazy" of her band's sophomore album, CrazySexyCool, referred to her—and died a crazy death. (If you can stomach it, the moments leading up to her fatal car crash are above, excerpted from the VH1 documentary The Last Days of Left Eye, which chronicled 27 days she spent in Honduras before her death.) Left Eye died exactly eight months after 22-year-old Aaliyah and for a period, it felt like the world of R&B was collapsing. The ‘90s had ended two years earlier, but where R&B is concerned, April 25, 2002 is the day they definitively died.

There's nothing like a good answer song, and Wales' Marina and the Diamonds crafted a great one by opening up Justin Bieber's "Boyfriend" and rearranging its insides. If you were waiting for the female perspective on eating fondue, you'll be disappointed, but this does a really job of making the original's melody even ear-wormier while trimming the fat (i.e. the rapping). With a new Saint Etienne song called "Answer Song" having just been released yesterday, it's a good time for the medium. Check this space for my response to "Beez in the Trap," "Aunts on My Log."

Yesterday, Brian McKnight, responsible for lite '90s R&B hits like "One Last Cry," "Back at One" and "Love Is" (with Vanessa Williams), posted a song on his YouTube to serve as a preview for his then-upcoming "adult mixtape." The chorus went: "Let me show you how your pussy works / Betcha didn't know that it could squirt / I have lots of things to show you / If you're ready to learn." That he sang this in his signature squeaky clean croon on top of easy listening keyboards made the irony that much more hilarious. People were outraged.

Carrie Manolakos, a former Broadway actress who made her mark as Sophie Sheridan in Mamma Mia!, is promoting her upcoming debut album Echo with the release of a climactic "Creep" cover she performed earlier this month at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village.

"Somebody That I Used To Know," the Sting-esque earworm of a single from Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter Gotye, has ascended to the peak position on the Billboard Hot 100 in its 15th week on the chart. Have a listen, if you've somehow managed to avoid its rise so far. It's a great song, but its popularity is particularly notable for two reasons.