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Two of the fan-friendliest festivals in Chicago’s packed summer season are combing forces this year, with the annual Hideout Block Party and the newer Onion/A.V. Club Festival taking place on Friday and Saturday, September 14-15, on the wonderfully scene stretch outside the club at 1354 W. Wabansia.

The initial batch of acts announced today include Iron & Wine, Glen Hansard, Lee Fields & the Expressions, the Corin Tucker Band, the Waco Brothers with Paul Burch and the Redmoon Theater Company. More to come later this month, but two-day passes are on sale now at $40 plus ticket fees (jumping thereafter to $50 plus fees), with a portion of proceeds going to Rock For Kids, Literacy Works, the Drummond Elementary School and the Oscar Mayer Magnet School.

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Having led the drive to get Lollapalooza to pay its fair share of taxes, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer isn’t about to see that cash—some $160,000—squandered. (Hey, it happens… too often!) At Tuesday’s board meeting, she introduced her plan for the windfall: a summer jobs program for kids ages 14 to 18.

 “There will be 75 young people who will work this summer who otherwise would not have had a summer job,” Gainer told the Sun-Times, and the bad economy is only exacerbated in poor, violence-plagued neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the city Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events inches ever closer to completing its much-ballyhooed 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan, preparing to release a draft in July and solicit public comments at a series of town hall meetings

According to the department press release, these confabs will take place at Malcom X College at 6 p.m. on July 24; the South Shore Cultural Center at 6 p.m. on July 25; St. Augustine College/Essanay Studios at 10 a.m. on July 28, and the Chicago Cultural Center (still standing, but who knows for how long?) at 6 p.m.

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In honor of the newest addition to Team Sound Ops—Jacob Nathan, born Saturday afternoon, six pounds, six ounces—here are my choices for the six best rock songs ever about having a baby. Have some suggestions of your own? Post ’em below and join me in wishing the very best to baby Jake and his parents!

6. Howie B, “Music for Babies”

Best known as a trip-hop Brian Eno/behind-the scenes sonic guru for Tricky, Bjork and U2/Passengers, Scotland’s Howard Bernstein made his debut as an ambient solo artist in his own right with a 1996 album inspired by the birth of his daughter, mixing electronic trance grooves with elements of freeform jazz and dub. His hero and role model made Music for Airports, but he made Music for Babies, and the watery title track evokes floating in the womb… and emerging to equal measures of disorientation and wonder.

5.

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Hip-hop has a notoriously short attention span and a ridiculous number of prejudices, and El-P, also known as El Producto but born Jamie Meline, has several strikes against him. The Brooklyn-based producer first made his mark on the music scene in the mid-90s, a million years ago in hip-hop time; he’s remained resolutely independent and disdainful of bling throughout his long career, marking him as one of those dreaded granola-munching backpackers, and most of all he’s been a consistently inventive sonic pioneer, scoffing at clichés and ignoring genre boundaries while consistently pushing the envelope. But take him for granted or marginalize him at your own loss, because he has just crafted two undeniable masterpieces, instantly ranking among the best rap albums of the new millennium.

Cancer 4 Cure only is the prolific beatmaster and selfless collaborator’s third solo album, and it revisits the wasted urban landscape familiar from his earlier work, notably I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (2007), as yet another epic of dystopian paranoia, incredibly dark even by this doom monger’s standards.

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Amid the onslaught of Kardashians, Ke$ha and Nicki Minaj, the pop world has never needed Beth Ditto more. In many ways, the favorite daughter of Searcy, Arkansas, remains one of a kind—funny, flamboyant and endlessly quotable, a tireless opponent of sexism, homophobia and sizism and a champion of self-empowerment. Alas, that’s true everywhere except on her second major-label album fronting the Gossip.

Riding high on the success of Standing in the Way of Control (2006) and basking in the adulation of the U.K. pop machine, Ditto began the great bland-out with her shift from Kill Rock Stars to Columbia Records in 2009, allowing Rick Rubin to buff away all of the quirky edges that made the group’s earlier dance-punk so effervescent and irresistible. (And what is it with that guy stripping our oversized heroines of all their originality?

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If you haven't seen it yet, Google today is honoring the 78th birthday of electronic music pioneer Robert Moog with a playable doodle/theme of his famous Minimoog synthesizer, an instrument that changed the world of popular music every bit as much as the electric guitar.

In fact, the last Google doodle that was this cool was the one honoring a godfather of that instrument, Les Paul, on his 96th birthday.

So, blog readers, today I pose this question: Which doodle is cooler, the synth or the guitar? (Not that it really matters; both are and were a heck of a lot of fun.) Register your vote below.

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Donna Summer, one of the most successful singers of the 1970s and perhaps the most important female artist in the history of electronic music, died this morning after a battle with cancer. She was 63 years old.

Born on New Year's Eve, 1948-1949, and one of seven children raised in a devout Christian home in the Dorchester section of Boston, LaDonna Adrian Gaines would see three consecutive double albums reach No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, score four No. 1 singles in a little more than a year, win five Grammys and epitomize the disco era for millions of fans.

All of those music-industry accomplishments and many more are certain to be repeated in the obituaries and tributes that will flood the media in coming days. But this blog prefers to pay homage by remembering her very real and enduring contributions to the development of electronic dance music, perhaps best encapsulated by her timeless 1975 hit “Love to Love You Baby” and 1977’s “I Feel Love.”

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