February 3, 2012 – Coldplay know how to please a crowd, which isn't as easy or unimportant as snobs would have you think, or else everybody could do it. If there's any justice in the world, "Charlie Brown" will be the most crowd-pleasing song from last year's Mylo Xyloto. Yes, Chris Martin and the lads sound like they're trying to please us — there's one of those whirling "Clocks"-style intro, a language-transcending "woo ooh" hook, and a trace of Arcade Fire's harrowed urgency in the verses — but it'd be churlish to deny how much they succeed. With Valentine's Day approaching, Coldplay has revealed a "Charlie Brown" video that shows exuberant young love in a rave's neon light. Which, as it happily turns out, is yet another hugely appealing way to encounter this song.

February 3, 2012 – Earlier this week, rapper Big K.R.I.T. unveiled a mixtape track called "Boobie Miles." The title could just as easily apply to the new Adult Swim-produced animated video for Neon Indian's nuclear-decaying synth-pop incantation "Fallout," from last year's fine disc Era Extraña. Directed by Flying Lotus collaborator Lilfuchs, the clip shows an anatomically exaggerated chillwave Barbie taking her hot-pink sports car to the shop. Whatever Psychic Chasms, the title of Neon Indian's stellar debut album, referred to, we're pretty sure that's where the car drives next. Somebody tell Detroit about the latest ingenious marketing device: miles per décolletage.

February 2, 2012 – Dave Grohl is getting into the TV business. The Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer is executive producing a 30-minute comedy currently in the works from FX, Deadline Hollywood reports. Grohl got involved at the behest of the show's creator and star, comedian Dana Gould, who's evidently a Foo Fighters fan. And look, they both have the same initials! The show will focus on (surprise) a rock band. This particular rock band is about to get huge, but it's also about to break up, so its members take a page out of Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster and hire a therapist. Of course, this is a TV comedy, so their therapist turns out to specialize in couples, hate people, and be really close to breakup of her own: a divorce.

February 2, 2012 – Grizzly Bear have promised a new album sometime this year, but for now fans of the Brooklyn indie rockers will have to content themselves with old samples and new solo music. " 'Two Weeks' by Grizzly Bear / That's a pretty good song, right?" asks Das Racist's Victor Vazquez, a.k.a. Kool A.D., on the New York hip-hop trio's outstanding 2010 mixtape Sit Down, Man. Yes, the baroque highlight from the Jay-Z-co-signed band's 2008's Veckatimest is exquisitely good. It's also been heavily sampled, by everyone from Rhymesayers co-founder Musab to Community's Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino.

February 2, 2012 – The Boss will be in the house at the 54th annual Grammy Awards. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are set to perform at the February 12 ceremony, event organizers revealed this morning. Springsteen, who recently announced a massive tour ahead of 17th album Wrecking Ball (due March 6), already has 20 Grammys to call his own. And, OK, Springsteen might be taking the "from sea to shining sea" bit from Wrecking Ball advance track "We Take Care of Our Own" a bit literally. Amid news that he and the E Street Band will be invading Los Angeles' Staples Center forthe Grammys comes word that they will also be taking the stage at New York's historic Apollo Theater. Sirius XM has revealed that Springsteen and the E Street band will be playing at the nonprofit Harlem venue on March 9, in a concert that will air live on thesatellite radio operator's E Street Radio channel, channel 20.

February 2, 2012 – First! Adele just might wind up with the record that spends the most weeks atop Billboard's Top 200 albums, after all. Her 21 moved 116,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, holding off Tim McGraw's Emotional Traffic and six other Top 10 debuts to notch its 18th non-consecutive week of chart dominance. With that, the British singer's sophomore album pulls ahead of Billy Ray Cyrus' Some Gave All and ties the 1991-1992 rein of Garth Brooks' Ropin' the Wind. Lana Del Rey's Born to Die (also check out Deconstructing Lana Del Rey) is projected to debut at No. 2 next week, which would put Adele on the verge of matching the all-time record of 20 weeks at No. 1, set by The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992-1993. Van Halen (A Different Kind of Truth; February 7), Whitney Houston will always love you. 2 Through 10: After the post-holiday doldrums, it was a big week for new albums.

February 2, 2012 – WILLIS EARL BEAL Who: An idiosyncratic, Chicago-based antifolk belter whose cassette-recorded debut, Acousmatic Sorcery, drops on April 3 via XL Recordings' new Hot Charity imprint. He's set to open some U.S. shows for new labelmate SBTRKT and is known for spreading flyers around town listing his phone number and singing a song for whoever calls. File Next To: Abner Jay, Daniel Johnston, Mountain Goats, Jeffrey Lewis, Bright Eyes Where to Start: Existential lo-fi head-clearing "Evening's Kiss," this fascinating Chicago Reader profile. FLATBUSH ZOMBIES Who: A Brooklyn hip-hop trio of Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, and Erick Arch Elliott, who made the "Gucci Gucci" beat safe for Kreayshawn haters with a dismissive yet no less hedonistic freestyle last year.

February 1, 2012 – As Jay-Z gets set to perform a pair of benefit shows next week at Carnegie Hall, and tastemakers like Diplo routinely seek out plainspoken music from impoverished areas both rural and urban, it might be tough to remember there was ever a divide between so-called high and low culture. In the mid-1930s, however, when folklorist Alan Lomax started making field recordings across the South, hillbilly music and African-American blues were considered, well, déclassé. The music in Lomax's vaults helped pave the way for everyone from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Spinal Tap, and soon it will all be streaming online. Lomax's vision of a "global jukebox" is coming true.

February 1, 2012 – The creator of Soul Train would wish viewers love, peace, and soul at the end of each episode, and now he's left us for good. Don Cornelius, who hosted the nationally syndicated music show from its inception in 1971 until 1993, was found dead early this morning at his Sherman Oaks, California, home, according to the Los Angeles Times. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, sources told the newspaper on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing. Cornelius was 75. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soul Train helped draw attention to music by African-American artists, with memorable performances by Michael Jackson, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, and other legends. The young dancers who would show off their moves on the program helped blaze a trail for more recent dance TV shows like FOX's So You Think You Can Dance?.

February 1, 2012 – When the going gets tough, artists hoping to capture the moment have a couple of options: feel our pain, or help us pretend that the pain doesn't exist. For the Darkness, the over-the-top hair-rockers best known for the wonderfully cheesy early 2000s excess of "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," there wasn't even a choice. "Nothin's Gonna Stop Us," the English band's first song since 2005's One Way Ticket to Hell... and Back is all Queen falsetto, Starship exuberance, rainbows, and unicorns. Its video opens with a BBC reporter declaring, "Everyone everywhere is feeling very sad," and imagines a time when a tween-age girl would be able to own a record player and a million pieces of band-related merch. Animated hijinks pour forth from her pen, involving flying guitars, flamingos, medieval swordcraft, and a multi-armed boxer playing a guitar solo.