New Kids On The Block are reuniting 20 years after the release of hit album Hangin’ Tough.

Their first show will be a live performance this Friday, April 4th on the Today Show.

All five original members (Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, Danny Wood, Jordan Knight and Jonathan Knight) are involved.

And yes, they will be keeping their name even though all the ‘Kids are now in their late 30s.

We’re curious to see if NKOTB has any new material or if they’ll stick to the money-makers that caused them to sell 50 million albums.

Hey, “Step By Step” was a great song. Or at least it was when I was in 2nd grade.

Brooklyn trio the Rub have done some insanely thorough curating with their series of yearly rundowns of the best (in their learned opinions) hip-hop tracks. They've strung together dozens of gems for every year from 1979 to 1999 (you can access the MP3 files here). That is some serious dedication and edification, boom-bap aficionados.

Below are a few videos from some of my faves that the Rub have included in their pantheon.

Just-Ice's “Cold Gettin' Dumb” (1986)

Gang Starr's “Who's Gonna Take the Weight” (1990)

GZA's “Shadowboxing” (1995)

Fu-Schnickens' “Ring the Alarm” (1992)

Here's the perfect gift for that dude/dudette with an Apple logo tattoo or a closet full of Atari T-shirts: Mark Richards' Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers. Check out the slide show—and take care that you don't get any on your keyboard, geek.

Tip: My Seattle techno DJ/producer homie Jerry Abstract

Majesty Crush ca. early 1990s. Photo by Jack Nelson.

Cult '90s Detroit shoegazer-rock band Majesty Crush—featuring gregarious OC Weekly freelancer Hobey Echlin on bass and Michael Segal (the OC Weekly music editor's brother [CONFLICT OF INTEREST!]) on guitar—get a belated quarter-hour of fame in respected, LA-based music mag URB. Go here for URB's say and here for my Sprawl of Sound column about the Crush, who have a really solid career-retrospective CD out now on Full Effect Records.

Graffiti is one of the four elements of hip-hop. Ya heard? That's why I'm slapping this onto Heard Mentality. Graffiti Archaeology is an engrossing site that will eat up a good chunk of your day if you're not careful. Read the mission statement below.

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present.

Tip: Rachael M.

Ex-Nirvana bassist/current political activist Krist Novoselic hosts an exclusive live Flipper track in his column this week on our sister paper Seattle Weekly's blog. The song's recorded by Jack Endino, the studio wiz who produced Bleach about 18 years ago. Novoselic currently plays bass in Flipper, who reunited in 2005.

Flipper were my favorite American punk band because they wrote the funniest lyrics and they wittily bucked the conformist punk trend of loud/fast/stoopid rules (actually, slow/loud/smart rules; make a note of it). Check out Krist's column and the track (“Way of the World”) here.

And here's a clip of a much younger Flipper doing "In Life My Friends" in 1982.

Saturn: Currently shopping demos to several labels.

With a sound that's been honed over billions of years, the planet Saturn has developed quite a beguiling musical signature. It's doubtful that many Earthlings will hum along to it, but I think it may be my favorite strain of music of the spheres. With enough promotional savvy, Saturn could be huge.

Tip: Chris Alfaro

The album that launched Left Coast gangsta rap into white suburban consciousness and mainstream culture, N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton, will be reissued Dec. 4 with a bonus live track and covers by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Snoop Dogg and C-Murder, Mack 10, and WC to anticipate its 20th anniversary. Marked by more profanity than a Richard Pryor LP and provoking almost as many laughs as same, Compton established Dr. Dre as a production savant, Ice Cube as a lyrical humorist par excellence and Eazy-E as an entertaining, if occasionally risible, braggart.

I remember when Compton came out; I played the hell out of my cassette copy and, despite verses that celebrated all types of anti-social actions and un-PC behavior, I continued to live a law-abiding, woman-respecting existence. I also note that Western (and Eastern) civilization did not crumble, even as Compton went double-platinum. Although Eazy died of AIDS in 1995, Dre and Cube live lives of creative productivity and social respectability and can buy all of you many times over (MC Ren, DJ Yella and the rest have faded into oblivion). Political pundits, social critics, Tipper Gore's PMRC and worrywarts of all stripes—proved wrong again.

In other news, police officers nationwide are uttering their own stream of curse words into their donuts over this development.

You can read the press release after the jump.

Iconic British punk group the Sex Pistols have re-recorded “Anarchy in the U.K.” for the video game Guitar Hero™ III: Legends of Rock; they've also redone “Pretty Vacant” for another game called skate. Original members John Lydon, guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook cut the track with Chris Thomas in London's Air Studios. The band—including original bassist Glen Matlock—will also play in that city's Brixton Academy Nov. 8-10 [all dates are sold out], and to complete the Pistols multimedia blast, their sole studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here are the Sex Pistols, will be reissued on vinyl on Oct. 29, 30 years after its initial release.

I've never been hung up about musicians maintaining punk-rock integrity, but it seems as if these moves (the video-game re-recording and reunion show sans Sid Vicious, whose corpse could probably play bass just as well as he did while alive) will chap some uptight, denim-clad asses. Cynical cash-ins apparently are now punk rock, dig? Nurse, administer the smelling salts...

Here's the Sex Pistols in more fresh-faced days performing “Anarchy.”

Full press release after the jump.

With chatter about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's and "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" single and reissues of two of the Monkees' best albums (Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.) fresh in my mind, I am compelled to compare two of the best songs by these iconic pop groups via the magnetic charm of YouTube.

The Monkees' "Porpoise Song" (written by Gerry Goffin/Carole King) is some kind of ultimate watery bliss pop hatched from cynical music-biz vets looking to cash in on da yoof craze of the late-'60s (back when all candy and soft drinks were laced with the finest LSD). Seriously, I can imagine Brian Eno turning another green shade of envy over the gorgeous, enwombing stasis of this song. It represents Micky Dolenz's finest moment on the mic, too.

"Porpoise Song" seems to be loosely based upon "Strawberry Fields Forever" (both are nostalgia-laden reveries and poignant paeans to childhood), especially if you believe the Monkees to be a cynical marketing scheme devised by American record-biz moguls trying to fabricate a Yank Fab Four to capitalize (albeit late) on Beatlemania. But the Beatles song carries a sinister undercurrent that's absent from the Monkees tune; there's an uneasiness beneath the antiquated psychedelic idyll. When all the sound drops out near song's end and then returns with that mad, warbly Mellotron and those dread-filled martial rhythms and harrowing, phased guitars come into earshot, you can feel a wrenching sense of doom looming over these charmed lads.

Hell, I wouldn't want to live in a world without either song.