Yesterday afternoon, Pitchfork announced part of the lineup for its popular Pitchfork Music Festival, which returns to Chicago’s Union Park on July 18 - 20.

One of the bands included in this partial list is the semilocal Afropop quartet Extra Golden. This is especially welcome news, because the African portion of the band has been caught up in Kenya’s recent unrest.

When I enquired with the band’s label, Thrill Jockey, they told me that the PFMF is going to be just one part of an upcoming American tour, “likely including a DC date,” and more recording, too. Good news.

Here’s yours truly on the band’s most recent, Hera Ma Nono, which was released just prior to the post-election chaos in Kenya.

And here’s the band’s Web site, where you can make a donation to help the Kenyan members of Extra Golden.

Heard in a cab yesterday: Club Envy, a NE nightspot described as a “dance club that is also used as a music venue,” has been closed by D.C. police after a fatal shooting that happened at 4:20 Sunday morning.

According to this Washington Post article, a man was killed and a woman was injured.

While reading news of yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing–the one at which singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett testified–I, for one, was surprised to discover that one of DC’s most successful composers has been hiding in plain sight for years. As it turns out, Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican and former chairman of the aforementioned Committee, writes gospel hymns and country tunes. Not only that, he has some hit records to prove it.

According to Dana Milbank’s article in today’s Post, Hatch claimed at the hearing–which was called “Exploring the Scope of Public Performance Rights”–that, “I have one gold and one platinum record, but I’ve been told I would have more if it wasn’t for piracy.”

His discography doesn’t cry out, STEAL ME, but the guy does have a song on the Ocean’s Twelve soundtrack, so perhaps his comment is less self-aggrandizing than it sounds. Who’s up for an illegal download of “Morning Breaks on Arlington”?

New Model Army won’t be touring the United States this fall. (Press release follows jump.)
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It’s fair to be skeptical about anything that the British current-affairs journal Prospect has to say about pop music; a 2004 cri-de-coeur by ex-Gay Dad drummer Nick Crowe about  hip-hop was so ass-backwards and old-man it’s become an ILX in-joke. But while there’s nothing really new in this article from the Prospect about today’s music-industry economics, it’s still a fine sythesis of the issues at play, detailing just how the sands are shifting. [Arts & Letters Daily]

• “Anyone who orders the [Fugazi] book from now until the end of July will recieve it postage paid and shipped within 2 weeks (that’s at your door as much as a month before the official release),” says Glen E. Friedman. [BoingBoing]
• Fake Steve Jobs on Prince packaging his new CD in a British newspaper, and retailer’s complaints about it: “They’re threatening not to stock any Prince albums as a form of pay-back. Here’s the thing. Would you really want to do business with people whose chief form of negotiation is blackmail? Point B: These idiots are all dying anyway, so who cares what threats they make?” [FSJ]
• Douglas Wolk: “I’ve made a mix of 15 songs I associate somehow with specific chapters of Reading Comics.” [Largehearted Boy]

• The Supreme Court has passed on considering the case of Aisha vs. Madonna. Aisha’s Web site lists at least 35 things that Madonna has stolen from other artists. (Apparently she stole Che Guevara imagery from Kylie Minogue, but I’d argue they both stole it from dude in the Che T-shirt who lived down the hall of my first apartment building.) SCOTUSblog wonders: “Why did the Chief Justice and Justice Alito recuse themselves?”
• Dischord’s blog reports that Joe Lally and Zu have canceled a Japanese tour “due to complications with their promoter and the subsequent news of the death of Joe’s father.” Lally is scheduled to play Fort Reno on Monday with the Evens.
• More Dischord: Idolator links to an MP3 of “Nickelback,” the opening track from Bluetip’s 1996 album, Dischord No. 101.