This week Madonna's 12th studio album and dive into the deep end of the EDM pool, MDNA, came out. I didn't like it very much. But what I like even less is the sexism-tinged age-baiting that the record seems to be inspiring in so many critics. Forbes was likely the worst offender of the bunch, going so far as to call MDNA "Madonna's Mighty Menopausal Comeback." (Uh, was that claim fact-checked, "straight woman half her age" who wrote that piece?)

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Maybe it's all that misguided Year of the Woman chatter that dominated year-end roundups, or the slow, agonizing creep of Fashion Week, or the coming apocalypse, but hoo boy has there been a lot of terrible writing about female musicians in the past few weeks. The latest offender is the New York Times style magazine T's cover-worthy profile of Lana Del Rey, which manages to be offensive from its first sentence and somehow gets worse from there. (There are even photos by the terminally icky Terry Richardson.) This piece inspired me to put forth four questions that writers, whether they're male or female, whether they're people with Tumblrs or those important enough to score offices at the New York Times building, should ask themselves before hitting "send" on their next piece about a woman making music.

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Jason Paul Roberts

Last week in the Voice, we told you the story of Kalyn Heffernan, a disabled, queer rapper from Colorado and her shambling jazz-hop trio's October trip to New York City. Heffernan still lives in Denver, but the 24-year-old contemplated relocating to New York City a couple years ago. Having studied studio engineering at the University of Colorado Denver (a/k/a Music Entertainment Industry Studies with a Tech Focus), she applied for an unpaid studio-recording internships in New York City and New Jersey around the turn of 2010.

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There is always a relevant Unrest video.
Sure, autumn isn't exactly the season that your typical clichés associate with love ünd romance, but the chances that you might wind up seeing music with someone you fancy do exist! And despite the gloom and the cacophony of freakouts over Facebook becoming even more whiplash-inducing I'm feeling sorta optimistic for the coming season on this first day of fall, so in the interest of helping you all find happiness while not irritating the people in your immediate vicinity—particularly if you are at a crowded show surrounded by people who might not be as romantically lucky as you are—here is the one cardinal rule of being on a date at a general admission concert that I would like to present to all of you:

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This week the Rock Beach shows in Brooklyn-not-Rockaway have been getting a fair amount of bad press, thanks to a Brooklyn Paper piece that called this summer's series of concerts at the Aviator Sports Complex a "beach-blanket bomb." But it's probably not all that good of an idea to get defensive by getting sexist, as JellyNYC's Chris Goldstein kinda did when he gave a comment to Gothamist on the story, which also noted that the turnout for the most recent one was about 150 people or so. Granted, the Brooklyn Paper piece was horribly written (please, copyeditors, fight the word "hipster" from appearing in your stories more than once; the BP story used that dried-out term four times in the body alone, never mind the headline/caption combo). But the lashing-out Goldstein engaged in was more than a bit cringeworthy.

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"I'm not saying don't drink. Just don't do 13 shots out of a bowling ball. The guy peeing where he's standing? That's a problem."
—O.A.R. manager Dave Roberge on the rowdy fans that helped his charges get banned from the Jones Beach Theater after a particularly rowdy show where 20 drunk teenagers got arrested in the Wall Street Journal's look at the fan-control efforts recently put forth by Roberge and other bands. Among them is a policy that "demands that fans refrain from fighting, doing illegal drugs, wielding laser pens and drinking underage"; it's known as "Don't Be That Guy/Girl," which is a reference to the old PCU joke about not wearing a band's t-shirts to that same band's gig. My, how party fouls have changed since the dawn of the alt-rock era. Maybe selling more smart drinks would help stem the tide of alcohol seepage into the brain? OK, so they tasted like chalk, but still.

You have no choice to admire the chutzpah of someone who'd hop on Stubhub and offer $1,500-a-shot tickets for a show that isn't even technically on sale yet. And yet here we are. Whether this is serious or performance art or what we couldn't rightly say, but let us politely suggest that you wait until tix for LCD Soundsystem's April 2 farewell show at Madison Square Garden are actually on sale, Friday at 11 a.m., before you go selling whatever amount of plasma it would require to finance this. (The ticket-resale market is already robust, but usually within more logical bounds: Tickets for this morning's Pitchfork presale, which lasted all of like 60 seconds apparently, topped out at a far more manageable $61.50.) Oh, and to whoever's offering this fantastic deal: James Murphy wants to kick your ass.

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And so it came to pass that the two most anticipated hip-hop albums of the fall will be released 24 hours apart, if their respective voluminous Twitter accounts are to be believed, and given the airtight rapper/Twitter double helix these days, why wouldn't you believe them. From an increasingly hypothetical shopper's perspective this is awfully convenient; from Nicki's standpoint, definitely not.

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Nothing beats a good promo photo

Here we have an amusing look at the pitfalls and clichés of the DJ-bio racket, an increasingly hackneyed PR necessity marred by such banalities as "classically trained pianist" or "known for spinning eclectic sets." As a more complicated exercise, our guide than attempts to pen the highly coveted all-cliché bio, and the results are chilling indeed:

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Despite the fact that a Haitian electoral board ruled late Friday night that Wyclef Jean was ineligible to run for the country's presidency--presumably because he doesn't meaningfully live in Haiti at all, though the board didn't give a reason--Jean has now decided to appeal the decision. After, that is, declaring just two and half days ago: "I respectfully accept the committee's final decision." Not anymore! He's since directed his lawyers to appeal the ruling to Haiti's national electoral dispute office, because he has a document ''which shows everything is correct," according to the AP. That must be some document!

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