If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

– Pauline O’Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson’s part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground — I’ve seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to “straight boy emo” to “Make It Real,” the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow “Ph Divas” Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she’ll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I’m not sure what to expect, but I’ll bet it enlightens me about what’s really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy ’80s variety show “Solid Gold” as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

–Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years — with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in “La Vie en Rose.” You might think I’m grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven’t already.

Homeward bound: We’re heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman’s death Sunday.

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Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from “Once” and Michael Franti.

Branch’s performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including “Long Goodbye,” her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty’s “You Wreck Me” for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

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A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee’s campaign to cease and desist from playing “More Than a Feeling.”

–Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she’s only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

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If you’re of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it’s no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, “chasing a mushroom on level three” compositions. What are chiptunes? They’re songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as “Around the World.” It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris’ Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

–Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has “Faith,” har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of “Eli Stone” at 10 tonight on ABC and you’ll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller’s heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I’m not an official member), “the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the ‘little guy.’ George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds.” And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George’s extensive oeuvre. Can’t wait for the “I Want Your Sex” episode. C-c-c-c-c’mon!

– Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the ’70s and ’80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn’t. A resurgent interest in Russell’s work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records’ 2004 “The World of Arthur Russell” is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don’t see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell’s “A Little Lost” is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-’07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell’s “Answers Me” on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell’s wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell” evokes Russell’s playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell’s lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

–August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson’s first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don’t take these endeavors seriously, but we think it’s perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we’re also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth — literally! Anyway, here’s the press release:

“Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group’s Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios.”

Despite our teases, we’re keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch “Ghost World” on an annual basis. Here’s hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain’t, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records…

– Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]