A #1 hit, but not a one hit.

Yes, the VH1-clip-showization of music-discussion culture is pretty much a given at this point, thanks to, well, the Internet, and its tendency for shared laughter to hold more ballast than shared enjoyment within. (Shh.) And it follows that calling certain artists "one-hit wonders" is a common way to act as a laugh track for pop music, since it allows people to point and giggle at the parts of their past that they miss, but don't want to admit doing so for whatever reason (sadness/shame at getting older, the deep-seated knowledge that Stock/Aitken/Waterman's best songs are much more pleasurable than 90% of "authentic"/"mature" music). But you'd expect a retailer to at least be a little careful when pigeonholing some of its artists as such if only to wring maximum profit out of their back catalogs—and yet iTunes' latest stab at collecting so-called "one-hit wonders" that it's deep-discounted to 69 cents isn't just lazily compiled, it seems to exist on Planet I've Never Been Inside A Rite Aid Playing The Follow-Up Singles To These Admittedly Very Big Songs. Five such examples, below.

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Near the end of A Perfect Circle's Beacon Theatre show earlier this month, Maynard James Keenan asked the audience to engage in a thought experiment of sorts. "We're going to pretend we all left the stage for a few minutes," he told the crowd. "We're just going to stay here and do a couple more songs"—and forego the charade of the encore, that seemingly mandated pause just after a concert's climax to sustain the moments before its denouement. At the time I chalked this aesthetic decision up to Keenan and his band's low tolerance for bullshit (a quality that makes their take on gloomy hard rock much easier to swallow than other, wankier acts in their realm), but in the two weeks since I saw that show I've experienced two other acts—both at the large-scale level, I should note—skip the idea of the encore, too, in favor of cramming more songs into their allotted time.

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Deep at the heart of Cheryl Cole's abrupt dismissal from the American edition of X Factor earlier this week is a twisted take on My Fair Lady. Here we have a pop star who takes leave from her U.K. homeland--where she's a household name thanks to her tenure in the hit-making girlband Girls Aloud--because she sees a chance to make her career global. She uproots her entire life, moves to L.A., presents herself with poise, and avoids getting into any trouble really. And then she gets axed, allegedly over reasons that would make people in traditional workplaces would call up a lawyer--having a thick accent, not connecting to a co-worker whose reputation for self-medicating precedes her.

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Money, honey.

The "Hallmark holiday for music nerds" festivities of Record Store Day are a little less than 36 hours past, and as predicted, the speculators and collectors were out in full force on Saturday. And some of them are already seeing returns on their waiting-in-line investments! eBay's search engine turns up quite a few completed listings with "RSD" in their title, with surely more lurking under misspellings like "RDS" or dispensing with the branding altogether. The spendiest item so far? The limited-to-500-copies Ed Banger Bee Sides box set, a five-disc set of one-sided etched 7-inches that has a Justice demo and four other tracks that went for £497 (which comes out to about $810.36 on our side of the pond--and that's before shipping).

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The scene outside the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium Monday night suggested a Latin jazz celebration; pianist Eddie Palmieri, pianist/bandleader Larry Harlow, drummer Bobby Sanabria, trombonist Chris Washburne, and trumpeter Brian Lynch milled about. But this wasn't a concert, nor was it a celebration; it was an informational meeting organized by the New York chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) where the musicians gathered would soon sound off in polite yet impassioned protest of the Grammys' elimination of the Best Latin Jazz Album category.

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This morning NARAS--the outfit responsible for putting on the Grammy Awards every year--announced that next year, the awards show would have a leaner, tougher look, bringing the total number of categories down to 78 (from 109) and forcing each category to justify its existence by having 40 potential nominees within (up from 25). Not that this'll make the show any shorter--most of the affected categories are ones distributed during the pre-telecast--but it might result in competition getting a bit stiffer.

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So Lil Wayne finally made it out of Rikers yesterday, walking away from solitary confinement, the Rikers guard who called him a "jackass," and what TMZ pegs as one solitary fan in the parking lot (not the way we heard it). Either way, he's free. And though we know now that he's spoken on the phone with Drake, and he may well triumphant emerge at his protégé's concert stop at in Las Vegas tomorrow, what few images that have emerged since Wayne got out have made the rapper's newfound freedom look...lonely. DJ Scoob Doo, among others, has been chronicling Wayne's first 24 hours outside the bing. Does this look like a liberated man to you?:

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The abridged version of our 5500-word primer on Juggalos goes something like this. The self-declared "most misunderstood people in the world" insist they are not a roving gang of suburban serial killers, but a fellowship of outcasts united by dick jokes, harlequin vigilantes, and family love. This last part is particularly offensive to the creator of ICP Fans Against Juggalos, who says that clown rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope have become little else than "a pair of tree-hugging hippies looking to spread peace, love, and the word of the Holy Bible" and that while he once identified as a Juggalo, now the community is nothing but "a support group for misfit children." We spoke with the anonymous blogger, a mid-20s Chicagoan who describes himself as "an award-winning independent filmmaker" that doesn't "want to be known solely for this blog," over e-mail.

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Marco Anelli

King Neptune staring at Marina

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson have been christened Master of Ceremonies for this year's Mermaid Parade, which for a day will make them, respectively, King Neptune and Queen Mermaid. Hopefully, this means in the press lead-up to June 19's topless-lady procession, we'll get an array of really awkward renderings of the art couple as goofy sea creatures. There's already one posted on the official Mermaid Parade web site, the pair illustrated as a Coney-Island-sideshow-style banner. Perma-frowning Lou appears downright ridiculous:

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