Earlier this week, No Doubt announced the details of their summer tour with Paramore. Now, Gwen Stefani and the boys announced they’ll be performing on an upcoming episode of the CW’s Gossip Girl, otherwise known as The Greatest Show Of Our Time. We’ve been deprived of new episodes the past few weeks, but that will come to an end soon, and we also have this treat of an episode to look forward to. From their website:

Mark your calendars to see No Doubt perform “Stand And Deliver” (originally by Adam And The Ants) for the first time ever on Gossip Girl, May 11, 8/7c on The CW.

Does this mean we get to see Queen Blair try to skank in a bejeweled headband? Oh please, let it be.

Hopefully the ska-pop band will gain some new fans out of the kids who tune into their televised performance. Judging by how well the Pierces were received post-GG appearance, we’re willing to bet that more than a few copies of Tragic Kingdom will be dug out of storage and passed down. As it should be.

What will we find this week? Welcome back to another edition of Flashion Backward, a UI feature that’s the spiritual cousin of our recently debuted Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. Onto this week’s buried treat…

Pop and world music maven Donna De Lory can seamlessly blend an intense and dizzying array of influences, effortlessly setting Indian mantras against modern beats without sounding like a generic purveyor of om-flecked massage parlor music.

Her approach to fashion, on the other hand, is totally and admirably hands-off. Comfort, color and a vaguely Eastern vibe (in that order) appear to rule the day. Donna’s feelings about her hair are evidently more complicated, but it could be summarized a la Saturday Night Fever, thusly: “Don’t touch the hair! I spend a lot of time on my hair!”

(KEEP READING FLASHION BACKWARD)

Welcome back to Almost Famous, where we select one lucky Uncensored Interviewee who we deem to be on the verge of spreading beyond our illustrious tastemaking boundaries and taking over the cultural zeitgeist at large in the coming months.

Last time, we hopped over to Ireland to visit Fight Like Apes. With this edition, we use up the rest of our frequent flyer miles to check out Norway’s Ida Maria, who recently added a big building block to her tower of song with the 2008 European release Fortress Round My Heart. The single “Oh My God” was a runaway success, topping year-end lists from critics at Time and NME, further landing her performances at the Glastonbury Festival and on the late night telly show Later…with Jools Holland. Hear it for yourself this April when the U.S. version is released.

Ida Maria’s edgy, dangerously honest songs have won her a devoted audience, particularly those looking to cut through the crap and get straight to the heart of the matter. Yet somehow she still manages to retain a punk rock spirit, all the while creating memorably melodic songs. We believe this live wire will connect with many more like-minded music fans in the near future, electrifying these new followers as well. And with all the distractions that are out there, we think she’s quite deserving of the Almost Famous badge of honor.

We’ve long chronicled the television career of Anderson Cooper–since his early hosting days of The Mole, in fact!–and our adoration of the Silver Fox has grown through his subtle guilty pleasure admissions. By now everyone knows he’s kind of maybe-obsessed with NeNe from The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but last night, after President Obama’s first State of the Union Address, CNN contributor Roland Martin and Cooper used the 50 Cent/Kanye beef to illustrate the political process:

Martin began by comparing Kanye West to Barack Obama: “Look, what he’s doing, he’s laying down: Here are the markers in terms of my presidency…I guess, if I had to use an example, sort of when like Kanye West had his new album, and he said, I want to make it as bad as Stevie Wonder’s…He said, if it doesn’t get to that, it’s still a great album.” Cooper picks the analogy right up, and decides to go ahead and lump Curtis James Jackson III in with the entire GOP:

COOPER: In your Kanye West analogy, I guess the Republicans, then, are 50 Cent?

MARTIN: Yes, because…

COOPER: Because they lost…

And we wonder why anyone bothers to watch Keith Olbermann! Has someone sent a flagged Blackberry email to our President about Martin and Coop’s conversation yet? Because we’d simply love to hear what he thinks about this. And so would Gemma Hayes.

Get ready to sachet, shante (“Shante shante shante!”) with Flashion Forward, a new UI feature in which we endeavor to explore the ever-expanding universe of sonic style. Each week, we’ll pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines. Let’s work it, shall we?

This week we’re drooling over, I mean, er, taking a scholarly look at Elvis Perkins in Dearland, the Wurlitzer-happy fetching foursome. They’re a band that embodies all that is right, cute and admirable about the indie rock scene with a hefty enough dollop of sex appeal to avoid being just another gaggle of twee, long-haired men-children overly in touch with their emotions.

Elvis himself springs directly from the loins of Anthony “I wouldn’t harm a fly” Psycho Perkins and generally hails from a long line of lovably zany wackadoos (including the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the Theosophist and psychic medium Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor), so chichi snazziness naturally runs in his veins.

Also, his name is Elvis.

His band of scruffily polished cohorts are equally endearing, with their dapper oh-I-totally-just-rolled-outta-bed-into-this-impossibly-boho-chic-outfit-that-signals comfort-and-a-hearty-rejection-of-the-man,. There are also knit-caps, tinted sunglasses and an ecru scarf tied in a complicated knot, all in one finger-lickin’ package.

(MORE ELVIS PERKINS IN DEARLAND)

February is the perfect opportunity to get busy on Valentine’s Day or, if you’re flying solo, tense up with cynical anxiety. The month is also Hollywood’s excuse to get all gussied up for the Oscars, while the rest of the unwashed masses watches as our economy sinks to lower levels than a PMSing Lauren Conrad on The Hills.

But who cares about love and money when there’s Fashion Week to distract us! With its solid-gold skin-tight suits (thank you Christian Siriano!), Holly Golightly gloves (ooh la la, Oscar…) and gossamer gowns paired with enthusiastically bedazzled tights (courtesy of the inimitable Zac Posen), there’s a flavor for all. So in that gloriously c’est la vie spirit (and in the spirit of the recently debuted feature Flashion Backward), here are our five best-dressed UI interviewees from the month of February:

5. Hockey

The solid, gritty, new wave quartet from Portland is more sensitive than their studious lack of grooming and so-appallingly-bad-it’s-good fashion sense may lead one to believe. (Anyone who can pull off a brightly hued tie-die t-shirt, white sunglasses, black bank-robbers hat and a giant ‘stache without looking like a drunken frat bro on Schlitz is an American treasure who must be preserved, respected and carefully studied by experts).

And when Hockey isn’t using its powers of fashion to fuck with our preconceived notions, they’re churning out danceable, aggressively funky bass and drum-happy tunes with lyrics that don’t suck, playing sold-out shows around the world and being good little soldiers in the bike-riding vegan army. Also, they’re scaring Asian ladies and sweating and crying because the aforementioned Asian lady is attempting to lube them up with moisturizing cream. Wait. What?

(KEEP READING BEST DRESSED FEST)

Fashion Week in New York bumped to a halt February 20, and as we took a look back at the eight full days of shows and presentations, regression was one of the biggest stories to emerge. Some designers attempted to work the doom-and-gloom of the recession into their clothes, whether it was utterly defying the Hemline Index or taking funereal-wear to new heights.

Others, like Marc Jacobs, chose to embrace a decade that made him feel happy about clothing and shopping again. He created a collection that referenced not only the 1980s, but evoked the joyful feelings of a New York City that hasn’t existed since then. Not so different from Uncensored Interview’s Yelle, who explained not so long ago that, with her brand of 80s electro-French-pop: “We wanted to make happy music; make happy songs.”

In contrast to fashion vet Jacobs, Erin Wasson (muse/stylist to Alexander Wang and now a designer in her own right) eschewed the runway for a party-like presentation of her line, Erin Wasson x RVCA, with models who flirted with photographers and danced with each other on a platform. Her clothes mix a California surfer aesthetic with an underlying injection of grunge. So Wasson, too, creates looks with a decade-gone-by in mind; and that sense of nostalgia isn’t lost on papercranes, who “really want it to be like it was in the 90s.” Everything’s better in retrospect, especially when your bank account is empty today.