Starring Rihanna as Optimus Prime.

Last week, Battleship, a movie based on the movies based on Transformers and a board game starring a bunch of plastic pegs that really suck to step on by accident and Rihanna, opened to $25 million. This week, Men in Black 3, starring noted pop-rapper Will Smith, will open to significantly more than that.

Making the leap from music royalty to respected blockbuster-opener is difficult. Here are some other recent attempts that turned out somewhere between Rihanna and the Fresh Prince. (Note: I've decided not to talk about DJ Jazzy Jeff's ill-advised star vehicle, Black-Suit Wearing Guys.)

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Back when Ben Folds Five released this album, people had to pirate it with NAPSTER.

Here's how things were different the last time Ben Folds Five released an album, without digital music stores, social networking, or anything like Kickstarter: Ubiquity was a possible outcome for rock-and-roll albums.

Not just from huge names, either--in the same way baseball's late-90s power binge put luminaries like Greg Vaughn and Dante Bichette in the company of much better players on the all-time home run leaderboard, the overheated market for CDs at the turn of the twenty-first century ensured that the all-time bestselling album list would make room for Hootie and the Blowfish and No Doubt forevermore. Ubiquity wasn't just possible--it was weirdly common.

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Pete's not wearing shoes on the cover, which is how you can tell he's going to kill himself this year.

As a fan of Mad Men, great music cues in TV shows and movies, and every Wings album, I was more than a little disappointed when second wife and hip-things enthusiast Megan was foolish enough to suggest Don Draper, TV's least psychedelic man, start off the Beatles' Revolver by listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows," the least accessible song on the album.

Look: I know uncool, because I am uncool. I live it so deep that my favorite Beatles album is still Help! I may not be able to perform a burlesque routine in French Canadian or save the Heinz account by making myself available for women's-room-gossip (at least not since the judge refused to expunge that charge from my criminal record [come on, there was a couch in there, it's institutionalized misandry], but I do know how to make Revolver appealing to someone who is trapped permanently as the coolest human being in the year 1960. Play it to them like so, and hope they fall asleep by the time the Indian-inspired tracks come on.

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Wikimedia Commons

Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" has confounded censors for years. And while the song's appeared in three music video games, the results haven't always been pretty.

Censorship is one of music's longer running conflicts, a struggle where the desire for marketability often trumps creative freedom. That's been the case for every music video game in existence, titles that constantly walk the aforementioned tightrope.

One of the more challenging songs to appear in any mainstream conduit is Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name," a tune that launched the band to prominence back in the 1990s. The awkwardness extends to music video games, most recently when the song was released this week as downloadable content for Rock Band 3.

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Zimbio.com

Justin Bieber carried Floyd Mayweather, Jr.'s championship belts to the ring on Saturday. No, seriously. This actually happened.

Whether Justin Bieber is being chased by a pack of fans while riding a Segway or pretending to get shot and killed on a popular television show, he can is increasingly dispatched in any setting.

Your moment of certainty came this weekend, when Bieber and 50 Cent accompanied Floyd Mayweather, Jr., to the ring before his fight with Miguel Cotto. Mayweather also had Lil Wayne and WWE superstar Triple H in his posse, making for one of the weirdest entourages in modern history.

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Ideally your party will be this nobly black-and-white.

Now is the time for all good cultured TV-owners with new apartments to show off to hold 2012 Kentucky Derby parties and try to remember to call it, while sipping what they hope to be a mint julep, the 138th renewal. In fact, it might be a little late--no doubt Mike Shannon is already "on assignment." This is RFT Music: I'm here to assist you in setting up your high-toned house party not just in general but specifically according to your apartment geography. Let's start where I end up in parties:

The Kitchen: NPR (talk)
People who feel a need to be active and have trouble pretending to know about horses and also didn't make a bet will congregate in the kitchen, the first resort for slow parties and things to do with your hands. In a Kentucky Derby party, of course, the kitchen holds some special relevance: It's where the juleps are made.

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Before spending millions of dollars to create a "hologram" of your favorite dead musician, perhaps find a lawyer. Unless, of course, you enjoyed getting sued.

There's no denying that the "hologram" of Tupac Shakur that debuted at Coachella this year is provocative. Some see the visual effect as a celebration of a well-regarded rapper's legacy. Others see the spectacle as a disturbing example of the uncanny valley theory on a particularly grand scale.

No matter what the opinion, "Hologram Tupac" is a testament to how far special effects have come in the last couple of decades. But this isn't the first time performers cleverly conjured up a deceased musician's image to attract attention - or make a profit. It's just that this particular instance wasn't nefarious or nonsensical. Shakur worked with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg when he was alive, so it wasn't too much of a stretch that he would perform alongside them.

But other artists scheming to bring popular musicians back from the dead through super-cool optical illusions may want to examine certain legal considerations closely.

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Jessi Rose

By Jef With One F

Almost 30 years after Buzz Osborne founded the Melvins -- playing tonight at the Firebird -- the band remains hard to concretely classify. You can call them punk, metal, grunge, rock and any one of a dozen other genres, but good luck trying to pin one particular tail on this donkey.

But the band isn't resting on its laurels at all. A new full-length record, Freak Puke, is due out in June, some tribute albums to the Melvins' personal inspirations are in the works, multiple tours of America and Europe are planned, and then there's The Bulls & the Bees.

This five-song EP is being made available to anyone, free, through a partnership with Scion, a division of Toyota. The company is very involved with the artistic community through its Scion A/V branch, even founding a monthly podcast with exclusive artist interviews and news of upcoming releases.

"We have been working in the music space since 2003," says Scion spokesperson Jeri Yoshizu via e-mail. "We have been working with the Melvins since our event in Austin in 2007.

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The Beach Boys' latest reunion seems to be doing all the right things. Sadly, the group won't be surfing out to St. Louis.

When it comes to the ever-subjective exercise of ranking the greatest bands of all time, The Beatles tend to be the default number one. Number two varies: Some would pick an obvious choice like the Rolling Stones or Led Zepplin, while others would pick a less universally popular band with great influence such as the Kinks or the Who.

But a solid contender for the somewhat-coveted number two spot would be the Beach Boys, the bodacious band that composed some of the greatest music of any age. This is a group, after all, that wrote catchy tunes about surfing and the sheer essence of longing and love. And more importantly, the members were intensely impressive musicians that influenced countless bands throughout the years.

Since most of the Beach Boys' biggest hits came about in the 1960s and 1970s, it would be easy to assume that group's best days faded long ago. But the group has been playing shows in various incarnations for the past couple of decades, including a worldwide tour that kicked off last week in Arizona. Previously feuding band members managed to patch up any hard feelings to get together for the group's 50th anniversary.

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Firebrand's consoles, covered in tarps. "We're not taking any chances."

Undoubtedly you're already aware of the hailstorm this weekend. If your property did not suffer any damage, then at the very least your Facebook feed was likely filled with photos of hands holding up golfball to baseball-sized rocks of ice. On one news story I saw they reported all the way up to "teacup" sized hail, which seemed to me a strange choice for a unit of measurement, but I digress.

St. Louis's Firebrand Recording Studio -- winner of RFT "Best of" awards and go-to spot for many of our city's finest recording artists -- saw massive chunks of hail break through the skylights of their building, punch through the drop ceiling tiles and bombard the inside of their studio. "All things considered, it coulda been a lot worse, " says co-owner / operator Brian Sheffer. "If we hadn't capped the skylight in the live room the drummer and drums would have been getting hit with hail falling at terminal velocity."

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