Every Friday, we take a look at the way various cities from around the world have been depicted in song, choosing five of our favorites about a given city. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been on the other side of the Atlantic, visiting various locations in the UK — and this week we’re skipping across the Irish Sea to Dublin, Ireland’s capital city and the home to about a bazillion great bands over the years. As ever, this isn’t meant to be a definitive list of the best songs ever about the city, just a selection of our personal favorites — and suggestions are always welcome.

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Recently, we read an article in the Guardian wherein critic Tom Ewing proclaimed loudly that he’d never heard Nirvana’s Nevermind. While Ewing’s oversight was apparently more due to apathy than willful ignorance — as he writes, “often I let an album pass me by, watch the buzz around it swell, crest and ebb” — the piece did get us thinking about how we’re generally of the opinion that you should give everything a chance, and then make a judgement, not dismiss things out of hand because they don’t fit your view of what’s good and what ain’t. While only the most curmudgeonly would dismiss Nevermind out of hand, there are plenty of other less fashionable albums that people these days tend to dismiss a priori as terminally uncool. And so we got to thinking about some such unfashionable records that we still think are totally worthy of a spot on your shelf and/or your iPod. We’ve nominated a few after the jump — (polite) suggestions are, as ever, welcome.

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Headline writing is an art akin to haiku: you have very little space to stylishly convey your meaning while also piquing readers’ interest. Pair that challenge with the time constraints of a 24-hour news cycle, and the result is quite a few headlines with unintentional — and often humorous — double meanings. Design You Trust points us to F*ck Yeah Headlines, a Tumblr that reinterprets these titles with hilarious illustrations. See a science story transform Freddie Mercury into a sea creature, learn Kim Jong-Il’s “bikini secrets,” and enjoy a Jennifer Aniston-fronted human centipede in a selection of our favorites from the blog after the jump.

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Sometimes you’ve gotta rock, and sometimes you want to just do something else–preferably something as not-rock as possible. That’s where a lot of alt and/or indie rock musicians have found themselves over the years, whether or not they actually act on the impulse. Here are nine artists who did just that.

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Conventional music wisdom is a tedious business. Given that rock ‘n’ roll was supposed to be about self-expression and individualism, it’s rather sad that such an orthodoxy has arisen around music criticism over the years — there’s the albums that you’re absolutely not allowed to dislike (our distaste for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band always gets us in trouble here), and conversely, there’s the albums that it’s pretty much taken as read that everyone hates. This can be a pretty dirty business — while there are certain albums that absolutely deserve all the vitriol that has been poured upon them, there’s also those that have been unfairly maligned. Here’s a selection of ten albums that we think have got a raw deal from the critics. What are your suggestions?

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Monday is the 4th of July, and among all the parades and flag-waving, it’s a chance to maybe think about what this country is and what its ideals represent. The American Dream — both the great shining vision and its dark underbelly — has been a powerful motif in literature over the years, dissected and discussed in works like The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, The Grapes of Wrath, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and many more. It’s also been a recurrent subject for songwriters, both as an ideal to which to aspire and a myth to be debunked. Here’s a mixtape that looks at both ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in between.

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There are two types of people in the world: those who actually enjoy American Idol and those who only tune in to the finale to see famous musicians play their hits amid elaborate stage set-ups, awards show-style. We won’t judge you for belonging to the former category, but we fall firmly into the latter. Thankfully for us, last night’s celebrity line-up was major: Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Bono and the Edge, Steven Tyler, and Marc Anthony and J.Lo all serenaded the crowd. (Several notables teamed up with Idol contestants, too, from TLC to Judas Priest.) So, how did the night’s non-contestants fare? We rate their performances we actually care about from best to worst after the jump.

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1. The 19 new films contending for the Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival have been announced, and they include Pedro Almodóvar’s La Piel Que Habito, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. [via ArtsBeat]

2. Bruce Campbell has confirmed that the long-rumored Evil Dead reboot will happen — he’s not just sure when. “Who can say -– we’re all working on other jobs right now. We’re not trying to dodge anybody’s questions, there just isn’t that much to talk about. The remake’s gonna kick ass –- you have my word.” [via Paste Mag]

3. It’s a miracle: A mango jelly bean was found with Kate Middleton’s face on it in Britain. Says the enterprising chap who found it: “Given that the royal wedding is only a few weeks away, we hope to make a few pounds out of it by selling it on the internet to a collector.” [via Gawker]

4. How exactly are book signings supposed to work in the age of the eBook? The New York Times offers up a few ideas, including having an author sign your iPad, which just sounds nuts to us.

5. William Shatner has announced the tracklist for his space-inspired covers album, Searching For Major Tom, and it includes songs by U2, Frank Sinatra, Queen, and Pink Floyd. [via HuffPo]

Bonus link: Watch Roger Ebert’s TED Talk About Losing His Voice

1. The nominees for The 15th Annual Webby Awards were announced this morning, and the list includes Justin Bieber, Angry Birds, Groupon, the Old Spice Guy, Arcade Fire, The Bed Intruder Song, SoundCloud, and Flipboard .

2. “I’m around great women, starting with my mom. Women keep men cool. The hotter the chick the cooler the guy … that sounds like a really bad rap line!” – Jay-Z talks about his new lifestyle website and explains how he became the coolest man on Earth to Gwyneth Paltrow in GOOP

3. With ticket sales estimated to top $700 million, U2’s 360 Degrees tour has surpassed The Rolling Stones’s Bigger Bang tour as the highest grossing tour of all time. Says their manager: “That dollar figure for the gross looks enormous! Of course I can’t tell you what the net is, but I can tell you that the band spend enormous sums on production for their audience.” Point taken, but how much could a giant claw (or three) cost? [via Vulture]

4. Look at a photo of a decidedly pregnant Tina Fey that was snapped while she was leaving The Late Show With David Letterman last night.

5. Ikea’s first US-based factory in Danville, Virginia, has become “a target of racial discrimination complaints, a heated union-organizing battle, and turnover from disgruntled employees.” Of note: workers at similar factories in Sweden make a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and five weeks of paid vacation. That’s compared to $8 an hour in Danville and 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company. [via LAT]

Bonus link: It’s free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s!

Poor Titus Andronicus. They were all excited to go on tour with The Pogues, but apparently the experience has left a sour taste – singer Patrick Stickles told Spinner this week, “I hated the tour. It made me furious throughout. I didn’t think that we were treated at all with the respect that we deserved, not even the respect as saying, ‘We’re an important punk band,’ but respect that we’re human beings.” Still, for all that their support slot turned out to be a huge let-down, at least they didn’t get beaten up, or get chased out of the country, or end up stuck inside a giant lemon. Here we “celebrate” ten of rock ’n’ roll’s most hilariously disastrous concert tours.

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