If Andre 3000 came out right now, they’d call him hipster rap.

-Bronx, NY rapper Mickey Factz in an Allhiphop.com interview.

Kid Cudi adorns himself in the quintessential hipster uniform of skinny jeans, silver BapSta sneakers and a colorful hoodie. Some call him a bipster (black hipster), a lazy blogger’s term for hipster-friendly rap acts such as the Cool Kids, Kidz in the Hall, Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco; in other words, anyone who raps in colorful, form-fitting clothing.

Whatever you do, don’t refer to Kid Cudi as that.

“Black hipster? I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I don’t know nothing about a hipster,” he said after getting a bevy of love from the audience during his half-hour set at Cinespace Tuesday night. He was especially popular when he poured shots from a Grey Goose bottle into the mouths of female fans near the stage during his performance of “Super Boo.”

Scott Mescudi, 23, from the Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland and now a 4-year resident of Brooklyn, was brought to the attention of Plain Pat, Kanye West’s former Def Jam A&R guy, who calls Cudi’s sound “progressive” and special for not “following what’s hot.”

In just a few years Cudi has gone from Abercrombie & Fitch stockroom worker to having a single in rotation on Power 106, the cosmic ode to stoner loneliness, “Day N Nite.” Fools Gold Records, home to Kid Sister, will release his debut Man on the Moon.

His first mixtape, “A Kid Named Cudi,” hits the Web next month. “I’m going to rap about having fun and I’m going to rap about me as a person. I’m the epitome of the new breed of realness,” said Cudi.

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Summer camp is officially over. Rock ‘n’ roll summer camp courtesy of Camp Freddy, that is. The supergroup of Los Angeles-area rockers, consisting of Dave Navarro, Billy Morrison, Matt Sorum, Donovan Leitch and Chris Chaney, ended its monthlong residency at the Roxy last night with a bang — landing Billy Idol as closing guest.

“This one’s for you, Jonesy,” a smiling Idol said before he launched into “Dancing With Myself” from the stage to a sold-out, rapturous audience obviously clued in to the evening’s special guest (fashion selections among the aging Idol groupies were verging on tragic). But despite the title of the tune, Idol was not dancing with himself Thursday evening — he brought with him a few special guests.

Idol was joined onstage with longtime guitarist Steve Stevens and the Doors’ Robby Krieger, both of whom helped give the three-song final act a precious feel in spirit of the May celebration of all things rock at the Roxy.

The sneering ’80s icon began the last set of the evening with an extended, metal-tinged version of “L.A. Woman,” which took on obvious significance given the location of the gig on the Strip and Krieger’s presence onstage. The former Generation X singer seemed to be having the time of his life onstage, even doling out a few trademark Idol sneers with a wink as if it were 1984.

For Idol fans, the true highlight of the night was a song that broke big that very year, “Rebel Yell.” Without the slick synths the track is known for, “Rebel Yell” with Camp Freddy was a monster. Stevens’ guitar work was searing and Idol was in full-on icon mode, pumping his fist into the air, seemingly genuinely into the moment, despite presumably loathing the tune after how popular it was in the 1980s (it was one of his signature hits).

Other highlights of the final installment of Camp Freddy’s Roxy residency included Juliette Lewis’ reverential takes on X’s “Los Angeles,” Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds.” Earlier in the evening, 311’s Nick Hexum actually pulled off a convincing but perhaps too-karaoke-perfect version of the Clash’s “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” but the crowd response was tepid at best. These were rock fans with a capital R, hell-bent on seeing guests like Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell tear it up with Freddy onstage, and no one here was copping to even knowing who Hexum was.

Regardless, most everyone was happy just to be inside the venerable Sunset Boulevard venue late Thursday night, if only to say goodbye (for now, anyway) to the best house band on the Strip for a while.

Here is the complete set list from the final installment of Camp Freddy at the Roxy:

Cheap Trick, “Hello There”
Blur, “Song # 2″
Black Sabbath, “Paranoid” w/Wayne Static on vocals (Static X)
The Clash, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” w/Nick Hexum on vocals
X, “Los Angeles” w/Juliette Lewis + Donovan duet
Van Halen, “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” w/John 5 (Rob Zombie), Lewis
AC/DC, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” w/Lewis, Chris Vrenna (Marilyn Manson, NIN) Oasis, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” w/Billy Duffy (The Cult)
The Cult, “Lil’ Devil” w/McGrath on vocals, Duffy
KISS, “Rock and Roll All Nite” w/McGrath, Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains)
Alice in Chains, “Man in the Box” w/Leah Duors (McQueen), Cantrell
Sex Pistols, “EMI” w/McGrath on vocals, Naveen Andrews on guitar (actor, “Lost”)
Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love” w/Pat Monahan on vocals (Train), Robby Krieger
The Doors, “L.A. Woman” w/Billy Idol, Steve Stevens & Brian Tichy (Billy Idol), Kreiger
Billy Idol, “Dancing With Myself” w/Idol, Stevens, Tichy
Billy Idol, “Rebel Yell” w/Idol, Stevens, Tichy
The Stooges, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” w/McGrath, Cantrell, Stevens and others.

– Post and photo by Charlie Amter

It’s only fitting that a garage band from Chicago – one of the nation’s foremost pizza towns – should possess such an all-consuming fondness for the cheesy open-faced baked pie that it releases a one-sided 7-inch devoted entirely to singing the praises of its gooey joys.

Johnny and the Limelites’ debut record is a jaw-dropping, lo-fi epic that refuses to nest comfortably in any pigeonholes. If Shaggy and Scooby were allowed to record and release a song, this is probably what it would sound like. Unabashedly silly and sloppy, the record nonetheless has ambitions that supersede the band’s abilities. Clocking in at 3 minutes, 50 seconds, it builds to a crescendo, then breaks down and ambles into a long, spectacular finish. To be sure, it’s a joke song of sorts, but it also sounds pretty good. With music like this, it’s the beat and the energy that count, not the lyrics. “Extra cheese/ If you please / On my knees/ Anchovies” is a sample highlight, but what makes this record really stand out is singer Johnny Agatucci’s phlegm-laden vocals and the near-soulful conclusion of the song in a cacophony of tamborines, rough harmonizing and Agatucci’s final list of his favorite influences, “Pizza Hut, Domino’s, yeah, I love ’em all.”

It’s the “Gone With the Wind” of budget garage-rock releases – and an interesting point in the ever-evolving world of this scrappy genre. In the mid-’90s, lo-fi was the garage punk cause du jour. After influential bands like the Brentwoods and Supercharger popularized the lo-fi aesthetic, the scene eventually shifted toward a smoother, better-produced sound. It’s nice to see a new crop of younger garage acts – such as Tucson’s Okmoniks, Oakland’s Nobunny and Johnny and the Limelites – returning to this soil with a fresh approach and a new energy.

–Jason Gelt

Photo: Johnny and the Limelites

Read more or the Magnanimous Collector here.

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler checked himself into an unidentified rehab facility earlier this month to recover from recent foot surgery. A spokeswoman for Tyler said the surgery was done “to correct longtime foot injuries resulting from his … athletic stage performances.”

Tyler checked himself, but his spokeswoman said, “I have no further information available” on the nature of the rehabilitation. No further word on whether it is for physical treatment for the foot itself or substance-related due to medications used in the course of the surgery and post-surgery.

“The doctors told me the pain in my feet could be corrected but it would require a few surgeries over time,” Tyler said in a statement issued today. “The ‘foot repair’ pain was intense, greater than I’d anticipated. The months of rehabilitative care and the painful strain of physical therapy were traumatic.

“I really needed a safe environment to recuperate where I could shut off my phone and get back on my feet,” Tyler’s statement continued. “Make no mistake, Aerosmith has no plans to stop rocking. There’s a new album to record, then another tour.”

– Randy Lewis

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Everything is coming up Miles Davis these days: two film projects, remixes, box sets, books galore and “Miles From India,” a new release of interpretations of some Miles classics by Indian musicians aided by Miles sidemen. This Sunday, a concert — one of only three planned nationwide — seeks to bring that recording project to the stage here in L.A. It’s the kick-off show for the Grand Performances series at the California Plaza downtown.

I talked with the man who brought “Miles From India” to life, the irrepressible Bob Belden, but first an anecdote on how I personally became involved in the music of the black magus.

Something momentous happened to me at age 15 in my prep school dorm in 1969. I was in the habit of listening to the “underground” New York area radio stations and there was one African American DJ whose very blackness was so deep, so African, so revolutionary that I used to get a kick out of his monologues, happy that he wasn’t being kicked off the airwaves.

One day he played a very lengthy cut (not that unusual in the psychedelic late ’60s). It was jazz, but not really. It wasn’t the free jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor. It wasn’t the pervasive hard bop of Lee Morgan or Cannonball Adderley and it certainly wasn’t anyone doing standards. It was more like ambient (a word not used then) funk, a bold trumpet with dueling keyboards, a nod toward Sly and James Brown in the rhythm section and a guitarist noodling on minimal, spooky modal lines.

I called the station and asked what the track was and who the guitarist might be (one of my various identities in school was Guitar Hero; the dorm levitated from the sound of my Gibson). It was Davis‘ “It’s About That Time” from his album “In a Silent Way,” and the guitarist was John McLaughlin.

This was not the Davis I remembered from my early childhood — the post-bop cool; the natty, slim English suits; the polished obsidian complexion. This was a funky thing, more in touch with Harlem than Carnegie Hall.

Several months later, I found myself in Greenwich Village’s Village Gate in either late December 1969 or early January 1970. We were there to see Miles and what is now known as “The Lost Quintet” — his gigging band during the recording of “Bitches Brew” but never recorded “as is”: Wayne Shorter on tenor and soprano sax, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on electric piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums. I seem to remember Airto Moreira sitting in on percussion.

It was loud, enveloping, confusing, exhilarating. Sheer, beautiful insanity. I left the Village Gate around midnight feeling purple.

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The news that Justin Timberlake has offered to write a song for the wedding of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi got me thinking about the music we choose to mark crucial moments in our lives. Everybody loves to talk wedding songs, graduation songs, even summer songs. Funeral songs, not so much. (My morbid/controlling streak — what’s more controlling than dictating what happens after you’ve kicked? — has led me to contemplate the subject. The only choice I’m sure about so far is “Days” by the Kinks.)

Pop is a life force, and it’s natural that its fans would prefer talk of love to meditations on death. But sometimes a song comes along that perfectly captures the vagaries of grief. Greg Laswell’s “High and Low” is one such song.

First released on “Through Toledo,” the San Diego-based singer-songwriter’s seductively morose meditation on being violently dumped, “High and Low” isn’t necessarily about someone who’s literally shuffled off this mortal coil. Yet this gentle torch song builds and diminishes the same way sorrow does after a death.

Laswell’s deliberate piano lines push along, like a depressive’s step through another gray day. His almost lackadaisical vocals relay a lyric half made of casual observation, half syruped in melancholy. The song goes on and on, soothing at first, then slightly irritating, like a haunting memory. Strings kick in to convey a new mood, but the revelations stay small. Healing, this song says, comes slowly, and just when you think you’re better that old ache returns.

Stream: High and Low

An expanded version of “High and Low” appears on Laswell’s EP “How the Day Sounds,” released by Vanguard Records as an amuse-bouche leading up to his next full-length, “Three Flights From Alto Nido,” out July 8. He’s also part of this summer’s annual Hotel Cafe tour, along with Sara Bareilles, Cary Brothers and Ingrid Michaelson.

Thanks to Alan and Filter magazine for the tip on Greg.

– Ann Powers

Photo by Joseph Llanes

Bands naming themselves after the songs of their musical predecessors is a time-honored tradition, from Eric’s Trip (a Sonic Youth reference) to Radiohead (Talking Heads). But L.A. duo Uh Huh Her has gone one better, naming themselves after both an obscure PJ Harvey song and her 2004 album. “I don’t think we thought it through,” admits singer Leisha Hailey. “We love PJ Harvey but we never thought we’d have a tribute band.”

They don’t: Uh Huh Her’s sleek, synth-infused sound is closer to “Adore”-era Smashing Pumpkins or Metric than it is to the moody English alt-rocker. The band’s debut album, “Common Reaction” (out Aug. 19), is an electro-pop feast characterized by layers of overlapping vocals. “We like the way our voices blend together,” says Hailey. She’s no stranger to harmonizing: Before taking a music hiatus to play Alice Pieszecki in Showtime’s “The L Word,” she strummed and sang in Lilith Fair pair the Murmurs, who had a 1994 hit with “You Suck.” “The sound is really different,” she says of the quirky Murmurs. “I was much younger [then].”

Camila Grey, former Mellowdrone bassist and the band’s resident multi-instrumentalist, is happy for the chance to stretch out. “I was always a hired gun, so I was never allowed to be as creative as I wanted to be,” she says.

Now, a few European dates under their belts and a national tour underway, the band is looking forward to making a mark on their home turf. “We’ve played one show [in L.A.], at the Knitting Factory,” says Grey. “I’d love to be a local band.”

||| Live: Uh Huh Her rocks the Roxy on Saturday.

||| Download: “Not a Love Song”

||| Also: Brother-sister act the Fiery Furnaces heat up Spaceland with a two-night stand on Friday and Saturday, while ex-Irving members Afternoons kick off the month’s Monday residency… The two-man band Rumspringa starts its Echo residency on Monday… And if that’s not enough partnership for you, lovable folk-parodists-turned-HBO-stars Flight of the Conchords play for the ladies of the world at the Orpheum Theatre on Friday and Sunday.

– David Greenwald

Photo by Lisa Eisner

[Buzz Bands blogger Kevin Bronson has the week off.]

Veronica, Alison, get thee to the El Rey tonight: Rumor has it that your favorite bespectacled Catholic (lapsed?) will be playing a secret show after his turn tonight at the Hollywood Bowl. We confess we know no more than that but a phone call to the El Rey revealed someone rehearsing in the background, though there is nary a name on the official schedule for tonight.

–Margaret Wappler

Photo by Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times

The Police hit a sweet spot in about the middle of their Tuesday night show at the Hollywood Bowl when they fell into a fierce locomotive reggae jam on the song “Driven to Tears.” The island rhythms came way out front and you could feel the change; that’s better than all that “Roxanne” and “Every Breath You Take” stuff, n’est-ce pas? Andy Summers was losing himself in huge, prog-jazz guitar texturing, Stewart Copeland was beating his kit to pieces in a grimacing tirade of Caribbean drum nerd triumph, and then there was Sting, loving his minimal role as the provider of a bouncing, rising reggae bass line. That “Zenyatta Mondatta”-era meditation was followed by “Hole in My Life” — jam continuing — and into Summers fingering a calypso or even Afro-pop opener for “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Once the meat of that radio hit kicked in, the spell was broken, but it was there for a sustained moment with this gorgeous, unbeatable band.

Now that Sting looks a little ridiculous singing such paeans to self-obsession as “King of Pain,” maybe that tuff island sound will give the Police a new lease on life. The threesome never wrote anthems, so the big, bold arrangement of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” doesn’t make it, no matter how they try, a chance to rekindle a youthful, generational statement. And when the band is too literal — like the photo-montage of big-eyed Third World children that accompanied “Invisible Sun” — it’s almost painful, even if Summers, Copeland and Sumners do care a lot about children, having, what, 17 children between them?

The charged reggae flow picked up again when they stretched out the boisterous lament, “So Lonely,” the pre-encore show closer. The form seemed to give it more impact. They didn’t have to reach for the point. Sting wasn’t even trying to swallow the meaning of the lyrics, which he seemed to be doing with other songs (some of those literary allusions just come back to bite you). He just let them be poignant. If this band plans to record new music in the future, someone please get them back to that studio in Montserrat where they once discovered a new world, just so we can all spend a little more time there.

– Dean Kuipers

Photo of Sting by Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times

A lot of big-name acts had a shot at the Will Call title this week.

First, or should I say primero, we had diminutive Latin heartthrob Marc Anthony, who’ll be leaving his famous missus at home and appearing solo at the Gibson Amphitheatre on July 26; get tickets for the show Friday.

Standing tall after their confrontation with Maxim Magazine, the Black Crowes will play the Greek Theatre on Sept. 17; tickets for the grits-and-gravy rockers go on sale Saturday.

Indie 103.1’s recent obsession, the vaguely Afro-pop indie rock band Vampire Weekend will play the Wiltern the same night (that’s Sept. 17 for all you ADHD sufferers out there); tickets go on sale Thursday.

And Brazilian dance-rockers CSS scored double points for announcing two sets of local shows with SSION — Sept. 22-23 at the Mayan and Sept. 24 at the Glass House — both on sale now.

But there’s no point in giving any of them the bold ink over uber-celebrity singer Madonna, who announced a Nov. 6 show at Dodger Stadium in support of her recently released and already million-selling album, “Hard Candy.” What more can I say? At this point, Madonna’s like the Terminator:

It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop…

The show goes on sale Sunday so you’ve got plenty of time to get your redial button unstuck.

–Liam Gowing

Photo of Madonna by Matt Sayles / Associated Press