HOT
Hidden Words
If you want to know what Chris Martin is singing on Coldplay’s forthcoming album, Ghost Stories, you could wait for its release May 19. Or you could go to the library. The band announced that lyric sheets for the album’s nine songs are hidden in “ghost story” books stashed in nine libraries in various parts of the world. The band’s Twitter is posting clues and, once found, will have photos of the lyric sheets. It should be fun to see if Coldplay’s younger fans will figure out that libraries aren’t just those things in iTunes that hold your music, and if the band’s older fans will be able to figure out how to use “the Twitter.” Perhaps it’s all just a cross-generational bonding exercise.
WARM
New Law of Attraction?
An odd study conducted at the University of Sussex purports to have found that “women have sexual preferences during peak conception times for men that are able to create more complex music.” The study, which surveyed 1,500 young women, found that most whose menstrual cycles had them in peak fertility mode preferred a composer who wrote complex pieces over ones who wrote simpler ones, but they preferred those composers only “as short-term sexual partners.” The study’s author says his work supports Charles Darwin’s theory that music was created by humans purely “for the sake of charming the opposite sex” and suggests the attraction stems from an innate drive to “acquire genetic benefits” to make smarter babies. What it doesn’t explain is why “simple” Pop stars have thousands of screaming women at their concerts, but you’d have to hire a search team to find a woman at a Prog Rock show.
COLD
Your Move, Black Eyed Peas
The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers is the most hated person in America this week after a recording of him telling his girlfriend not to bring black people to “his” basketball games (among other bigoted chestnuts) surfaced. Condemnation of the 80-year-old owner has been widespread, but one musician is looking to hit back by cutting into the fun factor of Clippers games. Victor Willis — aka “The Cop from the Village People” — says he is forbidding the Clippers from playing Village People music at games, including fan favorite “Y.M.C.A.” Clippers fans will now have to find other four letter words to choreographically spell out during breaks in the action. That’ll show him.