September 18, 2012 – How should I describe rapper/producer 7evenThirty's Heaven's Computer? A Big K.R.I.T. album if the only influence were 8ball & MJG's Space Age Pimpin'? Devin the Dude in "Zeldar" mode for 50 straight minutes? John Sayles' The Brother From Another Planet meets Forbidden Planet as a hip-hop musical? The Gorillaz's Plastic Beach with a lot more rapping and an '80s obsession that includes the Back To The Future soundtrack and the arch, ironic dialogue of Heathers? OutKast if they were still doing what they were doing?All of those might sound pretty good, but they don't tap into what's so exciting about this concept album that casts 7evenThirty (presumably a Big L reference, right? "If you're 730, that means you're crazy" from "Ebonics") as a take-no-crap alien invader named Max Redrum. Tagging along with him is a super-polite super-computer named Alfie.

September 18, 2012 – Since the tragic death of David Foster Wallace on September 15, 2008, we've seen a small but significant number of works by the author unearthed for the first time, or cannily repackaged. These include his incomplete novel The Pale King, his 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College, and even his undergraduate senior thesis. Still out of print, however, and selling for hundreds of dollars used, is Wallace and Mark Costello's 1990 book Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. This book is often diminished by those studying Wallace, even though it is an early example of the author's published non-fiction.

September 17, 2012 – Ideally, Sunday's news that Nicki Minaj will join a new group of new judges for this season's American Idol — along with Mariah Carey and country singer Keith Urban — might be the start of an improvement in the rocky relationship between hip-hop and reality television. Save reality satires like those produced by Ego Trip (The White Rapper Show and Miss Rap Supreme), hip-hop fans have endured a specific kind of exploitative, buffonish trash. Shows like Flavor Of Love (in which the greatest hypeman of all time makes every Public Enemy show since then seem slightly absurd), T.I. & Tiny: The Family Hustle, and Ice Loves Coco, seem intent on cutting some of rap's most larger-than-life personalities down to size. Nicki Minaj is the first rap star to be involved with American Idol and that, in and of itself, is a victory.

September 14, 2012 – So, E-40 was on America's Got Talent last night, rapping with an old guy. To explain: When this season of the show began and they went through the prerequisite freak show, one act was a wrinkly creep named Burton Crane, who dressed like Don Magic Juan and said "whatcha gonna do" over and over again, which was enough for him to declare himself "the grandfather of rap." Old people are weird like that. In the beach town where my grandparents live, there's this guy who called himself the "Old Fart" and walks around with a fart machine and a hat that says "old fart" on it and seems to just harass people. Sounds "hilarious," right? Like I said, old people are weird.

September 14, 2012 – "We're just getting old. Me? I got a daughter, I got a family." That's Yung Clova, one half of the defunct-for-the-moment, Huntsville, Alabama duo G-Side, and now the head of Lambo Music, over the phone yesterday afternoon. "It's time for me to support them; I can't keep..." Then he trails off. For Clova, it seems, the DIY grind that was a source of pride for G-Side was also beginning to feel like, well, too much of a grind. "We've been doing music since we were, like, 15 years old and, at times, it seemed like we were close to a deal." Though nothing was ever confirmed by the group, there were two or three times over the past year when talk would swirl around that G-Side had signed a major-label deal, but the rumors always turned out to be untrue or preemptive. Clova, it seems, wanted to continue in the direction of courting the interests of a label.

September 13, 2012 – Consider Berkeley rapper 100s' Ice Cold Perm an album-length bizarro version of the Coup's "Fuck a Perm," from that Bay Area group's 1993 Kill My Landlord album. It's as if this whole mixtape's a response to Boots Riley's funny, pointed celebration of going "natural" that, if you think about it, also encourages a whole bunch of somewhat problematic ideas about "purity" that hip-hop still needs to shake. Ice Cold Perm seems happy to let in as many outsider ideas as possible. 100s has no problem coming off unnatural or "impure." This is snarling, no-nonsense pimp-rap, celebrating exploitation and preemptively lashing out at everyone trying to get anything over on 100s, but it finds a way to complicate those regressive, retro sensibilities, or at least superimpose them onto more contemporary, relatively open-minded Internet-rap values.

September 12, 2012 – G-Side, the Huntsville, Alabama, rap duo consisting of ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova have split up. "It just felt like it was time," ST told me over the phone yesterday, on his way to a performance in Austin, Texas. "It was time to go elsewhere creatively. We've been doing records since 2004. You just grow up and grow out and that's kind of the case." The end of G-Side felt like it was a long time coming, according to ST, though he makes it clear that there's no bad blood: "I wish there was something juicy, but it's like, there's no big drama behind it, man.

September 7, 2012 – Labtekwon has released more than 30 albums since 1993. His debut EP, Ghetto Gospel, is the type of rare, regional rap 12-inch that commands outrageously high prices on eBay: From a golden, bygone era, and expertly delivered, yet tinged with the more specific sounds of his Baltimore hometown, and pretty much impossible to find. To certain circles, Lab's a #randomrap superstar. To those even more in the know, however, he's one of the most ambitious and underrated rappers of all time.

September 7, 2012 – A few weeks ago, when I was talking about 2 Chainz and Kanye West's "Birthday Song," I compared Kanye's recent production style to Christopher Nolan's. These days, Kanye's pretty much making "the portentous Christopher Nolan version of trap music," I said. The prime directive seems to be to make everything grand and elaborate, often to the detriment of the song or concept. Well this new one, "Clique," with Big Sean and Jay-Z and produced by Hit-Boy (but undoubtedly bearing the mark of Kanye somewhere), seems like the most Nolan-like G.O.O.D. song yet. Has so much grandeur and ambition ever been handed over to such a stupid sentiment? Like, you know how Nolan's Batman movies seem intent on taking something inherently goofy — like a man dressed like a bat fighting bad guys — as seriously as possible?

September 6, 2012 – So, the trick to finally turning transcendently spare, Bay Area hip-hop into the actual next big thing is not branding it as city-specific? Blame and thank Los Angeles producer DJ Mustard's "ratchet music" tag — a nebulous, know-it-when-you-hear-it minimalism that takes from hyphy, L.A. jerk, and even a little bit of Afrojack's top 40-ready lope by way of L.A. loudmouths LMFAO. That loose EDM comparison isn't facetious. Everybody's ears perked up again, and we ended up with EDM or the equally-vague-at-this-point "dubstep" at the moment when Skrillex arrived, and all the cool-enough regional dance sounds collapsed on top of each other (Dutch house! Bmore club! Electro-clash! Blog-house!), and specificity got rubbed out. " Once nobody owns it, anybody can do it, and then it's of interest to everybody else.