September 5, 2012 – The late J Dilla's final project Donuts, created while the Detroit producer was in the hospital, is a beat tape turned into head-on confrontation with life and death. Slickly sliced soul samples do the talking ("You're gonna want me back, in your arms," Dionne Warwick sings) and its existential thematics are filtered through modest, low-stakes imagery — the circle of life manifested by way of Homer Simpson's favorite treat — which just makes the thing even more devastating. Some samples ride out, while others are cruelly cut short, as if Dilla was trying to tweak time itself. Panda Bear: I didn't like it at first. It sounded really dense. I couldn't find away into because it was so dense and it moved so fast. But then after listening to it a couple times, the speed of it? Once I got into that, anything slower than that seemed less stimulating.

September 5, 2012 – Rhode Island-bred full-contact producer Abraham Orellana started out making screeching, treble-filled street bangers for Dipset when their major label money started to dwindle. Slowly though, this Heatmakerz-on-a-budget beatmaker proved himself to be an MPC drum machine virtuoso, feverishly firing out shards of samples at an inhuman rate of speed. The studio rat now blurs the borders between instrumental hip-hop, transcendent EDM cheese, and glitching, trap-rap-flecked noise, with the push of a button, building drum machine jams in front of packed, slack-jawed festival crowds. Back to the Centipedia glossary NEXT: Khaira Arby

September 4, 2012 – Given hip-hop's loopy libertarian streak as of late, expressed by even a few of the most cogent, socially-engaged rappers — Kendrick Lamar saying that he doesn't vote, Ab-Soul and Killer Mike suddenly losing all their nuance and telling you that Obama's no different than all the other dudes in power — Nicki Minaj's supposed support for Mitt Romney on "Mercy" off Lil Wayne's Dedication 4 mixtape made sense for a fleeting few moments, at least. Then, you paused, ignored the explosions of tweets about Nicki's being pro-Romney, and realized that she isn't declaring her support. She's doing the thing rappers do where they make things up, and contrive the weirdest, wildest ways to say some pretty basic stuff like, "I got more money than you do, and I don't give a fuck" — Romney's M.O., no?

August 31, 2012 – News flash: Clint Eastwood has always been a big jerk! He starred in some of the creepiest, most conservative movies ever made, too many of which involve him as a cop picking off or threatening minorities because some stuffy liberal has made it harder for him to do his job. His supposedly great Unforgiven is John Ford's The Searchers minus the moral ambiguity and all of Ford's sentimental though complex love of democracy replaced with the cruel, calculated appeal of fascism and stupid revenge. Even in a goofy movie like Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, Eastwood has to have his character come out on top and survive, even though that's totally the kind of zooted '70s road movie where the big star is supposed to die. And let's not even talk about Gran Torino.

August 31, 2012 – Former cocaine trafficker and C.I.A./Contra/crack-conspiracy fall guy Rick Ross only refers to the rapper "Rick Ross" by his real name, William Roberts. You can understand why. It must be pretty strange to be sitting in a jail cell back in 2006, and hear of a new rapper out there with your name, claiming to know all about the cocaine connections that got you sent to jail for a very long time. It must be even stranger to find that rapper and his record label claim that their artist has never heard of you in a court of law, or to read a recent Rolling Stone cover story on Ross, which simply avoided the issue of how William Roberts became "Rick Ross" altogether. And so, "the real Rick Ross" has taken to the Internet, penning a response to the Rolling Stone article (read it at AllHipHop) and preparing yet another lawsuit against the rapper and his record label.

August 31, 2012 – Back when rap was just beginning to become big business, it was still relatively ungoverned and, as a result, seemingly a world away from the more restrictive marketplace of rock and pop. Chris Lighty, who died on Thursday, from what appears to be a suicide, was the genre's expert at balancing the artistic expression important to insiders with commercial impulses necessary to keep it moving forward. Namely, because he was just like the rappers he represented.

August 29, 2012 – I don't buy into much of this "post-regional" theorizing. Rap has always been post-regional. A$AP Rocky's crew, rather defensively explained that grills/gold fronts were in New York years before they were popularized by folks in the South. That would never float if flipped the other way around — I can't imagine, say, Houston hip-hoppers doing early-'90s NYC grit and then reminding everybody that DJ Premier was born in Texas, and getting away with it — but rap music, if you're listening closely, has never been all that insular. When Slate pondered the "end of hip-hop regionalism" and cited Kanye West and company's "Mercy" as one of its examples, the post-regional hot mess of Chicago-by-way-of-New York-boom-bap plus ornate Puff Daddy orchestration plus loping Rap-A-Lot-like live instrumentation that is College Dropout was conveniently ignored.

August 28, 2012 – Chris Keating of Yeasayer's pooh-pooh-ing of popular R&B and electronic dance in a recent Rolling Stone interview, along with a misses-the-point mix of Nicki Minaj verses minus key sugar-rush hooks from AGF and Vladislav Delay (described as "chorus-free & mainstream-free" on their Soundcloud), are reminders that, despite all the jumping between genres that's happening right now, way too many musicians speak condescendingly of the very music they cherry-pick for influence. And while it is important to call out these musical half-steppers — Meaghan Garvey's Sound of the City response to Keating is highly recommended — it is also important to praise projects from artists who aren't afraid to wander into a genre outside of their wheelhouse and approach it on its own terms.

August 24, 2012 – ?uestlove of the Roots tweeted out this video of the late, great, J. Dilla last night. "Rare footage of #Dilla in Tdot," is all it said, with a link. The video is originally from 2003 and features footage of Dilla dropping his beats live in a club, and the kind of hagiography that's all but overwhelmed his reputation since his death in 2006. But here, he's still alive, and it's a nice reminder of how much he mattered to so many people before he passed away and got enshrined. The best part is the interview, which works as a presentation of the producer as just a regular dude. Not the stoic beat maniac or the sickly genius hammering it out on an MPC up until his death, but a regular-ass rap nerd geeked about being in a foreign country in a club full of his fans.

August 23, 2012 – Last night, the music video for "Bitch Bad," Lupe Fiasco's muddled, mealy-mouthed missive about rap and misogyny was released. Directed by Gil Green — who is best known for ambitious mini-movie-like videos for DJ Khaled and friends and as such, is no stranger to the kind of objectification and thug-celebrating that Lupe's video attacks — the video stays close to Lupe's loaded, three-act storytelling rap. Before we get started, note that you won't read any reference to the music or even style of rapping here, because it is clear that Lupe is mining the moronic “lyrics over everything” attitude, reducing rap to a game of preaching to the converted. The concept of "Bitch Bad" is how two different young people, one male, one female, can encounter mainstream, "bitch"-spewing hip-hop in quite different contexts and come to different conclusions.