NO TRIVIA

October 23, 2012 – Despite receiving little to no airplay on rap and R&B radio, PSY's witty K-Pop behemoth "Gangnam Style," currently sits at No. 1 on Billboard's Rap Songs chart for the third week in a row. Blame Billboard's "new methodology" for determining what tops their genre charts, introduced earlier this month. The changes now consider digital download sales and data based on streaming music.

October 19, 2012 – <p>No Trivia Friday Five Reading List: Victor LaValle's <i>The Devil In Silver</i>. It's like Ken Kesey's <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>, if you sent it through a de-hippie-dippie-fying machine. LaValle's novel tells the story of Pepper, who is wrongly sent to a psychiatric hospital and seemingly can't get out no matter how hard he tries to prove he's sane.

October 18, 2012 – <p>Big Sant is like the bizarro-world version of Big K.R.I.T. He's stocky instead of lean, gifted with a gruff guttural shout rather than a sing-song rapping voice, and more than willing to indulge himself and not feel all twisted up about it the next day. Sant can be found Incredible Hulk-ing his way through a few of K.R.I.T.'s most immediate tracks: "Return of 4Eva" from <i>K.R.I.T.

October 18, 2012 – Every rapper likes to think they've got their whole city on their back. As if, just by being a talented artist from some loaded locale and making the leap in logic that your story is important, it actually bodes well for the rest of the jerks in your hometown. If you shine, everybody shines, right? This is the assumption that Kendrick Lamar's major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d. city, ambitiously confounds.

October 17, 2012 – Last year, Wiz Khalifa prefaced his major-label debut, Rolling Papers, with Cabin Fever, a trap music-tinged mixtape that countered the more good-natured mainstream release. Cabin Fever 2, a ratchet-music facsimile, released yesterday, arrives less than two months before December's presumably more poppy O.N.F.I.C..

October 16, 2012 – Rap music, even when it is behaving badly, can teach its fans a great deal. Last week, Maybach Music Group's Gunplay turned himself into a Miami jail for an armed robbery that allegedly took place earlier this year.