This is the best thing you will read and/or listen to all day. NPR has the story of a 25-person Russian feminist punk collective named Pussy Riot (brilliant) whose members were arrested after a video of their protest in the Red Square went viral on the world wide web.

This song just keeps getting better for me, the lines "Watch me as a I fall, then scrape me off the wall and take me home/See me as I am, just half a man" reminding me of a time not so long ago when my life's relative lack responsibilities allowed me the freedom, if you want to call it that, to be at best half a man. I also continue to be entertained by how handily Mr. Ranaldo is beating the kids at their own game, first with the sort of fuzzed-out indie pop they all like so much these days, and now with a hazy video with cut up footage of, like, trees and the sun. Boy, am I ever excited about his full-length, due our on March 20th.

• Koko, covering Destroyer's "Kaputt"

There were some good songs released by humans, however...

“I like balancing things. I’m a mom, too, you know, but I don’t always want to look just like that,” Gordon told the NYT. “It’s the idea of finding things that work and are comfortable, but in which you can still feel like you have an identity.”

One critic, however, wasn't as complacent about this series of events. The New Yorker's resident pop culture critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, had his own message to deliver to Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, who had just published a statement of the PTC's displeasure online.

Of all the accolades Bon Iver's Justin Vernon has piled up in recent months (like playing Saturday Night Live this weekend, for one), none comes packaged with such a beaming sense of pride as this local news segment from Vernon's hometown, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which, in the week leading up to the Grammys, takes us "At Home with the Vernons" to brief viewers on the top nominee's upbringing. I might not be a huge Bon Iver fan, but I am now a huge fan of his parents. Watch an extended version here, in which Mrs. Vernon remembers sitting around the table folding and stuffing the first 500 copies of For Emma, Forever Ago with good-natured aplomb. Five years later, and she's maybe concerned how many times her son said "fuck" in the press last week?

Follow Lauren Beck on Twitter @heylaurenbeck.

In terms of ridiculousness, spectacle, inanity, and cheap, pre-canned controversy, I think we can all agree that last night's Madonna medley was one of the greats. It was very Super Bowl. Very half-time. The role she was born to play! (Seriously, maybe the best/stupidest use of a huge/stupid platform since Prince?)

The entire show was immediately boiled down to .gif form, because of course it was, but the whole thing was kind of one big, dumb replayable loop. So, lets relive it, together:

First came the sound of scraping, and then of footsteps. 21-year-old electronic musician Nicolas Jaar sat behind a bank of electronics on a circular stage in the middle of a geodesic dome and began cueing samples. The smell of smoke from an adjoining space in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 drifted in as well, settling among the floorboards and high ceilings. The early arrivals clustered around the stage or watched the video projected on the section of the dome directly behind Jaar: sometimes slow pans across landscapes, at other times, equally-paced views of the faces of the crowd, either watching music be made, following the camera with their eyes, or absorbed in electronics of their own.

I've heard people talking about this for the past few days, and Klingman even blogged about it earlier in the week, but I sort of couldn't even get myself to acknowledge that it could be true. Except it is. Madonna has a terrible and embarrassing new song called "Give Me All Your Luvin'," which features Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., two otherwise strong-enough seeming women who were inexplicably willing to dress up as cheerleaders and prance around like fucking idiots for 4 minutes while Madonna dances with football players or whatever. We're probably supposed to assume something subversive is happening here, because that's what I've gathered we're supposed to assume about everything that's stupid these days, but mostly I think it's just some bullshit jock-pop jam with dialed-in, cliché-ridden lyrics more befitting a 9th-grade girl than, say, a 53-year-old woman. Watch the video here, if you must.

So I guess this is when people start saying that Lana Del Rey's handlers and image consultants and lawyers and rich fathers coached her on the art of the televised performance. After the SNL debacle from a few weeks back, LDR gave it another go last night on Late Night With David Letterman with a performance of "Video Games." To say the very least, she sounded better: she all but did away with the ridiculous and infuriating baby-voice, and she wisely let the vocal melody sit in a range where she's comfortable, rather than taking it higher and lower than she's actually capable of, a trap she'd fallen deeply into of late. There were some really nice moments throughout—the small adjustments she's made to the song's melody are subtle and perfect for the stripped down arrangement. She seemed more comfortable this time around, and she was perfectly grateful and gracious when Dave and Paul started creepily fawning over her at the end. In short, if my parents had seen this performance, they probably would have though nothing of it it, maybe even liked it a little bit, rather than watching in horror and then calling me up the next morning for an explanation like they did after SNL. This is progress. Granted, it's the kind of progress one generally makes before appearing on Saturday Night Live and Letterman, but it's progress all the same.

Wednesday, he began posting a series of gargantuan survey mixes, one marking each year of the site's life. On the first weekday of each following month, you'll be able to drown yourself in chronologically distinct moments of pop music's recent past. (The first mix also exists as a Spotify playlist.) We talked to Perpetua about his ground-breaking site, the writing career it launched, what all perfect pop songs have in common, and why the 2003 mix is going to be insane.

The L: What goals did you have for Fluxblog when you started the site in 2002?

Matthew Perpetua: I had extremely modest goals in the early days of the site. It was mainly written for an audience of people I knew from around the Internet, mainly from the I Love Music and Barbelith online communities. I was just out of art school and hadn't really considered writing as a career, so it was just something I was doing to kill the time and entertain people who I'd never really met. The first year or so of the site wasn't in the format I developed with mp3 reviews, it was actually more similar to the Fluxblog Tumblr which would eventually be the sidebar of the site. I'm pretty sure the Tumblr is more popular than the regular site these days, though!

How has curating Fluxblog changed your tastes in music?

It made me more open, especially early on. By setting up a requirement to write about a certain number of songs per week — these days, it's generally one song per weekday, though I used to do two songs or more — it made me look outside of comfort zones to find things I might like and want to write about. I used to put the emphasis more on discovery, but it's shifted over time to being more focused on writing, so for the most part I write about what interests me as a writer. Somewhere along the line I felt like the audience I have cares more about me and what I'm writing than in discovering things — there are lots of other, more efficient way to find out the newest possible thing. Which isn't to say that I don't want to write about the newest possible thing, just that I'm not a slave to it and don't mind dropping everything to write about some song from a long time ago or a record from the recent past that isn't in a hype cycle anymore.

Perhaps what's offensive about this video has less to do with the video's "explicit" nature (c'mon, Lady Gaga shows us just as much skin), and all to do with the fact that Nicki Minaj displays and inhabits every degrading female trope in the book—a posing statue to a plasticine barbie, to an animal in a cage to an "innocent" little girl licking a lollipop. Network's perspective aside, the nudity's neither here nor there; the problem is that Nicki's video plays like an action-packed trailer for a misogynist fantasy. BET did not immediately respond to comment for TMZ, so who knows if the execs took that into account when deciding not to air it. Either way, you can decide for yourself and watch it here.

You can follow Sydney Brownstone on Twitter @sydbrownstone