Every week, Mayor Slay's website runs a poll, taking the pulse of St. Louisans on a wide range of topics, such as genetically modified foods, the actions of Congress, and what it takes to deliver a good political speech. The raw data gathered is synthesized and used to custom-build the city of St. Louis to its citizens' liking (that is what it is for, right Slay?).

This week's poll is about Justin Bieber, for some reason.

See Also:
- Crotching Whiskey at the Justin Bieber Concert and Getting Thrown Out: A Review

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James Brown would have been 80 years old today, but who cares? What's worth remembering is not how many hits he had, how many millions he made and lost, or how many times he voted for Richard Nixon. No, when we talk about James Brown, we're talking about indisputably the single most important musician of the twentieth century: The man who forever separated popular music from melody. Motherfucker also mashed potatoes, camel-walked, Detroit-pimped and a danced a thousand other dances -- we don't have time to count those either, but here are some of our favorites.

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This is my life -- in my mind.

You'd best prep your favorite Barry Manilow, Nelly and Journey songs, because you're entrenched in National Karaoke Week.

Seriously, this is a thing; I'm not making it up just to jump back into the karaoke-writing game, though it's sure convenient. National Karaoke Week happens through Saturday, and it's a BFD in some parts of the country. Wait, scratch that -- it's apparently a BFD in some parts of the world, as this video from Britain shows:

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Mark your calendar and prepare your wallet: This Saturday, April 20, marks the sixth annual Record Store Day. Originally begun in 2008 as a way to pull music fans away from their computers and back into the already-dwindling brick-and-mortar shops, Record Store Day has grown larger with each passing year. It's not quite a bank holiday, and Hallmark hasn't yet issued cards for it (we checked). However, it's certainly become an annual tradition, probably destined to take its place next to Cinco de Mayo and Earth Day as accepted celebration days.

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The entire Internet was abuzz over the weekend with the tale of Joe Sly, the alleged undercover cop busted in Boston last week by St. Louis' own noise-punk duo Spelling Bee. The story was reported by Slate, Gawker, the A.V. Club and more, exposing a troubling pattern in Boston wherein police are apparently posing as punks online in order to infiltrate and shut down DIY shows.

The transparent ineptitude of attempts to mimic the behavior and attitude of young punks online was laughable, causing for Mr. Sly to be busted and propelling the story to go fully viral. A resident of the Boston area (Facebook name: Katrina Galore) caught wind of the excitement and created an FB event page for a "Cool Underground Basement Concert," a tongue-in-cheek baiting of the Boston Police Department that also went viral, eventually climbing to more than 5,000 invites. This past weekend, people were posting hilarious mockeries of Joe Sly's attempts at a rate of about one every five minutes. The event page was even shared by Occupy Wall Street via its Twitter feed, directed at the Boston PD.

See Also:
-Spelling Bee Outs "Joe Sly," Alleged Undercover Cop Posing as Punk Fan

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Fuel for records.

Local experimental electronic duo Ou Où has started an Indiegogo campaign to help fund the process of writing the act's upcoming fourth album. The goal of the campaign isn't about recording costs, though, as many of these things tend to be -- it is about pizza.

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Fuck me, I am going to overdose on this new Justin Timberlake album.

I know that I'm supposed to be ashamed of certain selections in my album collection. I know this from all of the times that people have looked through my CDs or records or iTunes and been all, "Hey, what's this doing here?" before handing me, say, a Carpenters album or some weird movie soundtrack and calling it my "guilty pleasure."

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Beavis and Butthead

This month marks twenty wonderful years since MTV aired the first episode of Beavis and Butt-head. Mike Judge's hilarious cult phenomenon originally ran from March 8, 1993, to November 28, 1997, before being retired so that Judge could focus on FOX's animated series King of the Hill. When that show came to a close, Judge returned to the dynamic duo, and much fanfare was rolled out for MTV's airing of twelve brand-new half-hour episodes, starting in October 2011 and wrapping up in December of that same year. And then, there was silence.

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If you like your music blog experiences to be timely and relevant, I suggest you stop reading now. This piece is neither. It concerns a book from five years ago that's as inconsequential now as the day it was published. This book hasn't dropped a track on Soundcloud, and it's not in a Twitter fight with Azealia Banks (yet). It's just super awful and, in this journalist's opinion, worth a quick snort.

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Press Photo

David Bowie is an Alien. No, really. We Mean it.

I've had this idea marinating for a long time. Like, years. I've floated it to various sources and it's been met with reactions that vary from amused to annoyed, but I'm dead serious: I really think David Bowie is an alien. An extraterrestrial. A being from another planet.

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