And can you blame him? The performance, set to take place on November 26th, was meant to follow this awful interview that Matt Lauer recently conducted with the rapper ("I want you to just look at his face..."), also on The Today Show. But if Kanye West has proved anything in 2010, it's that he doesn't have much need for the traditional media in terms of promoting himself and his music. (Which if you're the illegal downloading type you can now hear, in versions both dirty and clean. 'Ye seems zen about it.) So he told Lauer and The Today Show that they "made a mistake," and backed it up by bouncing on the program. In yet another Twitter stream of consciousness, of course. Rap Radar transcribed all the updates:

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As far back as 2007, Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco was threatening to quit music and telling us, "The entity of recorded music really sucks, it's really wack, especially when you're doing it through a major. It's like, you don't make any money unless you sell tons and tons of records. And I'm not selling tons and tons of records. So, financially, it's like, this ain't making no sense." Since then though, Fiasco has made his peace with the system, or seemed to. He followed up 2007's The Cool by announcing a forthcoming record, most recently called Lasers. But despite the fact that Lupe has asserted numerous times in the ensuing two and half years that the album is done, his label, Atlantic, still has yet to grace it with a release date. Fiasco feels at this point that his label is holding the LP hostage. Apparently, 29,751 people agree, and some of them plan to protest outside of Atlantic's New York offices next month.

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Well, it's probably time to admit to ourselves that it was a mistake to skip this one. Though they'll headline Webster Hall a month from now (after doing the same thing at the Bowery Ballroom back in March), last night brought the rousing sight of Jersey punk heroes Titus Andronicus playing the humbler confines of the Williamsburg rain forest that is Glasslands. We didn't go. That decision, it seems, was made in error: above, watch the band--and the crowd!--rip through the latter half of "Four Score and Seven." Ah well...

Screenshot of the since deleted Tweet via Gawker

This weekend, a Detroit teen named Kevin Kristopik made the dubious decision to hack to Twitter account of Justin Bieber's best friend, Ryan Butler, thus obtaining Bieber's phone number. What Kristopik did next was not smart: he texted Bieber. Phone number of his friend's hacker now in hand, Bieber put it on Twitter, embedded in a swiftly deleted message that began: "everyone call me 248-XXX-XXXX :) or text." Kristopik promptly got "an estimated 26,000 text messages from around the world," according to the Detroit Free Press. There were also a few phone calls (Bieber, it bears mentioning, has 4.5 million followers on Twitter). Kristopik has since changed his number, calling it "unusable." But before he did, he made a mesmerizing video of his phone blowing up, over and over and over again. It's hypnotic:

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So bagging on RS has been good sport among rock-critic types for, oh, the past couple decades perhaps, with even subscribers often sassing the venerable rag for its Baby Boomer tendencies, from ludicrously fawning reviews ("World, meet Mick Jagger, solo artist") to hilarious cover choices (still my favorite) to uncouth online snafus (recall the great domain-name quasi-disaster of a few months back). Their political coverage, too, has gotten ever more shrill and ever more dominant -- sort of the print equivalent of "MTV doesn't even play videos anymore."

To those haters, Rolling Stone now says unto you, "Bite me."

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