Beck’s upcoming album, Song Reader “isn’t really an album, so much as a collection of 20 different songs that exist only as individual pieces of sheet music.” It will be released by McSweeney’s along with unique drawings by Marcel Dzama and others.

“I’m against censorship, and my whole career I’ve always promoted freedom of expression, freedom of speech,” says Madonna in support of Russia’s Pussy Riot days before her concert in Moscow. “So obviously, I think what’s happening to them is unfair.”

At Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival, “artists are often in the room and the audience is invited to be in concert with them.” Opening Sept. 6, this year’s edition features Miguel Gutierrez, a Buckminster Fuller film project featuring Yo La Tengo, and more.

Since Rites of Spring’s Guy Picciotto protested apartheid outside the South African embassy in ’85 and Fugazi denounced the Gulf War a few years later, punk’s geopolitical influence has waned, writes Spencer Ackerman. Could Moscow’s Pussy Riot change that?

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has received a $1 million grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to create a digital archive—which will house “everything from Civil War memorabilia to footage from the early performances of Merce Cunningham and Robert Wilson.”

To mark the digital release of “Feistodon,” a split single that has Feist and metal act Mastodon covering each other, the bands have released a new video that lets listeners cross-fade between each version of the song “A Commotion.”

Members of the feminist band Pussy Riot went on trial Monday for holding an anti-Putin “punk prayer service” in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in February. If found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” they face seven years.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Walker welcomed performing artists like Bill T. Jones, Karen Finley, and Ron Athey, whose work reflected concerns of the day. In conjunction with the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, John Killacky, performing arts curator from 1988 to 1996, shares his memories of Walker performances—and politics—of the era.

“The arts are not something separate from us,” says Grammy-nominated pianist-composer Vijay Iyer. “[W]e are the arts. And I say that with the utmost humility, because when I say ‘we’ I don’t mean ‘we artists,’ I mean we, as humanity.”