Some of my favorite Seattle/NW bands—Fucking Dyke Bitches and Dick Binge—are on tour in the South, and appear to have freaked out the citizens of Asheville, North Carolina simply by having their "provocative" names displayed on a club's marquee. According to the local ABC station's report:

West Asheville business owner says a neighboring bar's marquee is offensive. The sign outside The Odditorium listed the names of several "queer" bands, according to a statement from the business owners. Those names include profanities that some have found inappropriate for the family friendly neighborhood. The co-owner of Nona Mia Italian Kitchen says "there are children that walk up and down this street" all the time and there are other ways to promote bands, such as blogs, Facebook and email without putting it out there for everyone. Yolie Affatato says it's not just offensive for children. She says she has adult workers, some of whom are queer, that also find it offensive. The city says the sign is protected by free speech since it's a marquee. The Odditorium owners agreed to make slight changes to the sign out of respect for their neighbors.

I couldn't stop laughing after watching the video report. I highly recommend watching it (serious tone and creative camera work avoids showing the super-offending words.) Club owners ended up using a few cleverly placed asterisk into the band names on the sign appease offended community members. Let's all hope that F*ck*ng D*ke B*tches and D*ck B*nge have a really great show tonight!

MusicfestNW, Portland's annual citywide music extravaganza, announced its full lineup earlier this week, and their ticket window opens today. I've previously affectionately described it as a miniaturized SXSW on quaaludes—all of the evening cornucopia of live music you need without the hectic pace of chasing down secret surprise guests to distract from exploring brunch villages or visiting to your friendly neighborhood mixologists along the way.

This year's headliners will be: Young the Giant, mind-expanding oddballs Animal Collective, Seattle's own #feels folk revivalists the Head and the Heart, and noted eagle-lover Neko Case.

The rest of the lineup, alphabetized:

!!! + 1939 Ensemble + Angel Olsen + Animal Collective + Antwon + Austra + Baroness + Beat Connection + Big Gigantic + Bison Bison + Bleached + Bleeding Rainbow + Bob Mould + Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy + Brian Posehn + Broncho + Bruxa + Charles Bradley + Chet Faker + Chill Crew + Chromatics + Chvrches + Cody ChesnuTT + Crushed Out + Dan Deacon + Deep Sea Diver + Deerhunter + Diana + Diplo + Dirtclodfight + Earth + Eyelids + FIDLAR + Flume + Frank Fairfield + Fred & Toody Cole (Unplugged) + Fred Armisen + G_Force + Gang$ign$ + Gate + Gaytheist + Glass Candy + Godspeed You! Black Emperor + Grieves + Hands + Hausu + Hiss Golden Messenger + Horse Feathers + Hostage Calm + Hurray for the Riff Raff + Icona Pop + Into It. Over It. + Joey Bada$$ + John Vanderslice + Justin Townes Earle + K.Flay + La Luz + Larry and his Flask + Like a Villain + Lonnie Winn + Lord Dying + Love as Laughter + Magic Fades + Mariachi El Bronx + Mean Jeans + Mike Donovan + Minden + Morning Ritual + Most Custom + Mt. Eerie + Murder By Death + Nacho Picasso + Naomi Punk + Neal Morgan + Neko Case + Odesza + Old Light + On An On + Onuinu + P.O.S. + Pacific Air + Pickwick + Poolside + Prefuse 73 + Priory + Ra Ra Riot + Royal Canoe + Royal Thunder + Saves The Day + Shad + Shlohmo (DJ Set) + Shuggie Otis + Shy Girls + Sirah + Sonny & The Sunsets + Superchunk + Surfer Blood + Team Dresch + Thao & The Get Down Stay Down + The Baseball Project + The Bronx + The Chicharones + The Dodos + The Head and The Heart + The Helio Sequence + The Joy Formidable + The Lonesome Billies + The Men + The Moondoggies + The Thermals + Titus Andronicus + Tobacco + TxE + Ty Segall + Typhoon + Unknown Mortal Orchestra + Vice Device + Washed Out + White Lung + Wooden Indian Burial Ground + Yob + Young The Giant + Youth Bitch + Youth Lagoon

A $150 wristband gets you into all of the Pioneer Courthouse Square shows plus grants access to 150 bands playing at 16 clubs throughout Portland over the entire festival; $90 gets you into all of the club shows plus one of the headliners. These tickets, as well as individual tickets to shows at Pioneer Courthouse Square, Crystal Ballroom, Wonder Ballroom, Roseland Theater, and Aladdin Theatre are onsale now at musicfestnw.com/tickets. It's never to early to start eyeing BoltBus reservations and looking into availability at the Ace (or your favorite Portland lodging situation).

• Yeah Yeah Yeahs: the most crowded/best show of the night.

• Blur

Below, a few quick points from Friday. Expect a less unsubstantial and more photo-filled recap about What It All Means on Monday.

BANDWATCH: By far, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs put on my favorite set of Friday. Karen O is at the pinnacle of this era's most compelling triple-threats: performance artist, fashion icon, and utterly magnetic rock stars. The crowd for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was among the largest and most engaged of the mainstage sets I caught. The show alternated between previews the soon-to-be-released album along with old favorites, winding down with most of the audience belting along to YYYs love-song "Maps". The left the stage fully warmed for a seemingly happily-reunited Blur. Although the occasional moody deep cuts felt like gifts to the purists, they opened with "Girls & Boys" and including intervening rock-blocks of unassailable hits (e.g., a "Coffee & TV", "Song 2", "Tender", and "Parklife" complete with footraces around the stage) won near-universal acclaim.

The answer to Who Are the Stone Roses Dot Tumblr Dot Com: quite possibly the least-watched Coachella headliner in (my own) memory. Walking back after sampling Foals and Tegan & Sara on other smaller stages, the area around the mainstage was crickets. The audience looked smaller than most midday sets and we're going to musical hell for being part of the problem and not sticking around to see more than a song on our way out of the venue. Maybe no one had acclimated to the new later curfew.

TRENDWATCH: I'm happy to report that the #nativeappropriationwave may have fully and finally bottomed out: this year feather headdress "fashion" is rare-to-nonexistent. In place, every third girl is donning hand-made(ish) artisanal floral headbands. This satellite office of FashionTunnel (TM) approves.

CELEBWATCH: There was a moment during which the mere sighting of Paris Hilton caused the entrance to the main VIP cage to grind to an immediate halt, stranding a minimum of fifty vaguely important humans in a single file line outside the single narrow entryway as the line's bent to her resilient gravity and dozens of long-lensed photographers infiltrated the amateur cellsnappers from nowhere in particular to get a shot. Good for her! She is, after all the original Coachella celeb. Other sightings: Kate Bosworth, Alexa Chung, Whitney Port and her sidekick from the Hills. None pictured, because I never recognize these people until someone else points them out to me once they're a half mile away.

PROTIP: if you're electromagnetic field is feeling a bit fuzzy or your aura's a little broken down, a good way to prepare for a giant music festival is to arrive early enough to make a pilgrimage out to the magical mojave desert for a good old fashioned sound bath at the Integratron. A half hour in the company of a man tickling a set of giant quartz bowls is a great three-to-five dimensional experience that might just flip spacetime to timespace for a few minutes. Or was it the other way around?
More pictures after the jump.

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If you've ever been to Bellingham, you already know about What's Up! Magazine—the local music mag that covers both Whatcom and Skagit County. This month marks the 15th Anniversary of the publication, and this upcoming weekend the city is celebrating it with a bender.

• What's Up Magazine

The fun starts Friday night. Black Eyes and Neck Ties will return from the grave they dug in 2009 to play a reunion show, or as I'd like to call it: the "please buy all of our leftover merch that's been sitting in the garage for four years" show. The show will also have The Narrows, The Wastelanders, and Sugar Sugar Sugar performing. Tickets will definitely be hard to get on the day-of, so think about buying them online, here.

Before the music on Friday, there is a gallery art opening at the local DIY art and music space Make.Shift that will have every What's Up! Magazine cover that has ever been published (about 200), as well as photographs of live shows and bands from the area during the lifespan of the magazine (think photographs of bands like Federation X, At The Drive-In, Murder City Devils, Full Frontal Assault, Black Eyes & Neckties, Macklemore, and Black Breath).

If you think that's still not enough...

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Neptunes/N.E.R.D./BBC/Qream mogul Pharrell Williams has a new book called Places And Spaces I've Been. The title of the book is the hook of a song very dear to me, Donald Byrd's "Places And Spaces", written and produced by Larry and Fonce Mizell; this song first floored me some years ago during a long morning walk to work at Charlie's At Shilshole, as I stared out at the water—something I've been doing all week. The song has been sampled a grip of times but my favorite is Pete Rock & CL Smooth's "All The Places".

Anyway, a few days ago during Art Basel, Skateboard P was hosting a Q&A about his book, and Kanye West showed up to stroke his Basel real quick: "Pharrell I wanted to ask you...just about y'know, your taste in art, and how you developed such a high taste level and influenced so many people around the world, through y'know, pop culture and music and visuals?"

I'm in Miami, winding down a week of taking in the city during Art Basel. Friday night, we went to warehouse that had, on one side, a cavernous, dark exhibit of GIFs on one side, and on the other, a party with free Belvedere, inflatable soccer balls, and Dan Deacon "spinning" the "cuts." After the haircut before him finished his Clams Casino instros, Deacon set the party off with Bowie's "Modern Love," R.Kelly's evergreen "Ignition Remix," and Rod Stewart's "Young Turks." The party was presented by Tumblr and Paddle 8, an auction site that provided the branded soccer balls that were occasionally punted around. I watched a couple vodka and cranberries get knocked onto people's Basel outfits. I liked to imagine the party turning up too far, with a rowdy, Belvy-fueled game of dodgeball breaking out, people leaping over benches, Dan Deacon getting bombed into unconsciousness for playing "This Is How We Do It." To all my neightbors, you got much flavor.

As for the exhibit, there was a short film about the GIF's history, made by one Sean Pecknold:

A Short History of the Gif | Moving the Still from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

The gifs themselves seemed dwarfed by the space they were in, not to mention static—for being moving images, that is. Watching them cycle through on a flat wall, they left less of an impression on me than usual; maybe I'm spoiled by the experience of scrolling down a Tumblr dash. The seriousness of the space (aside from Deacon spinning "Tequila" in the other room) seemed to dampen their impact as well—I'm conditioned to gifs as decontextualized little bits of pop culure flotsam, reflecting the itchy anxieties and VHS nostalgia of the online generation. No gifs of Cliff Huxtable, face all a-wobble, preparing to eat a sandwich, or a wasted-looking loop of Kelly Kapowski glitching into a Pizza Hut commercial. I would've loved to see the work of Seattle's GIF LORDS too, for that matter. Maybe somebody could "reblog" this happening in Seattle. I would "like" that.

Currently The Stranger's Mike Ramos, Seattle Times' Andrew Matson, myself, and our significant others are in Miami, taking in the events in and around the Art Basel festival. We're staying in South Beach a block from the sand. When we bought these plane tickets back in spring, we all acknowledged that it would likely be just in the nick of time, to jailbreak us from Seattle's scheduled programming of rain and drear. The piss-dumping week leading up to this trip definitely set that in stone. So now we're here, the sun's out, the coffee's thick and sweet, the ropa vieja is sublime. The cab drivers give you game: don't get run over, people are crazy, some of the cabs are actually undercovers. Every sixth car is a Bentley. Cab Driver Jean (pronounced, I think, like 'Wyclef Jean') tells us that billionaires from everywhere are here, copping rare artworks. Diddy is definitely walking these streets. (We'd rather run into Gunplay.)

My request for press credentials was denied—wamp wamp—so I guess I'll be missing what's happening at the convention center, but there's so much going on out here that I doubt I'll miss a thing. There's art happenings everywhere. There's a GIF festival presented in part by Tumblr, with Dan Deacon DJing. ASAP Rocky, SpaceGhostPurrp (word is that those two squashed it for now to make sure there's no repeats of last month), Mr Muthafuckin xQuire, Metro Zu and plenty others are all doing shows. It seems like the music component to Basel is really taking off.

Last night we hit a spot in Wynwood called The Stage (a half indoor/half outdoor venue—it's a goddamn shame we can't have more stuff like that) and took in a show with THEESatisfaction and LA's Georgia Anne-Muldrow, who's Madlib-produced Seeds was one of my favorite albums of 2012. Stas and Cat, making their first Miami appearance, killed. There was a crew of young women that looked right out of a THEESat video, and they stepped lively to every word. Even the real-hiphop-looking heads nodded approvingly.

The show started late and the opener played for something like an hour and a half, so it wasn't until 1:45 am that Muldrow hit the stage. To warm up, she brought her "Husfriend" Declaime AKA Dudley Perkins AKA Dr. Stokely onstage to perform four solo songs, then Georgia took center stage. She's got a powerful voice, a Betty Davis wardrobe, and an enveloping Earth-mother aura that got the crowd grinning and singing her hooks on command; everybody in there joyously sang the words "I'ma feel brand new", and at that moment, I did. "Y'all got me, though", Georgia grinned, smile big as a Cheshire cat.