I am a self-proclaimed foodie. Love watching Bourdain, Top Chef, Jamie Oliver, and Alton Brown, and I savor great dining experiences much like I do gigs and festivals. One reason I keep coming back to Bonnaroo year after year is the BBQ at Prater's in nearby Morrison, Tenn., just a stone's throw from the festival site.

You won't recognize him at first, especially if, like me, your best Beck memories involve him on his knees, belting out Midnite Vultures' "Debra" like it's hipster karaoke night and he's drawn a James Brown tune.

We're usually stoked to see Billie Joe Armstrong, a perennial Spin fave, gracing the pages of the New York Times. After all, his Green Day side project, Foxboro Hot Tubs, is tearing up the Southwest right now.

On a long subway ride home last night from JFK Airport, I cued up one of my perennial faves for mass transit listening: the podcast of This American Life, the long-running NPR program hosted by Ira Glass (now in its second season as a television series on Showtime).

Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the clever New Zealanders known as Flight of the Conchords, were owning a rambunctious crowd at NYC's Town Hall, running through a cheeky version of their song "Robots," in which the duo sing from the perspective of two robots who've recently eliminated the human race by using "poisonous gases" to "poison their asses." As the song concluded and the audience (w

Give them credit: When Justice plotted an NYC stop on their current MySpace Music tour, they initially booked at Madison Square Garden. The arena. Where the Knicks play, or, we should say, where a few players wearing orange and blue occasionally conduct a lazy pick-up game. It was a bold move, and while the plan ultimately didn't fly -- the show was moved to the smaller (but still relatively cavernous), 3,500-capacity WaMu Theater at MSG -- it did prove that dance music has a resurgent presence in this country not felt since the supposed-but-never-realized electronica takeover of 1997. Will SXSW 2008 serve as the launch pad for the next slew of dancefloor dominators? Let's examine a few contenders.