Yes, even that Bruno Mars LP that you bought and don't tell anyone about.

If you have been shopping for vinyl on the Amazon site, you may have noticed the AutoRip logo. No, it is not Amazon making light of late-night purchases splitting your wallet at the seams. It's actually something very cool.

The digital retailer is touting the further expansion of its music-delivery service, which already makes digital copies of the albums you buy available to you at no cost after purchase. The service has now expanded farther out into vinyl albums.

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UPDATE (Thursday, 11:22 a.m.): Ginn put out a press release this week saying that neither Robo nor Chuck Dukowski are part of his Black Flag. Dukowski remains in Keith Morris' FLAG, but Robo is not involved in either band. Greg Ginn's new Black Flag consists of himself, Ron Reyes, drummer Greg Moore of Ginn's former band GONE, and Dale Nixon -- a pseudonym for Ginn himself -- in the bass spot.

This past week the Internet was abuzz with the news that two different versions of the 1980s hardcore-punk pioneers Black Flag are reuniting. Since Black Flag is so iconic to almost any punk fan, this is big news indeed. But there's a catch: Neither of the two versions is the complete, real version of Black Flag.

Of course, as anybody who knows Black Flag also knows, the band had a wildly inconsistent, ever-changing, revolving-door lineup through the years. Aside from guitarist and founder Greg Ginn, few members have remained from one record to the next. So with that in mind, who can say what the "real" Black Flag is?

Which, I suppose, is why we now have two different bands. The question is, if we had the opportunity to see only one Black Flag, which one would we, as fans, want to see? Which is the blackest, flaggest one of them all? We'll break it down for you.

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Photo by Daniel Kramer

Beyoncé at Toyota Center, 2009

Remember when it actually seemed halfway likely that the Texans could make the Super Bowl this season? Ha! Good times. After the team's collapse down the stretch, highlighted by a couple of humiliating losses to Tom Brady and pals, the only way Matt Schaub will be in the Superdome on this coming Sunday is if he buys a ticket. Might want to hurry, too, because the game may sell out.

Luckily, Houston will still be represented on the field at the Big Game by a far worthier ambassador. The one and only Beyoncé will be the star of the annual halftime spectacular, and unlike some other locals we could name, she's a proven clutch performer.

As the date draws nearer, our imaginations are starting to race. We already know Destiny's Child will make an appearance, and you can probably pencil in Jay-Z at some point too. Could there be other special guests in the offing? Justin Timberlake? Gwyneth Paltrow? Michelle Obama?

And oh my God, what will Bey be wearing?

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David Bowie's career has been one filled with unparalleled changes, and no, that's not a pun on his hit song. The man has literally undergone so many career diversions and redirections that it's almost impossible to keep up with where he has been at any one point in time.

Rewind:

2013 RULES: David Bowie Announces New Album and Single

2013 marks the beginning of a new era for Bowie, a decade on from the end of the previous one. Not only is the release of his new record The Next Day and his reemergence into the public spotlight a momentous occasion, but that ten-year gap is a strange and unprecedented occurrence in Bowie's career.

Still, that got me thinking. Where was Bowie ten years ago? Where was he ten years before that? It seems that he stands in a wildly different position every ten years, and since decade-long increments seem to be the ones Bowie likes to employ lately, I thought it would be interesting to look at these snapshots in time from 1963 to 1973, from 1973 to 1983, and so on.

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Novelize this, please.

I suppose it was inevitable that Rush wrote a book. To move from long-form albums with intricate plot-lines and involved character development to a multi-hundred-page novel with the same isn't really much of a leap, after all, and prog has always been at least a bit about bombast. What could be more bombastic than expecting a fan to sit through 66 minutes of music and 300 pages of the same story?

While it seems silly at first blush, it got me thinking about the nature of song. If you think about it, songs were stories first. The literary tradition arguably began with song, its melodies and rhyming verses acting as an aid to the re-telling of myth and history. Memorizing 600 words of prose? Painful. Memorizing a three minute song? I'm guessing you know how that goes.

With that in mind, it's clear that Rush just reversed the process, or turned it into a circle, with a story begetting a song begetting a story. If they can do it, certainly others can too. If you mix and match song writers and authors, I'm pretty sure you can come up with some pretty compelling work. Take these, for example:

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Making music is easy. At its most basic, music is no more than a person causing sound waves to vibrate in a rhythmic fashion. Of course, if you want to make something more complex than "hand hits thing at precise intervals," then it can be argued that making music is hard. It's one thing to think of a melody, but another thing entirely to produce it.

This may not always be the case. As technology gets more powerful, so will our ability to make music. And if you ask Vince DeFranco, we may only be a few years away from being able to make music with our minds.

DeFranco is a musician, inventor and all-around big thinker. Best known in music circles for the creation of the Roland D-Beam and the Mandala Drum, DeFranco thinks these devices may be just the tip of the technological iceberg.

Curious about what technology might mean for music and how we create it, Rocks Off decided to pick DeFranco's brain to get his thoughts on some of these emerging technologies and how people might respond to them.

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Photo by Dan Kramer

Elton John (left) and friend Billy Joel at Toyota Center on 2009''s "Face to Face" tour

Great songwriters create great characters. Elton John has a plethora in his songs some real like Princess Diana, and others purely fictional. The stories he tells in his songs are what makes him one of the greatest artists ever to come from Great Britain.

His characterizations have even been celebrated on British television. In one episode of the hit BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, the villagers of Dibley put on an "Elton John Fashion Show" -- with a rocket man, no less -- in anticipation of his rumored arrival.

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The proper storage of vinyl records.

Yesterday, September 10, marked the 114th birthday of a man who helped introduce more people to music in the 20th Century than perhaps any other person despite never picking up an instrument or plugging in a microphone. Unless you're a serious chemistry geek, you've probably never heard of Waldo Lonsbury Semon, but you've almost certainly enjoyed the fruits of his labor. Semon is the inventor of the ultra-versatile chemical compound polyvinyl chloride, more commonly referred to among audiophiles as vinyl.

At least, he's the inventor of the elastic, durable version of vinyl that's now used to make just about everything. When Semon first started experimenting with synthetic rubbers back in 1926, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) existed already, but it was considered useless. Fresh off earning his PhD at the University of Washington, Semon went to work for BFGoodrich developing a new kind adhesive rubber that could be used to coat metal.

Semon's early efforts using reclaimed crude rubber were a failure, so he moved on to synthetic compounds including PVC, which was basically considered interesting trash back then. Because this early vinyl was stiff and brittle at room temperature, Semon heated it in a solvent with a high boiling point. The resulting jelly was elastic after cooling, and the chemist quickly realized he was onto something.

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Photos by Marco Torres

Saturday: Identity Festival at The Woodlands

ID Fest: The Crowd (daytime)

ID Fest: The Crowd (nighttime)

Here's a peek behind the curtain: when taking notes on a show I average about one page per hour. That's fine for a show like LMFAO, where the bulk of the review is on one act and I have a bit of leeway with what to discuss.

Saturday's Identity Festival was long and when you spend eight hours taking notes you have to kill a few of your observational babies for the sake of readability.

EDM shows continue to fascinate me, which explains why I tend to take way more notes than I need to when I go to them. Here are ten deleted scenes from my show review to help give things a bit more color.

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Gaze upon three of my 287 followers.

Up until recently I've remained fairly indifferent to the number of followers I have on Twitter. After all, if my ego was dependent on the number of people following me I would just drop the $5 necessary to buy a few thousand and call it a night.

Ever since I started writing here at Rocks Off I've noticed random musical groups from across the country following me. These are people I've never talked to or talked about, from places I've never been. They never reply, retweet or favorite anything I say. It feels oddly impersonal.

Since they aren't interested in communicating with me, I've never felt the need to follow them back, which I can only assume makes me a bad Twitter friend.

So today I've decided to do them one better. Someone somewhere had to take the time out of their day to hit the follow button on my Twitter account. If they were nice enough to do that I figure the least I can do is give them 30 seconds of my time to give them a brutally honest review of their music.

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