BlackBook

Give The People What They Want is the entirely spot-on title of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings newest album, due in August—you’d be hard pressed to find a more universally crowd-pleasing ensemble. The eleven-piece(!) outfit took a year to record in Bushwick after an extended tour of I Learned The Hard Way, and their lead-off single, “Retreat!” is anything but.

Taylor Swift and One Direction’s Harry Styles have broken up. I, for one, haven’t been this devastated since Taylor Swift broke up with that Kennedy kid. Alas, at least this means Swift will have enough material for at least three songs on her next album. (I’m guessing she’s been drafting some lyrics on that boat.) I’m hoping at least one of them is about Styles’s second set of nipples. (It’d be a good dig in a song called “I Could Never Love You (As Much As You Love Yourself)”) [NY Daily News, Gawker]

If you worked in the BlackBook office, you would know that we occasionally enjoy discussing Taylor Swift. Like much of the rest of the world, we are enthralled by her love life. Personally, I'm not mad if her jams come on the radio; when it comes to the slew of men she parades around with, however, I have an issue. Girl, Tay Tay, can ya keep it in your pants for a second? We've seen her jump from Jonas to Mayer to Lautner to Jake and, more recently, Kennedy to Harry Styles, or, as I like to call him, "the hot one" from One Direction. Excuse me while I remind myself I am a grown woman well past her teens. 

How many times have you heard some old person complain about what the kids are listening to these days? (Oh, yesterday, from me?) It's a certainty, like death and taxes, that popular music will only cause the furrowed brows of the cool kids of yesteryear to become more creased, their now wrinkled hands forming into limp fists raised slightly in the air as the loose skin on those arms shake with a ferocity only matched by the senility so depressingly spouting from their typing fingers. Do not dare hush them! They have opinions, and they are always correct! Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Musto has something to say about the current state of pop music! 

I can't keep up with who Taylor Swift is dating anymore because I exhausted that section of my brain—the one that pays attention to the fickle romantic couplings of people I don't know—back in middle school, when the girls "hooked up" (read: did not have sex) with a guy one week and then were caught holding hands with someone else at the skating rink the following Friday. Tiring, right?! All I wanted to do was sit at home and listen to showtunes and think confusing things about Paul Rudd in Clueless. Not much has changed, to be honest, but I can tell you one thing: this Taylor Swift gal is exhausting the hell out of me.

Last year, scientists at the University of Bristol announced they’d come up with a formula for predicting whether a song will crack the Top 5 on the U.K. pop charts. The software analyzes such factors as tempo, beat variation, harmonic simplicity, and something called “tertiary time signature,” then measures it against 50 years of data. The algorithm spits out a binary verdict: jam it or slam it.

You could listen to Wrong Direction's song Disclosure and learn something about Mitt Romney's shiesty, tax return withholding, Olympic-horse write-off enjoying ways. Or you could just listen to it on mute. Your choice.

It was bound to happen sooner or later: the NOC just released their own One Direction-inspired parody of the Fab Five from the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. The group had previously parodied Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” with Ryan Lochte (following last week's video featuring members of the the swimming team).

Once upon a time, boy band homoeroticism was a little more subtle. They might have rocked floppy hair and spent a lot of time at that tour bus together, but you they had a vested interest in appearing apple-pie-and-Applebys straight. And then there's the British boy band One Direction. The boys don't hide their homoerotic horseplay and even play it up for laughs, like when two of the boys appeared to kiss onstage at a concert in Texas this week. Watch the video after the jump and help me figure out what in the name of Lance Bass is going on.

● One Direction, an American band formed in 2009, has taken up legal action against the baby-faced British boy band which has been topping charts and selling out arenas using the same name. [TMZ]