March 13, 2013 – M.I.A. has shared a series of messages on Twitter that imply that her former fiancé Ben Bronfman and his very wealthy family are attempting to gain full custody of the onetime couple's four-year-old son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman. The pair's breakup was made public a year ago in an article by the Daily News, who claimed to learn that the Sri Lankan singer "sometimes goes six weeks without seeing" her child. It was then reported that Ben's mother, philanthropist Sherry Brewer, was helping her son care for Ikhyd.Ben Bronfman is the former frontman of the Exit, the founder of the environmentally conscious Green Owl label, and the son of Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., who was also CEO of Warner Music Group until 2011. M.I.A. has since taken down the three Tweets shown in the screen grab above.

March 13, 2013 – Prince has officially been confirmed to perform at this year's South By Southwest music conference on Saturday, March 16. He and A Tribe Called Quest, oddly enough, will be headlining a concert thrown by Samsung Galaxy. Though the announcement includes no further specifics about the show itself, yesterday we learned that, according to HitFix, the Artist will be bringing a 22-piece band to La Zona Rosa, whose stage is being remodeled for the occasion.As for entry, that'll be a bit tricky. The show will be open to those holding SXSW Platinum and Music badges, which have a walk-up price of $1,595 and $795 respectively. So you can empty the bank on a chance at squeezing through the gates.

March 13, 2013 – Former Girls frontman Christopher Owens may not have hit all of the marks with his considerably softened solo debut Lysandre, but the effort does come with a few considerable rewards. One of those is the song, "Here We Go Again," an upbeat bit of modified Belle and Sebastian-style strum (same twee vibes, less lyrical brawn), which is fairly well summed up by its own chorus: "Don't try to get me down / Don't try to harsh my mellow."Indeed, if the Ryan Owen Eddleston-directed video is any indication, Owens and his non-band band are simply out to have some good clean fun. While on tour in the U.K., they participate in activities like air-drumming, swan appreciation, and walking in an Egyptian manner. In other words, it's a bunch of footage from the road that aims to charm.

March 13, 2013 – Only a year ago we were talking to Cloud Nothings' Dylan Baldi in hopes of unpacking the emotionally brutal majesty of his band's SPIN Essential album Attack on Memory. With that Best Albums of 2012 ranking in the very near rear view, the Cleveland quartet are already well on their way to releasing LP number four — tentatively titled Body Music — which Baldi has predicted will be "less melodic ... noisier and less straightforward."We may now have the first taste of that fall release as a YouTube user caught Cloud Nothings performing a new song at South By Southwest yesterday. As Consequence of Sound points out, the composition seems to owe a little bit to Sonic Youth — in the lazy loll of the open and the shredded freakout that follows — plus My Bloody Valentine, as things do indeed get rather noisy by the end.

March 13, 2013 – Wayne Coyne has long had a pretty involved relationship with wacky, a pairing that occasionally veers into the obnoxious (to wit: the guy's 2012 timeline). But just as often, the Flaming Lips frontman uses weird as a vehicle for brilliance or, at the very least, some good acid-enhanced fun. Falling firmly into that latter category is Virgin Mobile's new "Retrain Your Brain" ad, which features Coyne using all manner of unusual tactics to hypnotize the viewer into changing his or her cell phone plan. There's a purring shark, a creepy set of triplets, a TV within a TV, and a whole lot of lobster involved. Oh, and as it turns out, Coyne isn't the only celeb involved. YouTube users have pointed out that the cat posing as a videographer (you read that right) is in none other than evil feline Internet sensation Colonel Meow.

March 13, 2013 – A month ago, Dipset producer and Providence sampler virtuoso AraabMuzik delivered the one-two punch of his bleak-banging "Never Have to Worry" and the fierce mixtape that birthed it: For Professional Use Only. Now he's got a video for that set's second song "The Prince Is Coming," and like clips by Frank Ocean, Nicki Minaj, and AlunaGeorge before it, this one appears to take place in an ancient fantasy realm — "The Age of Legends," as the intro text explains. Director Tilla delivers a somewhat shaky but visually bold narrative in which a trio of powerful queen types are on the hunt for a man with an exquisite gift for rhythm — why, a man like AraabMuzik, of course. As over the top as things do get (seven minutes is a lot of space to fill), it's not hard to imagine this sort of a scene being the unspoken yet intended plot of this elementally hulking instrumental. 

March 13, 2013 – New Jersey's mathcore stalwarts the Dillinger Escape Plan are set to release their fifth album One of Us Is the Killer on May 14 via their very own Party Smasher label. As noted in SPIN's review of their last shredzpedition, Option Paralysis, the fearless quintet often vacillates between "anthemic crush-and-croon" and "aggro-prog headfucks." The first taste of the new long-player most definitely belongs to that latter category. "Prancer" bursts out of the gate with stuttering Fantômas-style explosions of drums and guitar, before dragging the listener (willingly — the kicking and screaming is a sign that they like it) through an ever-shifting landscape of brutalizing art-metal. Sure, there's one calm moment that sounds like something beamed in from Mr.

March 13, 2013 – When SPIN spoke to Twin Shadow main brain George Lewis last year, he recalled the importance of YouTube in allowing him to fan out over performances from his musical idols. Well, now a fan just like him has captured and shared footage of Lewis performing a brand new song at Festival Nrmal in Monterrey, Mexico over the weekend. The song is called "End of the World," and after 40 seconds of very excited titter, you can watch Twin Shadow performing it in full-band form above. Though the footage isn't perfect, the track sounds like a logical extension of 2012's Confess, though with the ever-present new wave element evolving from Smiths yearning to U2 stadium-baiting. And right on time, it seems: At one point, a young woman sneaks her way onto the stage and gives Lewis a big kiss on the cheek.The singer is still aiming to keep things intimate.

March 12, 2013 – Thanks to a concerned Tennessee citizen and the plucky WKRN-TV news team, a few million young people's hearts have been broken. Local Kylee Francescan was recycling newspapers in a dumpster at the Granberry Elementary School in Brentwood, an affluent suburb located south of Nashville, when she discovered hundreds of letters addressed to Taylor Swift, many of which were unopened despite generous spacklings of both stickers and sparkles.Francescan was concerned. "I didn't know if they were stolen [or] discarded, so I threw them in a box. And I'm like, 'Somebody needs to let Taylor know'," she told Channel 2 Investigates. The reporters, in turn, took the box to Swift's label Big Machine Records on Nashville's Music Row, but they played ignorant. A call to the strip mall that hosts the crossover start's P.O.

March 12, 2013 – Multifaceted Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei has recorded an album of hard-rock songs, and he's going to ask for Elton John's help in releasing the thing.