November 16, 2012 – Rihanna is in the midst of her 777 Tour, bringing 250 press and fans along with her band and crew on a chartered plane around the world, performing seven shows in seven countries in seven days — all in the name of promoting her November 19 album Unapologetic. Does that sound as insane as it sounds fun? It totally is.Over the last 48 hours, a critical point was surpassed via travel weariness, scarcity of provisions, and delirium from inhaling the intoxicating fumes of Rihanna's aura. We are now in Stockholm after a seven-hour plane ride from Toronto. I write to you from the club.1. After drunk plane numero uno, plane leg two was a quiet slumber. Everyone was exhausted from the Mexico City smog, or at least I was, having puked twice from a two-hour bus ride in DF traffic.2. Toronto fans chanted "RiRi" like it was a national anthem. Just before she took the stage.

November 15, 2012 – Rihanna has launched her 777 Tour, towing 250 press and fans along with her band and crew on a chartered plane around the world, performing seven shows in seven countries in seven days, all in the name of promoting her November 19 album Unapologetic. Does that sound as insane as it sounds fun? It totally is. Here are SPIN's impressions from the first leg of the Rihanna party junket, as we traveled from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Toronto. 1. Rihanna is actually on this plane.Despite last-minute skepticism that she would deign to ride on the same convoy as us commoners — overheard: "she's probably in a private plane that will ride alongside us" — Rihanna is, in fact, on the #rihannaplane. After a long wait, she snuck up on us wearing a black bodycon tank dress and greeted everyone up and down the aisle.

November 5, 2012 – M.I.A. recently tweeted, "THE HEART OF ART IS MAKE IT THE ART OF ART IS SHARE IT," but it meant more to her than an all-caps shout-out to the generous high tenet of DIY. During an artist's lecture yesterday at Museum of Modern Art's Queens outpost at P.S.1, she made clear that in addition to global bass, staccato double-dutch lyrics, and wartime stencil paintings, one of her favorite tools is the art of dissemination. More specifically, mastering the Internet as art project. It's a medium that's influenced her more than most fans know, even including /\/\/\Y/\'s YouTube-streamer clusterfuck of a cover image and the information-freedom exegesis Vicki Leakx.

October 18, 2012 – Death Grips are on another level. Perhaps that's an obvious thing to point out, considering the Sacramento-based hip-hop/hardcore crew recently released their album NO LOVE DEEP WEB for free online with a buoyant "fuck you" to their label and a pic of a pulsating pink cock on the cover. But the way their music translates live is beyond dick-art subversion. It's a genre-meld mind-warp that advances the concepts of punk, rap, dance music, and sub-bass past their post-commercial, late-stage capitalist potential. When they tore into "No Love" last night on the stage at New York's Le Poisson Rouge, the crowd erupted into a mosh pit, guttural vocalist Stefan Burnett flailing his lean, tatted body about, conducting his own energy, turning it out. His kinetic anger split hip-hop's rage and punk's malcontent, translating both into a performative whir.

October 11, 2012 – Wacky punk Parisian label Andrea Crews celebrated its tenth year in business with a line for Spring entitled "KITTEN HOLOGRAM," an installation in the front of a pop-up hotel, featuring their signature conceptual sportswear in Euro dollar prints, and a crop-top tee that also functioned as a beekeeper's hat. The label has always been unorthodox—designer/visionary Maroussia Rebecq thinks of it as a "fashion art activism" collective ("Everyone is Andrea Crews"), and repurposing found garments is a central tenet to its existence. They've been proportioning sweatshirts in cartoonish proportions for years (take note, Commes des Garcons), and their projects blur the line between installation, costume, and silhouettes from the future.

October 3, 2012 – Who: This South London trio — Simon Williams, Gervase Gordon, and Will Horrocks — has been subtly absorbing and reinvigorating underground British dance sounds since 2007. But Gordon's bi-continental birthright (he's British and South African) has acted as a fresh conduit for their latest album, Sebenza, and the producers collaborated with some of South Africa's brightest young MCs — including Spoek Mathambo, Okmalumkoolkat, and Ruffest — to integrate contemporary Johannesburg futurism with London's dance-floor avant-garde.

October 1, 2012 – Deadmau5's flossy lightshow is one of those memorymakers that you end up wanting to constantly carry around in your brainpan post-show, and now you can, in a manner of speaking. Modify Watches has collabo'd with the be-mouse-eared beatmaker on a limited-edition signature timepiece that not only features his logo in signature LED green, but also has a strap that glows in the dark — offering some comfort that while you might lose your friends at the rave, you'll never have to wonder where your own arm went. The watch is itself analogue, ironically, and comes in a sleek minimal colorway of black and white, graphic designer-friendly like an Eames chair. Now if these wilders could figure out some way that we can replicate Mau5's red lava-lamp light tricks in our living room, the circle would be closed.

September 19, 2012 – Throughout the whirlwind of New York Fashion Week, the pressure to make designs salable echoed through even some of the most critically praised collections, capitalist impact evidenced by muted looks across lines tempered by the bitter taste of mediocrity. Every season this happens: London Fashion Week comes along with its convivial irreverence and English aplomb and puts an exclamation point on things, making some mainstream New York designers (barring the ones we love, of course) seem a like a bland bunch.

September 17, 2012 – Ever since Dame Vivienne Westwood opened up shop on King's Road, selling ripped-up frocks to the neighborhood miscreants, punk fashion's march from marginalized kids to the runway was inevitable, if slow. Her designs, drawn from freaks and ne'er-do-wells, have resonated with disaffected youth culture for 40 years, yet the original concept of fetish wear and shredded basics has evolved so much that on the right society moll, their origins are barely recognizable. Next Spring, the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to explore this chasm in "Punk: From Chaos to Couture," a show that shines the light on the genre's long haul from Piccadilly Circus to Via Monte Napoleone.

September 14, 2012 – GERLAN JEANS While the voice of Pussy Riot echoed a bit throughout fashion week — Le1f played them in his soundtrack for Patrik Ervell, for one, listenable via