Apple quietly told music executives about a special "keynote" event in four weeks, according to All Things D. Hard to see how CEO Steve Jobs avoids this event, after nearly a year in seclusion. Especially after recently rocking with Coldplay.

Les Paul literally made possible all the music you love, and he died today.

We've written about nerdcore anthems before, including this rap about the SXSW internet conference, the one about the Hadron Collider and the one from the O(nline)G threatening to shank a Wired writer. With few exceptions, the genre has been dominated by geeks, which is why it's nice to see Kate Miller-Heidke get righteous on a creepy, Facebooking ex.

Wrigley had the bright idea to pay Chris "Bubblegum" Brown to put out a pop song that was actually a Wrigley commercial—but without telling anyone it was a Wrigley commercial. The public ate it up! It went huge on pop charts! Proving that people who drive chart sales have no taste, and Wrigley has no ethics.

Somebody put on a yoga festival—a yoga festival—in Lake Tahoe, and indie staples Spoon, Broken Social Scene, and Jenny Lewis played. So did MC Yogi, who asked the crowd: "How many of you think Ganesh is fresh?" Why?

The arrest of Harvard's star African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates has reignited national conversation about things like racial profiling! The important part of the conversation, however? What the best of pop culture has to say about it, naturally.

Michael Jackson's memorial service happens in LA today. Is it a media circus out there? Check out the elephants! Eh? Seriously, it sounds like the media equivalent of the Superdome after Katrina. A brief rundown of the clusterfuckery:

Daily Intel hears there were layoffs today at Spin. Know details? Email us.

Vibe Magazine—one of the biggest music magazines in America—is folding. The entire music magazine landscape is full of the dead and dying. [UPDATED below.]

This wailing ringtone featuring a horsey Philip Roth sample is still better than anything Moby came up with for New York magazine. Of course, the joke is that there are no "hip literary types." [Guardian]

Planned Parenthood is mailing condoms to college kids in their welcome packets, which would be totally passé in developed regions of the country. But this was in Missouri!

One of Michael Jackson's most obvious legacies is the singer's impact on the craft of music video production; his videos were elaborate, expensive and phenomenally successful, both in saturating MTV and selling records. Here are 10 of the best.

New York magazine's Hugo Lindgren proves that—with just a few hours in the studio—Moby can transform a scratchy demo of an amateurish ballad into a rejected outtake from some bad Jennifer Grey movie soundtrack. [NY Mag]

Death Row Records sold; new Tupac album on the way! Seriously.

The Way We Live Now: Eking out a hard living in cubicle hell while beauty dies, duh. We work without music. We work without pay. We work without jobs, just to say "Hey, one day."

[To the tune of "American Pie"]

In your woozy Wednesday media column: multiple music magazines die, the Boston Globe thinks it's too tough to kill, Harvard newsies can't find jobs, Surface magazine gets a cheaper office, and a report from the newspaper conspiracy meeting:

If there's a reason your town reeks of oversweat Birkenstocks, patchouli, and politically unaddressed body odors, it's because seminal jam band Phish begins their reunion tour tonight. The biggest perk, naturally, will be the influx of high-grade marijuana in your town. But the 5-0 ain't havin' it.

Neat: previously extinct, 300 year-old, eight foot-long horn (a 'Litus') was reconstructed with computers.