Avril Lavigne has canceled her Asian tour due to coronavirus fears - it was set to begin on April 23, and it would have included stops in China, Japan, Philippines and Taiwan. Canadian rock group Wolf Parade canceled their European and U.K. dates, Billboard reports. Ultra Abu Dhabi has also been canceled in the shadow of coronavirus. According to EDM Tunes, many other events in the UAE are revising their outlooks. Thousands of people have signed a petition to have SXSW canceled, but the organizers of Austin-Texas hipster-fest said the show will go on. The Outline has a message for them: "The organizers of SXSW have a chance to be double heroes: not only could they possibly save lives by canceling their event, but they could save us all the inanity of hearing about it".

Quem Manda No Mic' by Angolan-Portuguese singer/rapper Pongo is an unusual ordinary song, the pop music's sweet spot; Shabazz Palaces released 'Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate)', their first new song in several years; Aalok Bala in an Andean artist who grew up in Queens but moved to LA five years ago, and it all can be heard on 'Sueño'; 'Rascal' by RMR is the strangest song this week where country meets trap, the video is even stranger; Jarvis Cocker's new band JARV IS... announced their debut album with a funky single 'House Music All Night Long'; Sex Swing delivered a sax-psych-noise song with 'Valentine's Day At The Gym'; Moaning have a simple song and a simple video - 'Make It Stop'; Etapp Kyle delivered a clockwork postcard from Ukraine with 'Nolove'; Kenny O'Brien made a lovely cover of The Waterboys' 'The Whole of the Moon'; Huntsmen have basically made a 21st century 'Planet Caravan' with 'God Will Stop Trying'.

Bernie Sanders has drawn endorsements from a wide range of Gen X and millennial rock musicians - from Vampire Weekend, the Strokes and Portugal. the Man to Jack White, Best Coast and Bon Iver, as well as a number of hip-hop artists, among them Public Enemy, Cardi B., Lizzo, Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike, Anderson .Paak, Lil Yachty, rapper T.I., and pop stars including Miley Cyrus, Zedd and Ariana Grande. It's not only Sanders who musician like - Cher, singer/actress Rita Wilson and her husband Tom Hanks are stumping for former Vice President Joe Biden, while John Legend, Melissa Etheridge, Rosanne Cash and Aimee Mann are backing Sen. Elizabeth Warren. LA Times discusses what does such support mean in the age of social media?

Lewis Capaldi this week starts a tour that will see him play some of the UK’s biggest venues, Sam Fender and Dermot Kennedy will soon play two shows each at Alexandra Palace, Billie Eilish plays four O2 Arena dates in July, Scottish troubadour Gerry Cinnamon is set to play arenas, castles, parks and even Glasgow’s Hampden Park stadium. How did it come to that? - some artists have huge followings thanks to social media, without having to play small shows. This often means they haven’t had the time to work on their live show and develop as artists used to. Guardian wonders whether it's damaging to young artists to be playing such big venues so early in their careers.

Lebanese singer-songwriter Juliana Yazbeck wrote an excellent article in the Gal-Dem about double standards when it comes to the perception of Arab music. "Apparently, my music is 'hard to sell' and 'hard to categorise'. A former manager of mine – also an Arab – said to my face that if I were 'less niche' I could book bigger shows and get paid more (read: get paid what I deserve). Who decides how niche I am? I would imagine that decision is down to me. Meanwhile, acts like Coldplay appropriate and fetishise our people’s culture and suffering (see: their latest album 'Everyday Life'), and we are meant to be grateful for being noticed by them. The same door that closes for us opens for white artists appropriating Arab culture". And she's not that niche at all, as Juliana says herself, she is - "combining Arabic singing traditions with rap and genre-bending electronica".

"Heavy metal Mardi Gras" was held yesterday in Perth - Canning Highway in west Australia city was closed to all vehicles except eight trucks that hosted eight different bands all singing their own version of AC/DC songs to commemorate the death of AC/DC frontman and Perth lad Bon Scott’s funeral 40 years ago. ABC reports that an estimated 150,000 people lined the route between Applecross and Fremantle waiting for the world’s longest stage, and before the AC/DC convoy began its journey, an air guitar world record was set when more than 3500 people rocked out to 'Highway To Hell', Louder reports. The Highway to Hell concept was big and weird and it was a gamble but it paid off massively and is something we can proudly write in history books - WA today writes.

Public Enemy have parted ways with their charismatic MC Flavor Flav, after more than 35 years, Rolling Stone reports. The dismissal came two days after the rapper sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bernie Sanders' campaign after his bandmates said they'd appear at one of his rallies in Los Angeles. Frontman Chuck D suggested on Twitter the disagreement over Sanders' rally was financially, not politically, motivated - "i there was a $bag, Flav would've been there front & centre. He will NOT do free benefit shows". Flavor Flav's cease-and-desist letter accused the campaign of using his "unauthorised likeness, image and trademarked clock in promotional materials" for a Los Angeles rally, even though the rapper "has not endorsed any political candidate". Public Enemy later performed at Sanders' LA rally, under the Public Enemy Radio banner - featuring Chuck D, DJ Lord, Jahi and the S1Ws.

Indie singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, pop-punk bandleader Hayley Williams, and country duo Maddie & Tae are dropping their new albums in two or more multi-song installments, divided by months.  “All of this comes down to streaming” - one indie label campaign manager explained. Nick Blandford, Sumney's publisher, said - “attention spans are short. We can’t change that. But we wanted to try and play with it a bit”. MusicWatch managing director Russ Crupnick is completely practical about it - “every study we do around social says the No. 1 thing fans want to hear about is new releases from their artists”.

The woman from the Dirty Dancing song teams up with a mobster and a kid from a pizza parlor to - by a combination of timing, luck, forethought, and stolen lyrics - start a revolution - Complex says about Sylvia Robinson, their choice of the best hip-hop producer od 1979. The best in 2019 - Madlib, for creating soulful, era-spanning beats. In-between the two - Kanye West, Dr. Dre, The Neptunes...

Korean boy band BTS have debuted on top of Billboard 200 chart, with their newest album 'Map of the Soul: 7' sold in 422,000 equivalent units (347,000 actual purchases, and 75 million streams). It is their fourth No. 1 album in the U.S., the biggest debut of 2020, and BTS' third No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in less than 12 months, which is a feat that had last been managed by The Beatles over half a century before. Back on the new Billboard 200, rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again bows at No. 2 with 'Still Flexin, Still Steppin', which steps in with 91,000 equivalent album units, and Ozzy Osbourne’s 'Ordinary Man' debuts at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 with 77,000 equivalent album units.

Los Angeles-based startup Stem Disintermedia Inc., launched last week, is offering musicians money they can use to go on tour, record new songs or market their work - without demanding ownership. According to Bloomberg, Stem has created a flat-fee service called Scale that offers financing in the form of a revolving credit line and plans to lend more than $100 million in advances to artists and independent labels. Fees range from 5% to 25%, and Stem also collects a cut when artists use its platform to distribute their music. Stem is backed by the likes of Mark Cuban and Scooter Braun, with clients Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Kanye West and Usher, Forbes reports.

"Musicians don't drink like normal people," Canadian singer-songwriter Damhnait Doyle wrote in a Toronto Star op-ed earlier this year. "You drink before gigs, during gigs, after gigs, on your day off, on a travel day, at the airport bar, the hotel bar, in the bus, the back of the van, when the show sucks, when the show is off the hook, when your song is on the radio, when no one's playing your single. Alcohol is both the journey and the destination". The article inspired Exclaim to talk to several artists - Hollerado drummer Jake Boyd, singer-songwriter and Single Mothers frontman Drew Thomson, PONY bandleader Sam Bielanski and singer-songwriter Ansley Simpson - about how they got sober and what has changed since they stopped drinking.

Danish musician Amalie Bruun chose Myrkur (Icelandic for "darkness") as her stage name, and the color persists on her new album 'Folkesange' where she reworked traditional Scandinavian songs. It's "modern versions" of songs played, all by her, on mandolas, lyres and a nyckelharpa, resulting in "dense, intense folk".

Violet Cold are so rich in sound on 'Kid Noir' it seems there is an orchestra behind the music, whereas it's a one-man-show - by Emin Guliyev. It's big, it's dramatic, it's rich, it's - great!!! Invisible Oranges likes the "spaced-out vocals and monstrously thick atmospherics to literally drown your ears in wet noise". On a lighter note - Guliyev charges his album $6,66 at Bandcamp :-).

Perth festival 2020 is closing on Sunday (March 1) with Highway To Hell - a celebration of AC/DC's Ben Scott, who died 40 years ago, with the longest stage in the world. Perth will close a 10 km stretch of Canning Highway (path Scott took when he was going from his home to practice) with two lanes for eight flat-bed trucks with dozens of performers on the trucks, the other two lanes for the public. According to Perth Now, a crowd of 100,000 people are expected to attend the Highway to Hell, but it'll actually be a musical paradise!

Rammstein have posted an intense timelapse video of their tour crew outfitting a stadium in Dresden, Germany. The entire process is highly coordinated, taking place over the span of seven days and with the help of multiple 18-wheelers and over 400 crew members carting in flooring, lights, decorative stage elements, and sound equipment. It takes 60 hours to set up the stage, and the Rammstein concert lasts 90 minutes or so.

"'Suddenly' is drenched in wonderful melodies – behind the bedroom-bound sonic boffin image, Snaith is a really good songwriter – and packed with moments more obviously pop-facing than anything previously released" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis writes about Caribou's new album (gave it 5 of 5 stars). He especially likes the way Dan Snaith sings - "You don’t realise how accustomed your ears have become to Auto-Tuned perfection until you hear someone who actually sounds like a human being rather than a cyborg programmed to perform vocal calisthenics: it hits you emotionally in a way that melismatic feats of strength and endurance simply don’t". Listen to the album in full at Bandcamp.

The Macrostylis metallicola is a worm-like creature that lives in the Clarion Clipperton Zone off the coast of Hawaii, at depths where the pressure is 400 times greater than that of the earth’s atmosphere. According to doctors Torben Riehl and Bart De Smet, who discovered the new creature, named it after the band due to specific details of their habitat, and Metallica is one of Riehl's favourite bands, the Phys reports.

London rapper Jelani Blackman lives the usual life, judging by the lyric "I just eat, work, and then I swerve" from his new song 'Swerve'; avantgarde Mexican musician Nnux is both experimental and enjoyable in her new video 'Piezas'; Lady Gaga unveiled her first solo single in three years, disco-pop 'Stupid Love', with a Slipknot-meets-Klingon-meets-Avatar video; Jessie Ware has shared a disco-banger 'Spotlight' with a video set in Belgrade aboard the Blue Train, the private transport of former Yugoslavian leader Tito; some good country by Steve Earle & the Dukes about one of the worst mining disasters in American history in 'Devil Put The Coal In The Ground'; Gorillaz go Afropop in 'Désolé' ("sorry") featuring Malian star Fatoumata Diawara on vocals; Lovelorn combine goth and synth-pop in 'Around You'; Azusa is comprised by members of Dillinger Escape Plan, Extol, Sea + Air, and, as if that wasn't enough, they have Testament’s Alex Skolnick on guitar solo on 'Detach'; Stephen Malkmus has shared 'Shadowbanned', a psych-folk jam featuring Kim Gordon, Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Conor Oberst in video.

An interesting interview with Halsey in the Guardian about how the media and the public present and view women - “It’s so much greater than me – it’s a social perception of women. So fuck it, I’m gonna tell them everything that happened. I am financially independent, I have my own team, I have every resource in the world to get out of [misogyny]. I still can’t. How hard must it be for women who don’t have these resources?”. But, things can be done - at the Women’s March in 2018, she delivered a poem about her experience of sexual harassment so compassionate, angry and confessional that - “people came up to me in the street. Men. A whole demographic who’d never approached me before. Art still works! You lose faith in it sometimes”.

Simon & Garfunkel made one of, or the best album of their career 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', and - broke up (for the third time). The latest edition of Acast podcast discussed that very issue - energy coming out from not a conflict, but a crucible of honest creative confrontation. Host Andy Bothwell speaks to musicians Nick Thorburn (Islands/Unicorns) and Mattiel on the importance of creative conflict. Listen to it - here.

Heavy metal fans are the mostly likely of any genre to have had a sexual experience in a car, according to a survey by TickPick about music habits while in automobiles. 75 percent of heavy metal listeners have experienced a sexual encounter in a vehicle, as opposed to 65 percent of all respondents, and ahead of fans of oldies music, hip-hop, rap and R&B/soul. Music of choice for car-sex - R&B and soul in over 27 percent of the time, metal 12.6 percent.

Green Day have postponed their scheduled tour of Asia, which was due to kick early next month, amid fears of coronavirus, Billboard reports. BTS canceled several shows in their native South Korea due to the alarming spread of coronavirus, while New Order announced they’d put their upcoming shows in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan “on hold” for the time being.

The Cabo Verdean popular music genre of funaná was outlawed by the Portuguese colonial government in the 1950s as too proud an expression of identity, and it emerged only in the 1990s as a symbol of political activism. A new compilation 'Pour Me a Grog: The Funaná Revolt in the 1990s' is driven by the gaita (the type of accordion), an instrument materially linked to colonial influences even as it necessarily revolts against them. It's accompanied by passionate vocals and plentiful drums and synths, with remarkable speed on instruments. PopMatters says the album is worth a listen if only to make the acquaintance of a wholly unique musical style.

16 years ago - in a more innocent, less litigious, and more freewheeling time - Danger Mouse made a sensation with his 'Grey Album' that combined music from The Beatles' 'White Album' and Jay-Z's vocals from his 'Black Album'. Rolling Stones is wondering would we get to hear such an experiment now? The answer is - probably not! Far more so than in the post-Napster days of 2004, the music business is on edge about copyright infringement. If anyone had the notion of creating something akin to 'The Grey Album now', those thoughts would be quickly extinguished, considered not worth the risk and cost.

Many DJ are acutely aware of the mental and physical risks of the typical "DJ lifestyle", Mix Magazine says in an interesting article about a change in nightclubs post-Avicii. With a new and welcome transparency around artists’ mental health and addiction, DJs feel more at ease to make a big change. The other big thing is that much of the club scene has changed, in many cases becoming less a place of expression than of consumption: a circuit for DJs and artists, where the emphasis on ever-grander spectacle and production can alienate not only the crowd but the DJs from the music, eating away at the idea of the club as a place of subculture and resistance.

RZA has released 'Guided Explorations', a five-track EP that is meant to be listened to in a “chill environment”, preferably while drinking some TAZO Tea. RZA goes deep on the scourge of distraction and poisonous thoughts, explaining how “competitive pressure can stagnate you”. As the record continues, he spools out kernels of self-help advice over ambient soundscapes and light beats.

British guitarist Rob Marshall invited "a long list of extraordinary vocalists [Dave Gahan, Mark Lanegan, Carl Hancock Rux] to bring grace, philosophical wisdom, and their unique artistic perspective to the songs" on his debut album as Humanist. PopMatters says the album's "high-minded ideals of birth, death, morality, and one's place in an unrelenting world are articulated by a perfectly curated list of singers who have all flown as close to the sun as anyone. Musically it's rich in scope with Marshall pulling in all of his influences from post-punk to breakbeat to indie and krautrock and fitting them together like parts of a puzzle".

The Strokes' drummer Fabrizio Moretti is also an artist. He shared some interesting thoughts to Consequence of Sound about how he sees arts and consuming of it: "There’s a difference between being an artist and actually fucking putting in the work”; “When you start crafting, you see that the work influences the rest of the work because of the sheer fact that you need to do well. I’m always working on two songs at the same time because if I don’t, I obsess on the details of one, and it fucks up"; "You go and you see a piece of art; you’re looking at it outside of you. When you listen to a song, the singer’s voice is being put together in your own head. The effort that you as the listener has is part of the artwork in a sense”.

Jay-Z has filed a civil lawsuit against the Mississippi Department of Corrections on behalf of 152 inmates at a state prison, alleging “abhorrent conditions, abuse and constant violence, inadequate health care and mental health care, and overuse of isolation", CNN reports. It is the second lawsuit brought against the prison by Jay-Z - he filed a suit, in tandem with Ya Gotti, on behalf of 29 other inmates in January. Jay-Z has frequently involved himself in African American civil rights cases using his philanthropy arm Team Roc.