#Hashtags are probably the bane of your Twitter existence. You no doubt follow people who either use them too much or in the strangest possible ways. Chances are, you regularly do the same. #DGAF. Currently, there are two songs that begin with a #hashtag in the Top 20. it's the most 'sign o' the times' moment of #2013 so far. The concept of a song or album including the little symbol is so new that # is still one of the forbidden characters on Wikipedia, and Will.i.am's #willpower is an example of what Wiki does in the case of an article necessitating the character in its title.

See also: Will.I.Am Kickstarts The Perhaps-Inevitable Trend Of Naming Albums After Hashtags

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If Cher could tweet the stars, she'd give them all 2 U~

RiFF RAFF may get all the the love as the King of Incomprehensible Tweets, but the title of Queen goes to Cher. While she may not have Harmony Korine ready to pen a book of tweet interpretations, the near-EGOTer has roughly 1.3 million followers who eagerly await her tweets, which, on any given day, can cover an odd mix of political rants, Instagram photoshoots, Q&A sessions, and often just a big ol' jumble of letters.

We wonder if maybe Cher takes her inspiration from another popular Twitter feed -- Horse ebooks. The spam account turned Internet phenomenon that friends in your timeline RT a bit too much keeps things as randomly inspirational and fragmented as the pop star. But we're pretty sure @Horse_ebooks never wrote a gem like "Half-Breed."

Do YOU think you can tell the two most interesting tweeters apart? Take our quiz!

See also: Tyler, the Creator's WOLF, Reviewed By Tyler, the Creator

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Tyler, the Creator's new album WOLF -- a 72-minute experiment to see how often the word "fag" can be rapped on a major label release -- is out today, and the reviews are steady rolling in. You don't need to read any of them. Because Tyler's already reviewed the album for you himself. For the past week, when not tweeting "FAG," "FUCK," "WOLF" or some variation thereof, he's tweeted the real scoop about the album and what we can best expect of it. Namely, it's not any good. Here's what we know, from Tyler's own fingertips: 1) Every beat on WOLF sounds the same. 2) WOLF is butt. 3)WOLF is weak. 4) Most of the lyrics on WOLF are on some Papa Roach, emo type shit, Tyler trying to work out his complicated feelings about his father abandoning him. 5) Hodgy has the best verse on WOLF. 6) WOLF is Sooooooooooooo (13 O's) shitty 7) Tyler says the following words frequently on WOLF: Fag, bike, niggas, golf. 8) You're not going to like WOLF because it's a "weak ass album." 10) WOLF has the best album cover of the year and if you don't think so you're a fag and you smell like shit.

Anyway, here's more of Tyler on his weak ass new album WOLF. WARNING: Tweets so edgy you might cut yourself.

See also: On Odd Future, Rape and Murder, And Why We Sometimes Like the Things That Repel Us

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Lil B has a 3-0 Twitter beef record

Twenty years ago, rap animosity was expressed via diss songs. Like, if someone pissed you off you went home, thought about it, went to a recording studio, pressed up your album, and sent it around. The object of your diss might not find out until six months later.

More recently the rise of the mixtape and the internet allowed diss tracks to reach their targets much more quickly, and today rap disses arrive mostly in 140 character bundles.

While we certainly miss classic diss tracks like "Takeover" and "No Vaseline," Twitter beef can be pretty damn entertaining. Here's a brief history, and at the end we crown a champion.

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Pharoahe Monch

Editor's note: In Tweets is Watching, Phillip Mlynar will ask local artists questions based solely on the contents of their Twitter timeline.

The mighty Pharoahe Monch rolls with nearly 80,000 Twitter followers and yesterday blessed his faithful following with a new single, "Damage." Penned from the perspective of a bullet, the Queens lifer's song is something akin to the third installment in a run that has previously taken in "Stray Bullet" and "When The Gun Draws." It also heads up his soon-coming P.T.S.D. project. After stalking Monch's timeline, here's his Twitter talk about misquoting Gwen Stefani, his secret Pop Lockin' Wednesdays, and his very particular eating habits while watching sports games.


See Also:
- Tweets Is Watching: Skyzoo
- Pharoahe Monch's Desire
- Live: Revive Big Band And Pharoahe Monch Come Together At Blue Note

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By Chris Gray

The passion of Randy Travis has been one of the saddest and most compelling musical dramas of the past year. One of Nashville's most beloved and seemingly mild-mannered singers (now a North Texan) has suddenly gone full-on Johnny Paycheck, brawling in church parking lots, popping out to buy smokes while missing his pants, and taking an asphalt nap on a deserted Texas highway. Even when he's nowhere in sight, his truck turns up flipped over in a deserted field.

There's just something so damn country about the whole thing - except, of course, Keith Urban or Dierks Bentley would sooner record a One Direction song than this series of scenarios that were once tailor-made for Music Row. So thank God for Twitter.

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Which Gallagher brother is a bigger prat... on Twitter?

If you're on the Internet you might have heard of Klout, a pseudo-scientific way for measuring the slippery ideal of "online influence." Taking into consideration a variety of factors, it has (despite its often being utterly gameable and as a result off the mark) turned into a way for people online to judge not just each other, but themselves.

Today a variation on Klout, Klouchebag, launched to further fill in the picture drawn by Klout's algorithms. Dubbing itself "the standard for measuring asshattery online" and putting itself (or, well, its code) on the lookout for people engaging in jerky behavior in the 140-character wild, it judges users' Twitter feeds on four metrics—"Anger," "Retweet Abuse," "Social Apps," and "English Misuse"—and then figures out just how much of an annoying prat they are accordingly. (Your correspondent's score of 57 causes her to fall in the "bit of a douchebag" range.) This new, exciting measurement of the always-rampant scourge of online idiocy caused us to wonder: Which musicians with prominent social-media presences are, in actuality, the worst—or at least, worse than their chief rivals using a semi-scientific method? A couple of head-to-head matchups after the jump.

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@KREAYSHAWN you're a dumb bitch. And you can't rap. I'll sit on your face. ... Fall back slut.

— ♥ AZEALIA BANKS ♥ (@AZEALIABANKS) January 4, 2012

The "social" part of "social media" describes the relationship users can develop with each other through constant updates. Twitter epitomizes this principle, inviting users to post their quick chirp-like thoughts 24 hours a day, seven days a week and providing an overwhelming amount of time for both opportunities and letdowns.

There's no need to stalk a concert in order to see the unfiltered side of an artist—just go online and check out what they're putting out on social media. But like any other relationship, this one has its limits—rules to the game, just like Biggie's Ten Crack Commandments. Etiquette, if you will, to handling online stardom and the commentary that surrounds it. Here are four guidelines for those people looking to navigate the social-media waters:

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Say what you will about Lana Del Rey—and boy, have you ever, Internet—even her most devoted fans would be hard-pressed to call her "profound." Amidst the embarrassing-for-everybody controversy over her Saturday Night Live performance, her lips, her name, her dad, her shelved first album and whether or not she actually likes video games (per an MTV interview: nope), the stone that is her Twitter feed has largely been left unturned. It's full of perky @ replies, album news and the sort of "meaningful," punctuation-challenged platitudes that you generally find on the Facebook walls of people who had kids right after high school.

But! Is Del Rey's zombie-eyed thought catalog so strange and robotic that you'd mistake it for a bizarrely compelling spambot designed to sell ebooks about horses? Is Lana our next inexplicably profound Internet muse? Is she smarter than the seemingly sentient @horse_ebooks, and more importantly, can you tell them apart? We're guessing no—but you're welcome to try. Below, you'll find tweets from both, presented verbatim. Don't cheat! If you can identify 1-5, you've probably never heard of Hipster Runoff and should congratulate yourself; 6-10, you're a reasonable, Internet-savvy adult; 11-15, have you even left your apartment this week? Call your mother, she's worried about you.

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Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm of Tanlines.

Giving the Best Local Music Twitter award in our Best of NYC issue to @tanlines was pretty much a no-brainer. The account, which is run by the duo's Jesse Cohen, is heavy on the wry observational humor and light on the "come see our band" or "here's somebody saying that we're awesome" self-promotion that bogs down way too many social-media outposts for musicians. Social-media gurus (and people who just want to be less annoying online) should take note; Cohen knows how to do it right. I talked to him on a chilly afternoon outside Blue Bottle about all things Internet; a condensed version of our lengthy chat is below.

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