August 30, 2012 – Borgore brings his own pole dancers. It's two in the morning in the unofficial dubstep corner of Nocturnal Wonderland Texas, the third installment of the late-April festival staged by Insomniac Events, America's dominant electronic-dance-music promoter. The other acts on this bass-music stage have settled for the usual visual iconography of laser sprays, candy-colored floodlights, and in-house dance troupes (one of which features dancers dressed like sexy bunches of white grapes). Not Borgore, the 24-year-old Israeli DJ/producer/"rapper," who has equated his seed to a dairy treat on record (see 2010's moaning "Ice Cream") and his manhood to an elephant ("Nympho," self-explanatory).

March 13, 2012 – Is American dubstep ready for its moment? Apparently not, based on this past Saturday’s inaugural North American Dubstep Music Awards, a one-day festival held inside Atlantic City's Showboat Casino. A nine-hour electronic dance music event advertising more than 35 performers in three indoor venues, including scene staples 12th Planet and Zeds Dead, the DMAs were an ambitious proposition targeted at the young market often identified as "brostep." Too ambitious, it turned out. Most of the day, there were more hungry gamblers lined up to eat downstairs at retro-cheeseburger malt-shop Johnny Rockets than bass-music spectators in the Harlem Ballroom, a 1,000-capacity reception hall where lady-dub DJ Reid Speed and drum-and-bass pioneer/dub-dabbler Photek played to a very empty space.

February 22, 2012 – Mark Lanegan's seventh solo record, the muscular and moody Blues Funeral (4AD), is his first in eight years, but good luck getting the former Screaming Trees frontman to explain the gap between personal projects. "I ended up doing other things" is all he'll say. (And he'll say it gruffly.) So let us fill in the blanks: Lanegan was busy collaborating with Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell on three full-lengths, lending his deeply emotive vocals to Queens of the Stone Age, conspiring with Greg Dulli on the Gutter Twins, and crooning for electronic-music production duo Soulsavers. Back on his own, the raspy-voiced 47-year-old used Blues Funeral to conjure old haunts ("Harborview Hospital") and air his French-language skills ("The Gravedigger's Song").

October 4, 2011 – After a decade of multiplatinum sales, two Grammy awards, and the messy departure of band cofounder Ben Moody, Evanescence siren Amy Lee took a hiatus from her painfully earnest public existence to be a wife, learn the harp, and, perhaps counterintuitively, listen to M.I.A. "She's so freaking powerful and awesome," the singer-pianist gushes. "I love her voice because it's weird, almost like she doesn't care." Lee, 29, does care, so much so that the admitted perfectionist needed five years to finish this October's Evanescence (Wind-up). The New York City resident phoned from home before the video shoot for hair-blowingly grandiose lead single "What You Want" to discuss some personal misconceptions, Hot Topic, and Juggalos. How often do you regret naming your band after a word no one can spell? It's pretty fun, actually. It's always a test of true fanhood.

July 18, 2011 – Most people who hear about Wheelchair Sports Camp assume the band's name is a crude joke. "Sports camp and wheelchairs, you know?" says 24-year-old MC Kalyn "T-Minus Katlyn" Heffernan. Diagnosed with the bone disease osteogenesis imperfecta at six months, the 3'6", 53-pound frontwoman for this jazz-funk hip-hop foursome does, in fact, roll instead of walk, and she did go to sports camp -- where she engaged in some less than wholesome activities. "I was always in the group for the more handicapped people," she remembers. "So I'd bring five of my able-bodied friends, and we'd leave and go smoke pot." Obsessed with hip-hop since she was six, Heffernan, who has the pun crip life tattooed across her stomach, formed Wheelchair Sports Camp in 2007 with help from saxophonist Abi McGaha Miller, Abi's drummer brother Isaac, and DJ B*Money.