Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers is quite possibly the most beloved power-pop album of all time, and certainly the most poignantly morose, a heartbreaking state only exacerbated by frontman Alex Chilton's death last year. Now comes word of a full-album live tribute with a crazy all-star cast, all trying their damndest to turn "Holocaust" into a celebration.

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Via Kim's Twitter, of course.

Well, this is just stupendous. Prince played his final Madison Square Garden show Monday night, with Cee Lo as an opener and a predictably great set list ("Purple Rain" was the sixth song), but as an overall highlight it's tough to beat pulling Kim Kardashian onstage and then kicking her back off when she won't dance. And if Questlove's word isn't good enough for you, here is remarkably high-quality video of Prince doing basically what America has been trying to do for years now. The man is a national treasure. Skip to 1:00 if you like:

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Kathleen Hanna is slowly creeping back into the limelight -- a few nights after taking the stage during her own star-studded tribute show at the Knitting Factory, the Riot Grrrl luminary/semi-recluse showed up at an Our Hit Parade fete at Joe's Pub for a long, rambling, thoroughly engrossing multimedia presentation that begins, of course, with "I'm gonna tell a story about the '90s." Discussed: Kurt Cobain, fake abortion clinics, hangovers, the ubiquity of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and being forced to strip to Janet Jackson songs for the pleasure of a hardcore band (named Muttonchop) your own band had opened for earlier that day because your van needs $1,000 in repairs. And then, of course, she further contributes to the ubiquity of "Teen Spirit" by singing it herself, with a whiff of "Rebel Girl" in there too, of course. She oughta do Broadway. (OK: Off-Broadway.) (Off-Off-Broadway.) Probably a Beastie Boy somewhere in here, too:

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Diddy: dirty money plus ice cream.

Rejoice New York, Diddy's long, long, long-awaited Last Train To Paris is finally out today, after three years in the making and some of the most pleasurable pre-album explicating known to man. The record, see, is about the woman of his dreams, except after a one-night stand, he fails to get her name. They eventually reunite, then tragically split again, the result of a misunderstanding. Finally: "One night in London, I get offstage at 9:45pm and I hear that she's in Paris. It's one of the foggiest nights, so I can't take my plane, I can't drive. The only way I can get to her is the last train to Paris..." BOOM! The record was reportedly inspired Felix da Housecat and all sorts of other delightful Eurohouse cheese (these influences are less audible then maybe you'd like them to be on the actual record) which, as Diddy tells Vulture's Amos Barshad in a late breaking contender for interview of the week/month/year, the rapper producer discovered at Ibiza's legendary club DC10:

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The crew at Terminal 5. These guys are good. Pic by Puja Patel.

LCD Soundsystem live are a fearsome, complicated, pretty wonderful thing, as hopefully you've found out by yourself by now; they've got an iTunes-only thing coming out Tuesday that will, for those who haven't seen 'em in person yet, come closest to proving it. Recorded in a U.K. studio in one day a week or so after this year's Glastonbury Festival, The London Sessions "perfectly captures the intuitive live evolvement of lcd as a band," as they put it. "Here nothing is replicated with computers, everything instead is recreated in real time, tougher, looser and less clinically." Not that "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" ever felt particular clinical, but still, great. Tracklist:

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Hold on to your butts: The most popular DJ receiving regular airtime on MTV right now is coming to town, and there will be NO GRENADES ALLOWED.

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Wayne's caption for this photo: "The trees in Lisbon are old and wicked."

Lost in the shuffle of a certain mega-celebrity joining the increasingly indispensable social networking site that is Twitter was the fact that Wayne Coyne, weirdo crown prince of the Flaming Lips, had also finally caved. Coyne's penchant for saying crazy things is well known. (Recall his 2009 line on the darlings of the music world this week, the Arcade Fire: "They have good tunes, but they're pricks, so fuck 'em.") And, so far, his Twitter account has been as stellar as one could have hoped: a mix of bonkers aphorisms, pithy observations, and pictures of his wife in the nude. It's early going yet--he's currently following a scant 18 people, among them Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Pitchfork--but we figured, why not collect a few of 'em? Someday history might thank us:

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Welcome to so many more photos like this one. Via @KanyeWest, of course.

Even as we write this, Kanye West is cruising through New York in a Maybach, listening to Andre Rieu's recording of the "William Tell Overture," talking about the genius of classical music and the hardship of dating models (too many cigarettes and small dogs). We know this because yesterday the world's greatest blogger joined Twitter (then performed there), where he's swiftly become all you could hope for in terms of a social media correspondent. So although it's only been 24 hours, and we have to assume there are innumerable delights waiting for us in the future, it seemed only right to memorialize 'Ye's first day on the microblogging service with a few, selected Tweets. As in:

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Seriously, this guy

Let's take a moment from our regularly scheduled programming to notify you about something we tangentially cover here at Sound of the City, that I've personally deemed very, very important. Specifically that Tracy Morgan will be filming his very first HBO special at the Apollo this fall and it's open to the public. The engagement takes place over the course of two nights--Friday, September 24 (the same night as the last bait-and-switch Pavement show, but eff them) and Saturday, September 25--and tickets are relatively inexpensive in the context of these things: $30 face, with another $12 or so in extraneous charges. (Plenty left, it seems, so have at it.) Let it also be known that Jordan, when not trying to hide the fact that he's been faithful to his onscreen wife Angie on 30 Rock, works blue. So blue that a steady stream of uptight perms walked out of his Carnegie Hall performance last November. And so when Morgan promises in the event press release that the "special is going to be all the elements: fire, water, earth, air"--in other words, "the Avatar of comedy experience"--it'll be more like the Avatar porn of comedy experience. So: like nothing you've ever seen before. And very, very blue.

"I feel a huge connection to Scott Pilgrim: we all grew up playing in bands, we all grew up with the John Hughes-esque emotional drama drowning our lives. So all I had to do was write music and it would work."

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game pixel art by Paul Roberston

Every few years, gloriously awkward music nerds get their very own vulnerable onscreen antiheroes. This year, Scott Pilgrim will be for music-blog-scanning MP3 hoarders what High Fidelity's Rob was to SPIN subscribers in 2000. The title character of the most recent film from Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim is a scrawny bassist who falls for a rollerblading indie girl named Ramona Flowers. New to town, she has the unusual baggage of seven evil exes; in order to date her, he must individually defeat them all. Personified by geek heartthrob Michael Cera and based on illustrator Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part graphic novel, Scott Pilgrim the protagonist is as much creative-underclass epitome as fighting-game avatar: successful combat moves register numerical points and achievements (e.g. "64 HIT COMBO"); extra lives are gained from grabbing levitating pixelated faces; bathroom visits deplete Pilgrim's "Pee Bar."

So logically, with the August 13 release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World comes Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game on August 10, an 8-bit side-scrolling brawler that pits the unlikely warrior against his paramour's former loves. Also logically (and awesomely), Ubisoft asked Brooklyn's own 8-bit-punks Anamanaguchi to score the cartoon melee, an opportunity the band's chief composer Pete Berkman admits was a "dream come true." Hence, Berkman and guitarist/Gameboy manipulator Ary Warnaar were "psyched beyond belief" to get on the phone and tell us about the experience.

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