​UPDATE: You can hear the whole thing now.

As the drop date for Lulu, the collaborative album between Lou Reed and Metallica, draws ever nearer (it's out November 1), the wonder over what it might sound like is growing. Well, now the world has a slightly clearer idea, thanks to 30-second samples of the album's nine non-"The View" tracks being posted online! Take a listen after the jump... if you dare.

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​You remember Pavement, right? That band whose Central Park reunion shows you bought tickets for a solid year ago? Who then pranced around the country for most of 2010 while you patiently waited and ruefully read fawning concert recaps from other cities and very possibly lost said tickets? (Seriously: Do you know where they are right now?) Well, those shows are finally almost upon us; that they're celebrating by going on Jimmy Fallon is not surprising. That they're holding an open call for a third guitarist is.

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via SlantShackJerky

​Tell me that isn't the most gourmet (can this word be applied to dried-up cow meat?) beef jerky you've ever seen. Over at Brooklyn Fireproof, the goods are being supplied by jerky newcomers SlantShack Jerky, whose mission statement is "To unleash a jerky flavor revolution upon the meat loving masses." Somehow, corporate sponsorship of indie-rock shows in tiny Brooklyn venues seems moral, if not saintly, when beef jerky is involved. Oh, and Freelance Whales are headlining. Admittedly, we are unsure as to how their prissy, L train-serenading pop-tronica fits in with this rousing affair. But damn, have you ever been to a beef jerky party?

Perhaps today in your Internet travels you will observe a few short, surrealist videos such as the one above, abstractly depicting some sort of Björk/Dirty Projectors project, putatively titled Mount Wittenberg Orca. A date, too: June 30. Huh. No idea what this could be about. Absolutely none.

​If there's any better specific evocation of desktop anxiety and mainframe malfunction, we haven't seen it--no surprise on an album filled with technophobic anthems, from "XXXO" to the so-far unreleased "The Message" and beyond. Lynn Hirschberg might argue that this cover, in juxtaposing M.I.A.'s beauty with the ugly YouTube interface, is "a little unkind" to the free video service provider, but we think those gold bars look quite fetching. [Rap-Up]

​Live by the reunion hysteria, die by the reunion hysteria. Pavement has now added a whopping fifth show to their September stand in New York, playing the Williamsburg Waterfront on September 19th in advance of four straight shows in Central Park later that week. If you thought it was like a handsome elf alighting from the sky and granting you your most personal and everlasting wish at the first announcement, and chuckled in shared anticipation at the second and third, and began to feel somewhat manipulated at the forth, may the fifth be the bolt of lightning that makes explicit what's been true all along: they are going to drag this out as long as humans will continue to buy tickets for it. Should be a lovely evening though! Cop here, starting Friday at noon. [Brooklyn Vegan]

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Seriously. (We think.) Happening October 1-3 in Sin City. There's a mailing list and everything. Liz Phair at Luxor? Pavement at Treasure Island? Interpol at New York, New York? The New Pornographers meet actual pornographers? Book your tickets now, kids -- we're, like, 80 percent sure this isn't a hoax.

​She ran naked through the streets, enacted some complicated restaging of the JFK assassination, then Tweeted about it. Matt & Kim were duly paid homage to, then interviewed, then paid homage to again. Law enforcement in Dallas put out an APB for witnesses who would come forward and testify to the harm the site of Erykah Badu's naked body had done to their eyeballs and children. "I don't think it's going to be something she would go to jail behind, but certainly the message has to be sent," said the city's Mayor Pro Tem. And now the hammer has come down: "Cops say they have charged Badu with disorderly conduct and will mail her a citation," TMZ reports. "Badu faces up to a $500 fine." Surely that astonishing figure will convince her that stripping naked for a video that would soon be watched by hundreds of thousands of people and later slavishly covered in all corners of the media for an entire week straight was a huge, enormous mistake.

​Here you go. Flew out to Portland to interview Stephen Malkmus and everything. There is the requisite fantasy-sports talk, a few theories Chuck's friends have on Pavement's appeal, some Vampire Weekend-ish stuff about whether Malkmus' family was "affluent" or "middle class," etc. But what's most remarkable here is the entirely appropriate but still hilarious total apathy with which these guys seem to be approaching their epochal reunion:

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​By way of promoting a clothing/shoe collaboration between Adidas and Star Wars, we gather--pictures of the hideous and not obviously Star Wars-related merchandise over here. It's like you're kind of on the moon, except your windbreaker makes you look like a robot, maybe? Snoop's role is as generic pitchman, it seems--"We've been giving him product for the last four years," Adidas global creative director Jess Weinstein told WWD. They marched up Broadway this morning; the photo at left was taken the Adidas Originals store in Soho not too long ago. What's a Boat Yoda? [Gothamist, Racked, WWD, photo via @JustRy]