D.C.-area crime novelist George Pelecanos has submitted a playlist of some of his favorite songs to Paper Cuts, the New York Times’ books blog. Among the local selections: William DeVaughan’s  “Be Thankful for What You Got,”  Slant 6’s “Time Expired,” and Fugazi’s “Cashout.”

OK. Late last week, Slate published a piece on African-American rappers and musicians obsessed with Space. Author Jonah Weiner begins in the late ’20s and carries on to Sun Ra, P-Funk’s Mothership, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West. In other words, all the usual far-out notes were hit.

I’m wondering what are the great songs about space? Who would be considered the Neil Armstrong of the genre?

George Clinton gets my vote.

On June 17 eMusic will release Super Gold Greatest Hits, the first full-length album by Mingering Mike, the mysterious D.C. resident and self-declared soul superstar. (Jeffry Cudlin wrote a fine piece about Mingering Mike’s story and fascinating record covers last year.) Four of the album’s 11 tracks are now available on the Mingering Mike Web site. (Click on “MingerPlayer.”) The album was apparently recorded in the late ’60s—which means, on the evidence of “Darlene, Come on Back,” dude invented beatboxing.

Thanks to a tip from a smart reader, we checked into the Bo Diddley-lived-here thesis. It’s true. Diddley lived at 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE in the ’60s. [OK--the reader had all the facts completely correct]. He talks about living here in a Washington Post feature published in 2006:

Diddley lived here from 1959 to 1966, building a studio in the basement of his house at 2614 Rhode Island Ave. NE, where he recorded 1960’s classic Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger album.

“I just wanted to be in Washington, D.C., around the Howard Theater,” Diddley explains. “I did everything from D.C. At that time, I was driving all the time — I didn’t start flying until 1968 — and it was close to New York and the South.”

I checked with The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. The address has not been registered as a historic landmark. I will have more in a bit.

Update 10 a.m. June 4: The 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE property is not listed as a landmark or part of a historic district, according to Kim Williams, the national register coordinator with the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. She goes on to say no application has been filed on behalf of that property in the last seven years. She’s “almost 100 percent sure” there has never been a landmark application submitted.

“If there are preservation organizations or neighborhood groups that are interested in having it designated, we will consider it,” Williams says.

So Christian came up with this look for last night’s female-wrestler-centric episode of Project Runway:

And I’m like, “Wasn’t that in Snoop’s video?”

More bad news from Kenya: three of the members of the DC/Nairobi afro-pop band Extra Golden are among those affected by the country’s post-election unrest.

Here are a couple of Washington City Paper pieces on the band: mine and Christopher Porter’s.

And here’s January 11, 2008 radio piece from NPR’s All Things Considered that addresses the band’s current misfortune:

Extra Golden Members Stranded in Kenya
By Joel Rose

The group’s American members are soliciting donations to help their Kenyan bandmates. Here’s the spiel from Pitchfork:

“We are asking for donations of $5. Of course we will accept any amount you can muster, but we believe that with enough contributions of $5 we can make a huge difference in our friends’ lives.

“To make a donation, please go to www.paypal.com and choose ’send money’. When asked for the email address of the recipient, enter ’service(at)kanyokanyo.com’. Please feel free to forward this message. We thank you in advance for your compassion and we hope that your help will enable us to compose a song of thanks for our next album.”

Chris Richards recently mentioned that Bullets, his R&B/club/hip-hop crossover project with DJ Dave Nada, was looking for a singer again. Their first recruit, Sarah Thompson, simply decided the gig wasn’t for her, Richards tells Black Plastic Bag.

“Things didn’t work with our original lineup, and Dave and I are still making tracks together and are looking for a frontwoman who can sing, rap, dance, throw down,” he says. “We should have a new demo up on MySpace right after Christmas.”

Richards and Nada each continue to DJ regularly here and there.

If you made the cut during this summer’s “American Idol” tryouts, and you’re preparing your game plan for Season 7 in January, keep this in mind: If you try to do Alicia Keys‘ “No One” during the competition, there’s a good chance that you will suck royally, unless you have amazing control. I’m no musical theorist, but my gut tells me that this melody is a bitch to sing, even for Keys. The video:

Her performance at the 2007 MTV VMAs:

I’ll let others decide whether Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time” is Advanced. (”It’s a hit song by a comedian who actually sings better when he’s imitating other people, blar-dee-blar-blar, blabba blabba.”)

I will note, however, that the song’s video is fantastic, but not because of the clothing, the hair, the lighting, the portly white guy with his sleeves pushed up, our own retro-actively ascribed meta-narratives about Murphy’s career, or even the shot at about 2:49 where Rick James looks like he’s either cupping a scrotum or elevating an imaginary heart during a ritual sacrifice. Nor is the video awesome because of what we now know about the relationship between James and Murphy brothers.

No, the video is singular because everybody in it — except maybe for James himself and the hair-metal dude on guitar — is TOTALLY AFRAID to be in the room with Eddie Murphy. You can see it: Oh shit, Rick is so high he actualy LIKES these vocals. Murphy’s own trepidation is obvious, yet different: These dudes would be too scared to tell me if I had a booger on my face. He’s lonely.

Nowadays, the extras in hip-hop and R&B videos act like they’re totally supposed to be there, even if they just happened to stumble upon the shoot. (I suppose people in R. Kelly videos are fearful in one way or another, but it’s also possible that they are also motivated by a strangely elegant form of pity.)

Eleanor Holmes Norton has scheduled a town hall meeting Saturday on HIV and AIDS awareness among teenagers. “What we found in our other town halls is that the most important way to drive out this disease is to bring it out in open conversation,” she told the Examiner.

Here’s a sense of why it’s an uphill battle: On Epiphany, the latest album from T-Pain, there’s a phone-conversation skit (”I Got It”) between the singer/rapper and a presumably fictitious girlfriend. She says she has HIV; he initially seems confused, but he closes out the conversation by saying, “I mean, we just gotta do what we gotta do. You know what, I love you, and we just gon’ make it work.” (The song immediately afterward, “Suicide,” looks at the psychology more grimly.)

Now, T-Pain made it clear in an interview with the Associated Press that his intention was to raise awareness about the disease: “A lot of people don’t think I got songs like that. … I hit on a lot of different subjects.”

But what does he get in response? At least five entries in Yahoo Answers — and numerous posts on message boards — that ask whether he actually has HIV/AIDS or not. Sigh. The questions prove at least one thing, though: Even if people can’t figure out that album skits are dramatizations, they at least have a sense that HIV/AIDS = bad for you.

For now, T-Pain seems to have more immediate problems.