Fans of Social Distortion today got another taste of the L.A. punk warriors’ forthcoming ‘Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes’ this week with the premiere of the track ‘California (Hustle and Flow)’ on the L.A. Times’ Pop & Hiss blog.

Mike Watt will release his third punk opera in March — the 30-track, Minutemen-inspired ‘Hyphenated-Man’ — and then embark on a massive North American tour in which he and his band The Missingmen will play the album ’51 times in 52 days.’

R.E.M. has posted a ‘lyric video’ to the song ‘Oh My Heart,’ the third track off the forthcoming ‘Collapse Into Now’ to make its way onto the web in the last three weeks.

Tonight’s episode of Slicing Up Eyeballs on Strangeways Radio featured music by The Smiths, Recoil, The Lucy Show, John Foxx, The Specials, Vision, Joe Strummer and more. Hear the replay at 2 p.m. EST Friday.

Mick Karn — who played bass in the acclaimed art-rock act Japan from the mid-’70s through the early ’80s and teamed up with Peter Murphy for the singer’s post-Bauhaus project Dalis Car — died today following a six-month battle with cancer. He was 52.

It’s Bernard Sumner’s birthday today — he’s turning 55 — and to celebrate, we present this somewhat rare New Order concert film called ‘Pumped Full of Drugs’ that was released on VHS in the U.K. in 1986.

Check out Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction in the full, unaired pilot for a proposed MTV reality show called ‘Grounded’ that apparently was going to follow different celebrities each week as they moved back home with their parents.