July 24, 2012 – There was once a time when the Beatles were staunchly anti-iTunes, but today the Fab Four's umpteenth compilation Tomorrow Never Knows arrives as an exclusive release on Apple's digital music service. Not a huge deal, except this LP comes with a digital liner note from analog champion Dave Grohl explaining his personal connection to the band. "If it weren't for the Beatles, I would not be a musician," Grohl writes. "It’s as simple as that. From a very young age I became fascinated with their songs, and over the years have drowned myself in the depth of their catalogue…From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time." The rest of his note (which can be read in full at Rolling Stone) is devoted to explaining how his 6-year-old daughter Violet recently discovered the Beatles.

July 23, 2012 – In June, Natasha Khan, better known by her nom de pop Bat for Lashes, debuted three new songs from her third LP, The Haunted Man. The first song, "Laura" seemed as though it had been penned with a mysterious subject in mind: which "Laura" is she talking about? Dern? Ingalls Wilder? Perhaps the very same Laura frontman Chris Owens of the erstwhile Girls sang about on 2009's Album?

July 23, 2012 – Frank Ocean gave his first official coming out interview to the Guardian this weekend, and the U.K. paper also featured a fresh story on Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, formerly known as Tom Gabel, who spoke about how she used to deal with her gender dysphoria while touring as an "angry white male" in a punk band. Some of the highlights are below, but the most intriguing detail came when Grace revealed why she chose to announce her news via a magazine story rather than a more personal method: "There's a certain amount of normalizing that happens when you do it in a fashion like that. I felt like the first time we played on a late-night TV show in the States — for my parents that was a moment when they were like, 'Oh, that's what you do.' It legitimized what you did.

July 23, 2012 – Mariah Carey just confirmed that she will be filling one of the two seats recently vacated by Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler on the upcoming season of American Idol. The news came via a telephone call with FOX president Kevin Reilly, who is making an appearance at the Television Critics Association's annual press tour in Los Angeles today and got the singer on the line to announce her sign-on herself. "I'm so excited to be joining Idol," Carey said. "I can't wait to get started" (via HitFix).

July 23, 2012 – Before fans had a chance to tweet the words "Sebadoh are going to put out their first new music in over a decade" the lo-fi pioneers suddenly dropped a five-song EP, called secret, as a "taste of [their] upcoming 2013 album" via their Bandcamp page. It is, in fact, the band's first new material since 1999's The Sebadoh. They reissued Bakesale via Sub Pop, in addition to their early recordings for 1990's Weed Forestin' via their Bandcamp, earlier this year. Predictably, as Backstage Rider reports (via Stereogum), the Lou Barlow-fronted trio, who reunited in 2010, recorded and mixed the new songs themselves, with Barlow writing three ("Keep the Boy Alive," "Arbitrary High," and "All Kinds") and Jason Loewenstein writing two ("My Drugs" and "I Don't Mind"). The artwork and digital release are also entirely band-produced.

July 23, 2012 – In the days between posting a complex coming-out note on his Tumblr and the night when he dropped his sparkling major label debut just a few days later, Frank Ocean didn't do much, if any, talking about himself. Even as controversy surrounding the album's physical release swirled, he still wasn't particularly loquacious. But as is most always the case, enigmatic acts by the most buzzworthy stars eventually get explained and Ocean's most forthcoming new interview surfaced over the weekend in Saturday's issue of the Guardian. The central question of the conversation: Why lay yourself on the line so radically right before your album drops? "I knew that I was writing in a way that people would ask questions," he explains of the excellent album's subject matter.

July 23, 2012 – In January 2011, Amy Winehouse returned to the stage in Brazil to largely positive reviews. Six months later, she performed what was quickly deemed a "train wreck" gig in Belgrade, Serbia, where she greeted the crowd, "Hello, Athens!" and stumbled around the stage clutching her stomach for an agonizing 90 minutes. The following day, her reps announced she'd be taking a break from live performance to "return to her best." On July 20, she danced alongside her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield at the iTunes festival. Three days later, she was discovered unresponsive in bed by her bodyguard at her Camden Square flat on a Saturday afternoon. Two ambulances were dispatched to her house, but EMTs weren't able to revive her. The 27-year-old singer was pronounced dead at the scene.

July 23, 2012 – Here's a scary thought: some of the teenagers who submitted their votes to the Teen Choice Awards this year were two years old the same year No Doubt released their last album, Rock Steady. But if you tuned into the fan-voted award ceremony last night, it'd be hard to tell exactly what year it was anyway. The band whose first album in over a decade, Push and Shove, arrives September 25 gave a performance that made it look like no time has passed between now and the last time they had new music for us, back in 2001, and fans in the audience screamed as if they had just rocked out to "Spiderwebs" at their junior prom. No Doubt have done a significant amount of playing since they wrapped their Rock Steady tour in 2003. including a Beatles tribute show at the Kennedy Center in 2010 and Neil Young's annual two-day Bridge School Benefit in 2009.

July 20, 2012 – Lil Wayne's preoccupation with Nirvana runs deep. He's long cited Nevermind as a big influence on his decision to pursue music. Last fall as the album was celebrating its 20th anniversary, he sat with MTV to chat about its significance (his interviewer, Sway, even sagely mentioned the song "I Smell Teen Spirit"). Earlier that year, brilliantly ridiculous Canadian pundit Narduwar gifted Wayne a Nirvana poster book at their interview. The latest manifestation of Weezy's longtime fascination with Kurt Cobain and Co. has arrived on BreadOverBed.com, the website the MC launched with his buddy DJ Scoob Doo featuring "exclusive footage" meant to document "all the sacrifice" that comes along with Wayne's success.

July 20, 2012 – The first half of 2012 began with a pop-heavy bang. From Madonna's controversy-fueled MDNA, Nicki Minaj's genre-agnostic Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, Justin Bieber's mob-inspiring Believe, Adam Lambert's history-making chart-topper Trespassing, and a little thing called One Direction, it's hard to believe there's more room in Poplandia this year.