Internet Oddity: "Weird"

Every fiber of my being wishes this was real. Makes me long for the days of "My Bologna" and "Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch". Well, not really.

Music Video: "I Feel Better"

The best song off the new Hot Chip album is now an amazing, weird, and hilarious music video. A rare example of a video making a song even better.

New Hotness: "Nothin' On You"

This super smooth Hip-Hop-Pop come from Kanye-wannabe (or "Kannabe") B.o.B. is currently climbing up the pop charts. It's a guilty pleasure, good for a few listens.

New Hotness: "Ambling Alp"

This killer Indie power jam is from their new album Odd Blood, and it's leagues better than anything on their debut. This is the "My Girls" of 2010. Included is an awesome remix by one of my new favorites The Very Best.

Yeasayer - "Ambling Alp" (The Very Best Mulomo Remix)

New Hotness: "Jump In The Air (Stay There)"

Off the upcoming New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh. Judging from this track and the cover art, expect part 2 to get a little freakier than the 4th World War.

New Hotness: "Baby I'm Yours"

Upon furthur contemplation, I realized that the new T.I. joint isn't really banging enough of a New Hotness to kick off the weekend. So when I stumbled over this epically amazing dance song, I had to throw it up. From the consistently fresh French dance label Ed Banger, this new Breakbot single oozes with Michael-esque disco flavor. I'm gonna be grooving to this one all weekend.

New Hotness: "I'm Back"

The first official single from T.I. since his release finds the rapper right where we left him. The song is pure T.I., it's good to see prison didn't change a playa.

Rocker of the Day: "Devastation"

I like these guys, because they rock pretty hard for a bunch of Canadian shoegazers. Kind of like if Arcade Fire listened to a lot of weird 70s art rock.

Internet Oddity: 8-bit Hip-Hop

Apparently this is about a year old, but I've never heard it and it's incredible. Nine rap anthems are given the NES treatment in stunning 8-bit sound, and it's amazing hop good they sound.

Here are the songs in the medley:
Jay-Z — Dirt Off Your Shoulders
T.I — What You Know
Chamillionaire — Ridin’
Ludacris — What’s Ya Fantasy
Bonecrusher — Neva Scared
Kanye West — Overnight Celebrity
Ludacris — Move Bitch
Lil Jon — Get Low
Kanye West — Gold Digger

Diplo Presents: Free Gucci

★★★★
The rise of Gucci Mane from obscure mush-mouthed rapper to pop chart Usher collaborator is just as difficult to understand as his allure. It's an allure that's undoubtedly there, despite the fact that on the surface he seems like any run-of-the-mill Atlanta ex-drug dealer turnt rapper. As it is with Hip-Hop, so much of an MC's talent lies within his voice, and Gucci's voice is something special. His withdrawn viscous growl conveys so much more than his wry and simplistic rhymes, which he humorously lets out in short bursts. He doesn't scream or dominate the microphone like so many other power-obsessed rappers. Instead it almost feels like he's just going along for the ride, casually talking to himself as the beat goes on. On Free Gucci, it's the same old Gucci but the beats have changed, thanks to Diplo and a cadre of indie electronic producers.
The rhymes on Free Gucci are from three mixtapes called The Cold War Series, your basic rap mixtapes with DJ Drama screaming all over the tracks. With all the "Gangsta Grillz!" and explosions going off, and the repetitive pounding of the contemporary Hip-Hop beats, it's easy to lose sight of Gucci Mane. You would think the same would happen here, with lavish techno production drowning out lil' ol' Gucci. What's so great about Free Gucci is that it's the exact opposite; the production here gives Gucci room to breath. The DJs have give the vocals all the focus, and on most of the tracks they amplify their impact with incredible beats. On Gucci's most recent studio album, The State vs. Radric Davis, there were some examples of production that gave Gucci the opportunity to be heard like he is here. Hopefully more producers will follow suit.

Key Tracks: "Danger's Not a Stranger", "Dope Boys", "I Be Everywhere (Mumdance Remix)"

1. Danger's Not A Stranger (Diplo Remix)

2. Dope Boys (Bird Peterson Remix)

3. Excuse Me (Memory Tapes Remix)

4. No No No (Brodinski & Monsieur Monsieur AKA Rubi Sapphyr Remix)

5. Frowny Face (Douster Remix)

6. Frowny Face (Emynd Remix)

7. I'm Expecting (DJ Teenwolf Remix)

8. Boi (Zomby Remix)

9. My Shadow (Salem Remix)

10. Excuse Me (Diplo Remix)

11. Photo Shoot (Flying Lotus Remix)
(For some reason this is the only one not on YouTube. Whatever, it's weak.)
12. I Be Everywhere (Mumdance Remix)

13. I Be Everywhere (DZ Remix)

14. I'm The Shit (DJ Benzi & Willy Joy Remix)

15. Break Yourself (Diplo Remix)

New Hotness: "Over"

Damn, a double daily dose of New Hotness today. This is the first single from Drake's debut studio album Thank Me Later. It's going to be one of the biggest rap albums of 2010, second only to a little super-anticipated album known as Good Ass Job from everyone's favorite Kanye. Drake's 2009 mixtape was a lot like Kanye's 808 & Heartbreak, but Drake said recently that his debut would be straight Hip-Hop. He's got a good start here, blasting off over a killer Boi-1da beat.

New Hotness: "Guilty"

Ur-shur baby. I cannot wait for Raymond v. Raymond, because if anyone can get it poppin' it's Usher. This song is pretty hot, and it features one of T.I.'s first post-prison raps.

Hot Chip - One Life Stand

★★½
Hot Chip is a band that's been derided for being practitioners of "indietronica", 2008's hottest music fad. The hipster genre is all about dancefloor tempos paired with mellow instrumentation or atypical sounds and structures. On their 2008 album Made In The Dark Hot Chip played with these structures, moving away from the technicolor glitch pop of their early work to a more varied and matured record. Songs like "Ready For The Floor" were infectious and meticulous pop hits, while slower songs like "We're Looking For A Lot Of Love" gave the album a ton of depth. With their new album One Life Stand, it seems they've returned to the shallow end of the pool, delivering an album that is cohesively toned down and zoned out, and one of the most boring dance albums I've ever heard.
Listening to One Life Stand it seems as if someone talked this band out of having fun. Nothing on the album even attempts to reach for dancefloor greatness like "Ready For The Floor" or "Over and Over". The few moments when they do are the album's highlights; big juicy slabs of retro house perfectly suited for Alexis Taylor's quiet quivering vocals. I'm not against the album's slow songs; the ballads on Made In The Dark were my favorite moments. It's just that all the energy has been sucked out of the album, mostly due to some truly awful songs that don't add anything at all to album. It's ten songs long and five of them suck. A big step backwards for one of Britain's biggest bands.

Key Tracks: "I Feel Better", "We Have Love"

Rocker of the Day: "It Ain't Gonna Save Me"

A few weeks ago Jay Reatard took his own life, and while his second album Watch Me Fall is filled with jangly punk rock numbers, the lyrics and tone of the album have taken on a whole new meaning since then. "It Ain't Gonna Save Me" is a bubbly clap-along head nodder, but when the bridge starts in with "All is lost there is no hope", it becomes a maudlin farwell address.

New Hotness: "Ridin' Solo"

If you like your pop saccharine, look no further. This track from white-boy heavy-hitter producer J.R. Rotem might make maple syrup ooze out your ears it's so sweet.

Rocker of the Day: "Five on the Five"

On The Raconteurs' second album Consolers of the Lonely they strayed from the basic classic rock archetypes on their debut for a little more variety. It featured everything from country ballads to punk jams, and this slice of gasoline-soaked rock n' roll. Starting with Jack White's signature guitar scream the song is relentless to the end, filled to the brim with jangly tambourines, misplaced cowbell, and power choruses and fretwork that would make Thin Lizzy jealous. Rock on.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

★★★★
A fictional band is a hell of a platform, and Damon Albarn has used Gorillaz to let lose his wildest pop fantasies. It was easy to tell Albarn wasn't interested in being trapped within the confines of a band after his fallout with Blur guitarist Graham Coxon. Since its debut in 2001 Gorillaz has acted as an outlet for Albarn, and each album has been fascinated with styles far from Blur's Britpop. Their self-titled debut was an experimentation in dub, while nearly every song on 2005's fantastic Demon Days was rooted in Hip-Hop. Now with Plastic Beach Damon Albarn presents us with a tapestry of pop, full of orchestral swells and Wilson-esque grandiosity.
Don't let the Snoop Dogg fool you, Plastic Beach isn't the murky Bush-era rap album that was Demon Days. The album is both parts melancholy and eager anticipation, with haunting pop ballads based more in electronic music than trip-hop. There are moments of psycheldelic layering that recall The Soft Bulletin, and other times we get muted electronica reminiscent of Air or even Hot Chip. On Demon Days Albarn's collaborators dominated on a lot of tracks. Here the featured performers seem to adapt more to the album, like the brilliant Bobby Womack on "Stylo" and even Lou Reed on "Some Kind of Nature". The album has a cohesiveness that really draws you in and makes you appreciate its little nuances that much more. There was talk that this Gorillaz album was never happening, but the progress made on Plastic Beach makes me very excited about the future of this project.

Key Tracks: "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach", "Superfast Jellyfish", "Plastic Beach"

The 100 greatest Hip-Hop songs of the 2000's: 1-10

1. "99 Problems" - Jay-Z

How do you defend the statement of claiming one song to be greater than all others? It's not easy. You could approach it from a cultural standpoint; trying to determine what song had the largest impact on our pop culture. You could consider artistic merit and aesthetics, two factors most people don't even consider when they think about Hip-Hop. Really, when you break it down, it has to be great for greatness sake. Great as in powerful. Great as in dominant. Great as in the fiery bellows of the greatest MC of the decade, in vicious top-form from a self-imposed fictional retirement. Great as in Rick Rubin, who here delivers a beat so other-worldly and unique that we have to question where the hell it came from. Great as in hands down the purest slice of Hip-Hop nostalgia in years that at the same time sounds years beyond 2003. When it comes down to it, I guess I had to ask myself, "Would it be right to put any song above this one?" Guess not.

2: "B.O.B." - OutKast

A lot of rock critics are saying now that the fusion of Hip-Hop and electronic dance music into the gelatinous pop-like substance we consume now was inevitable, fueled by the TRL generation. Unfortunately they and a large number of other "hipster-types" (i.e. people that can't dance) deride our modern booty music as unrefined and low-cultured. How wrong they are. If only they weren't total losers they would know that the Akons and J.R. Rotems of the world owe their Bugati's to "Bomb's Over Baghdad", a bombastic techno-rap that's so advanced and beyond comprehension I swear it was sent from the future. A Miami-Bass injected, dancefloor-drenched boogie anthem about a war that wouldn't start for another three years that ends chanting "Power music, electric revival!" To listen to this song is to hear the next ten years of Pop and Hip-Hop in five minutes. How did they do that?

3: "A Milli" - Lil' Wayne

The changes between 2000 and 2010 are pretty huge, and if you hear something in 2010 it's probably gonna sound more like "A Milli" than "B.O.B." Just a screwed up vocal sample, chopped up real quick with a simple yet sinister bass and snare. The staples of Southern Hip-Hop. So why "A Milli"? Because a beat like this puts it all on the rapper, and in 2008 there was no better rapper than Lil' Wayne. "A Milli" was an album stand in for every mixtape track Wayne had done in the years leading up to Tha Carter III; straight freestyle rapping, no hook. Without any of the frills of modern pop production Lil' Wayne made one of the most impactful singles of the decade with no chorus to speak off. Ask any geek off the street and he can probably rap the whole thing back to you.

4: "Paper Planes" - M.I.A.

There's something so intoxicating to American ears about international sounds bent into American genres. When we hear South Africans battle rapping in crazy afro-dutch accents we realize just how far our little hometown hero Hip-Hop has come since 1973 in the Bronx. M.I.A. was hyped up before her 2005 debut as an Indie savior of dance and Hip-Hop. It wasn't until her sophomore album Kala that her real success came, when she transformed her early multi-cultural jam vibe into a gritty, third world envisioning of American pop music. "Paper Planes" is the albums highlight and heart, a towering slab of funked-out rap that's half swagger and half satire. The snaps and thumps of the beat owe themselves to Southern Rap, but the international subject and starlet elevate this song into something bigger than the sum of its parts. By the time little Maya taunts "Some I murder, some I let go", you feel like Tupac in '95: Untouchable.

5: "What You Know" - T.I.

Southern Hip-Hop has been a lot of things, but most of the time its been almost a second tier genre. Throughout the 90s Hip-Hop's focus was on the coasts, and artists from New York and California were the ones bankrolled by major labels. They got the freshest beats and the videos with high production values. Southern MCs relied on soul samples or crude electro beats (think Goodie Mob and Mannie Fresh, respectively), while they formed their own independent labels. Wouldn't you know that this model set the stage for the influx of diversity in rap in the 2000s, and now Southern MCs dominate the landscape. What was (and still is) a challenge is adapting the Southern sound to the ever homogenized dance music of the Billboard charts. Words used to describe the dirty south of old might be "dusty", "funky", or "ghetto". "What You Know" conjures words like "regal", "epic", and "awesome". T.I., Atlanta trap superstar who started out rapping about rims, creates a track that rocks as hard as any Metallica song and is just as precise. Transforming the dirty dirty to the high and mighty.

6: "Hate It Or Love It" - The Game feat. 50 Cent

Nostalgia is huge part of Hip-Hop. The debates about "realness", or what constitutes real Hip-Hop, are tied up in the past. Old schoolers claim that what's on the radio isn't real rap. Guys from the 90s get pissed when you call them old school. The young MCs cite Jay-Z as Hip-Hop history. So when contemporary artists pay tribute, or make concessions, to the earlier days the results almost always take you back to simpler times, even if you weren't around for them. If Game really wants to be Dr. Dre, then this is his "Express Yourself"; a song imbued with positivity despite the reality of the rap interfere. Put this on at your next party and count the smiles.

7: "Drop It Like It's Hot" - Snoop Dogg feat. Pharrell

The Neptunes had to work with a lot of people before they found the one voice perfectly suited for their spaced-out electro funk. At a time when rap radio was yelling at you to "Lean Back" and "Get Low", things got real quiet whenever "Drop It Like It's Hot" came on. Over the deepest beat they ever made the Neptunes and Snoop make some strange magic here, with Snoop's threats and street language swallowed whole by the beat's echoing hugeness. As soon as this track was everywhere, imitators came running with quiet storm beats, but it just wasn't the same. If you need an example of perfect chemistry in 21st century rap, look no furthur than Snoop and the Neptunes.

8: "Country Grammar (Hot Shit)" - Nelly

Something I asked myself a lot in writing this list was, "how did this happen?" How did we get to the point of rap being just another aisle in Tower Records to having Hip-Hop pop, Hip-Hop culture? Hell, some would say we have a Hip-Hop president. If I had to pick a turning point for the tide of Hip-Hop in America, it would be this song. At the beginning of this new millenium, a young man was given unto the world, and his name was Nelly. He had a song called "Country Grammar", built around a grade-school jump rope rhyme and sing-song rapped at super speeds. He wasn't from New York or California, he wasn't even from Atlanta. He was from...St. Louis? His music video had all these crazy hood people, and rims, and fried chicken! This was not the same old music we'd always heard. It was new, and most importantly it was distinct. This song blew the roof off regional rap; finally audiences were ready for something new. In the song, Nelly shouts out nearly every city across America, and finishes with "getting paid off this country grammar." Thus the definition of regional rap in the 2000s.

9: "Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You)" - UGK feat. OutKast

This song, more than anything else, reminds us of what we don't have in contemporary Hip-Hop. The passing of Pimp C just months after this song was released made it so UGK would never have a single like this again. This was the biggest song they'd released since "Big Pimpin'" came out nearly ten years earlier, and a chance at fame was finally theirs. OutKast makes one of their first real Hip-Hop songs in five years, and their abscense from the Top Ten can be felt. Three 6 Mafia crafts a beat for Southern Soul purists that sounds more like Motown than Cash Money. In so many ways, this is the music we're not getting; souled out slow jams about marraige and fidelity, and also pimpin and poppin tags. This song should have launched UGK into the stratosphere, but there's no UGK left. RIP to the Pimp.

10: "Daylight" - Aesop Rock

Where are the descendants of Aesop? Where are the legions of high-functioning MCs gracing the covers of indie music mags, spitting dense cerebral lyrics to art-crowd white boy fans? In 2000 it seemed that they would be everywhere, saving Hip-Hop from itself. Aesop's label, Definitive Jux, was supposed to be the vessel, delivering a cadre of post-modern rappers. So where is alternative Hip-Hop in 2010? Jurassic 5 broke up, Black Star still only has one album, and just last month El-P stepped down as director of Def Jux, the label he founded in 1999. The idea was that indie rap would coexist alongside mainstream rap, but just look around. The scores of underground MCs still exist, but they no longer strive for a unified aesthetic. Instead they try harder and harder to sound like everybody else. This great rap movement never came, but Aesop Rock's 2001 album Labor Days is its high-water mark. "Daylight" is a song imbued with the raw passion that separated these alternative MCs from the flock. It's a shame this didn't blow up, because its one of the greatest Hip-Hop songs of all time.