NO TRIVIA

January 4, 2013 – So, Jay-Z is scoring Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby, along with the Bullitts. Spare me the "Jay-Z and Gatsby are the same" blog posts because they aren't the same (Kanye has a little bit of James Gatz's phoney-baloney, self-made, self-loathing spirit, though).

January 4, 2013 – Back in June, when David Lowery, the guy from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, took on the so-called "Free Culture movement"— mostly in response to a 21-year-old intern at NPR admitting that she, like most 21-year-olds, got most of her music for free — I kept thinking, "Where does rap music fit into all of this?" It's no surprise that an aging-out rocker would not consider hip-hop in his missive, but Lowery also teaches class

January 2, 2013 – Lee Bannon began last year with Fantastic Plastic, a producer album featuring rappin' ass legends like Inspectah Deck and Del the Funky Homosapien, right-now underground types like YU and Chuuwee, and on my favorite track, "Phone Drone," some dude on YouTube screaming excitedly about getting the new iPhone.

December 14, 2012 – Not sure what happened here, folks, but I really wandered into my own world this second half of the year! No radio hits unless Chinx Drugz and French Montana's hyper-regional hit “I'm a Coke Boy” counts.

December 12, 2012 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a little early to do this. But we're well into the non-stop whirl of year-end proceedings (check out SPIN's 40 Hip-Hop Albums of the Year if you haven't already), so all bets are off on critical appropriate-ness, I think.

December 7, 2012 – On Sunday, Das Racist officially broke up, and that's a bummer. The big Das Racist joke, it turns out, was that there was no joke. That rather than devolve into novelty MCs and pump out a bunch more “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”-type songs and become what my friend Sean once called “the hipster LMFAO,” they took their shit very, very seriously. That was funnier than any of their punch lines. They went for it.