Cold Weather Culture

December

Mary J. Blige

The Breakthrough, available December 20

Geffen

It's not that we don't want Mary J. Blige to be happy. Sure, her raw testimonials of suffering and pain have made her the most riveting, influential singer of the past 20 years. It's just that when the alternately shy and combative Blige, who once reportedly bitch-slapped then-supermodel Veronica Webb during an interview for Interview, proclaimed "No More Drama" a couple of years back, we knew she was tempting fate. So when Mary J. was honored as a living legend at the Vibe Awards last month and used her acceptance speech to blast the editors of Vibe for making her look bad on the cover of their December issue, the planets moved back into alignment. Blige's feisty outburst (it is an awful picture of her, by the way) whetted our appetite for The Breakthrough, featuring the Game and Bono, and produced by Flyte Tyme, Rodney Jerkins, the Peas' Will I Am, and Raphael Saadiq, among others. Blige describes the disc's theme as "going to a place where we fear the most...where people are gonna talk about us." Sounds dramatic. —Britt Robson

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody, available December 29

Gotham

It's a classic story. A nice Midwestern girl moves to Minneapolis to be with her boyfriend. She starts stripping, you know, just for fun. And before you know it, she's taken up peep show and sex phone work, become a well-known figure among, uh, self-gratifiers, thanks to her lascivious blog, and given herself a pseudonym associated with the lord of the underworld. Now the former City Pages associate arts editor and current television columnist will expound on the slick and sticky bits of her life in what we can only assume will be a glorious case of Too Much Information. —Lindsey Thomas

January

Art Shanty Project

Last year on Medicine Lake in Plymouth, ladders of varying lengths ascended from the frozen landscape, a translucent knife made of ice cut through the crystal-filled air, plywood ice houses were meeting spots for hatha yoga escapes, and frozen water balloons formed glowing structures filled with creatures seemingly spawned on Jupiter before mitochondria ruled Earth. This was the Art Shanty Project, a brainchild of local photographer Peter Haakon Thompson, whose fascination with the city retreat inspired him to turn the austere and arctic terrain into a public art space. This year's event promises new exhibits, sculptures, performances, and more, all with the concept of ice houses in mind. And, yes, those little shanties are equipped with heat, giving even the most winter-loathing among us no excuse not to be a part of redefining our sacred winter space. —Molly Priesmeyer

The Strokes

First Impressions of Earth, available January 3

RCA

After two albums of nearly identical (and nearly perfect) robo-garage pop-rock—2001's Is This It and 2003's Uh, Guys, Is This Still It—the disheveled New York fashion plates everyone loves to hate are back with their crucial third album, the one where they're supposed to stretch out and prove they can do more than hustle like cab drivers with absurdly expensive haircuts. They don't disappoint: First Impressions of Earth, for which the band traded their longtime homey Gordon Raphael for Sugar Ray producer David Kahne, overflows with weird, funky stuff, such as "Juicebox," the CD's bizarre surf-punk single, which is but one hash pipe short of an Offspring song. Other tunes shimmer with hints of post-disco electronics, pretty girl-group harmonies, and surprisingly manly alt-rock guitar crunch. It's sure to cause an underground backlash. What fun! —Mikael Wood

Nellie McKay

Pretty Little Head, available January 3

Columbia

Few of the doting notices she's accumulated do this cabaret-spawned brat justice. On paper she can't help but seem the one-note parody suggested by the cover of her debut, Get Away from Me: Just as McKay's smiley, open-armed photo wittily clashes with her anti-Norah title, her tunes play topical sarcasm off ingenue cutesiness to charm the old folks. Except the grayheads preferred Norah (go figure), so she's grown weirder and more topical—and rather than the disaster you'd expect (Doris Day sings the Tom Lehrer songbook), she produces a mutant curiosity deserving close analysis (Fiona Apple renews her trial subscription to The Nation). She burrows into the brains of a legion of do-gooders, from antivivisection protesters to tenants' rights activists, doomed to battle against their own best intentions. And don't be put off by her duet partners—a smart kid like McKay's sure to soon find better role models than Cyndi Lauper or k.d. Lang. Debbie Harry, anyone? —Keith Harris

Scrubs, fifth season premiering January 3