July 31, 2012 – Last year, Antwon released the Fantasy Beds mixtape (featuring breakout track "Helicopter" and production from Clams Casino, Javelin, Salem), plus the album My Westside Horizon, a lo-fi, Quiet Storm-informed affair, produced entirely by his buddy, Bad Slorp (who has since changed his name to DJ Sex Play). But Antwon's latest, End Of Earth, best displays his singular personality — an affable guy who might have one of rap's biggest, best-sounding voices, which he usually focuses on goofy jokes and surprisingly sweet bedroom raps. But he's also got a layered persona, bouncing between likable loverman (Biggie at his most open-hearted), and lonely, pissed-off punk, bleeding out break-up songs (like Biggie on "Suicidal Thoughts"). That Biggie comparison isn't only because Antwon happens to be a big dude with a rumbling voice.

July 27, 2012 – Sherman Hemsley, best known for portraying George Jefferson on the television show The Jeffersons, died earlier this week. Hemsley twisted a white-created cipher of a character into something closer to a a living, breathing black dude. The ideals of socially-aware TV producer Norman Lear were lofty (make working-class TV that wrestled with real-world issues), and seem downright shocking now that TV is depressingly pleasant (by the way, you should also Google Eric Monte and read up on a guy who was crucial to those shows and kind of got screwed), but Hemsley injected a character that was often simplified as "black Archie Bunker" with a three-dimensional personality that was warm, hilarious, and often, very unlikable.

July 26, 2012 – Back In March, Antwon teamed up with director Brandon Tauszik for "Helicopter." Seamlessly mixing the stalwart, dudes-hanging-out-and-drinking-40s formula, with footage from the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt, and a hilarious scene of the San Jose rapper pouring hot sauce all over his waffles, I called it an "early candidate for video of the year." And it still is, right up there with M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls," whose budget was undoubtedly hundreds of times more than "Helicopter." Antwon's video helped highlight what the website GOOD called "The Hidden Economics of Oakland's Rap Bohemia," and how, through a series of favors, goodwill, and a D.I.Y.

July 25, 2012 – Kane Mayfield was one of the many rappers I lumped into the "Guys Who Think It's 1993" category in SPIN's "Hip-Hop Issue" infographic from December of last year. He's from Long Island and he sounds like he's from Long Island, and over the past few years, he's built a reputation that has gotten him some love on, well, the kinds of sites that are mad at a jokes like, "Guys Who Think It's 1993." The first track on Rhymes By Kane is a burst of expertly-rapped, hot-sounding, lyrically-lyrical nonsense; and in lieu of a hook, there's a cool, calm, and collected speech from a kung-fu movie. Pretty typical stuff, except that over the aphorism-spewing sensei, Mayfield provides running Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary: "Victory and defeat are the same.” "I have no idea what the hook is saying; he's like a yoga master and he's saying stuff..." "Seek detachment.

July 24, 2012 – If you've been reading the latest in the endless cycle of complaints about rap music's pernicious influence — Google's colossal waste of time, "Hip-Hop On Trial," from last month; or Touré's Washington Post editorial, "How America and Hip-Hop Failed Each Other," from earlier this month — you would think it was still the late '90s, when shiny, amoral street rap reigned supreme. No matter that the average music listener doesn't associate ambitious superstars like Jay-Z and Kanye West, or walking cartoon characters like Snoop Dogg, or pop panderers like B.o.B. and Flo Rida, with any sort of seriously destructive or reprehensible behavior. The story continues to be that rap music today is a violent, negative scourge tearing apart a once-positive art form.

July 24, 2012 – 2 Chainz is nowhere near as impressive as Lil Wayne or Gucci Mane were at their ubiquitous heights, but what he shares with those hyper-prolific oddball street MCs is an inability to translate their goofy, mixtape power to the radio. On "No Lie" and now, "The Birthday Song" (featuring Kanye West), the first two singles from Based on a TRU Story ("Riot," started out as a mixtape track), 2 Chainz swings and misses. And you can't chalk up these less-than-compelling appearances to “dumbing down,” as was often the case with Wayne and Gucci, who were, at heart, knotty lyricists trying to accommodate a format allergic to knotty lyricists. 2 Chainz's whole appeal is that he's gleefully thoughtless.

July 20, 2012 – Whenever a new and underwhelming song from or featuring Dr. Dre appears and it hurts to hear, just close your eyes, drown out his goofy-ass ghostwritten grunts, and imagine an alternate rap history for the once legendary, now totally coasting producer. One where the G-funk visionary got rid of his ego, didn't spend the past two years or so contriving a big, fancy Detox comeback that'll never happen, and instead, stared down that mound of money he's got because of those stupid headphones, saw it as a nice nest egg, linked up with those Black Hippy fellas for real, and knocked out a Kendrick and company-filled follow-up to Chronic 2001, on some low-stakes, high quality Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 type shit. Screw it, give it away for free, even! But no, we get a clunky verse on a new Rick Ross track that's trying very, very hard to be an event.

July 18, 2012 – Life's Quest, the new album from pimp-rap legend 8ball is the kind of rap record I was blabbing about a couple week ago in regards Too $hort's No Trespassing: Don't let these well-crafted, worker-bee rap releases from legacy artists sneak by, unheard! More cohesive, and a bit more radio-friendly than 8ball's March mixtape Premro, Life's Quest arrives around the same time as Nas' Life Is Good, another middle-aged rap album from a golden era veteran. While this newfound maturity and comfort with age marks something of a sea change for Nasty Nas, it has been 8Ball's approach since day one. He has always seemed like a wizened veteran, even on 1993's career-starter with partner-for-life MJG, Comin' Out Hard. Single "Good Girl Bad Girl" and "Don't Bring Me Down" featuring 2 Chainz and a hypnotic stop-start beat, are low-stakes sex and party jams, respectively.

July 17, 2012 – Azealia Banks is embattled, and I love it. When I spoke with her in February, she brandished her newly-signed record deal with Universal like a weapon aimed at cred-obsessed hipsters: "Now that I've signed my deal it's kinda like I don't need the fucking Internet...You don't have to be on an indie label and eat ramen and make an album on some bullshit-ass mic in some dirty basement." Her noble, hilarious, though surely unwise Twitter attacks on white-girl rap idiots like Kreayshawn and Iggy Azealea, as well as Iggy's inexplicable benefactor, T.I., along with the candor displayed when she clowned the snooze-worthy beats of XL Recordings' Richard Russell in numerous interviews, makes a pretty good case for her not giving much of a fuck.

July 14, 2012 – Was it a coincidence that the original Frank Ocean, Cody Chesnutt, unveiled the Kickstarter for Landing On A Hundred, his full-length follow-up to 2002's The Headphone Masterpiece, the day after Channel Orange arrived on iTunes? Probably not. Actually, it was totally a coincidence. There's like, no way it wasn't. And I'm mostly just being a jerk about the "original Frank Ocean" dig, but hey, go give Cody Chesnutt some of your dough. He's a lo-fi R&B genius from back when such a thing was even less sustainable. Azealia Banks, "Fantasea" Azealia Banks raps awesomely over bleeding edge instrumentals just a little outside the sphere of hip-hop. This is what she did on break-out single "212," and on the songs that followed.