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.

July 13, 2012 – On Monday Courthouse News Service revealed that DITC producer/rapper Lord Finesse is suing annoying frat rapper Mac Miller, Miller's label Rostrum Records, and mixtape hub DatPiff, over the unauthorized use of his "Hip 2 Da Game," which serves as the instrumental for Miller's breakout track "Kool-Aid & Frozen Pizza." The 2010 song was given away as a free download on the mixtape Kickin' Incredible Dope Shit and never sold, so there are no direct profits from Miller's beat-jacking.

July 12, 2012 – The history of hip-hop is predicated upon someone doing something that somebody else told them they weren't allowed to do. At the beginning, it was idyllic mythmaking stuff like turning a turntable into a musical instrument and scratching the damn records. Then, it's N.W.A and other rappers deciding that violent lyrics no longer have to be a metonym for mad skills and can mean actually murdering people. When Nas cherry-picked the finest producers from his city and sculpted a classic, bending the one-rapper-one-producer rule, it was a bit of a cheat. So was Puff Daddy and friends sampling the most obvious hits with little panache. And, the 50 Cent of his 50 Cent Is The Future mixtape era, rapping over other peoples' beats and talking unprecedented levels of shit, was too.Those were all "Oh wait, you can do that?" moments. And rap quickly absorbed these shortcuts and never looked back.

July 11, 2012 – As of late, the best releases from the Stones Throw/Madlib Invazion camp have been exercises in extremes. They're either big, obnoxious beat-tape tomes like Jonwayne's Oodles of Doodles and Madlib Medicine Show series, or bite-sized, near rip-offs that leave you wanting more, like Homeboy Sandman's EPs (Subject: Matter and Chimera), and the Thuggin' EP from Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, a confusing gangsta/indie crossover that arrived before Killer Mike and El-P.

July 9, 2012 – Above the Law's KMG the Illustrator, who died on Saturday, begins "Murder Rap" from the West Coast group's 1990 debut Livin' Like Hustlers with some Flavor Flav-like words of encouragement for his rhyming partner and producer, Cold 187um: "Yo, Cold 187, they tryin' to give you a murder rap / And you ain't even like that / Yo, serve the niggas, cause they deserve to get dissed." KMG often played the tough-guy cheerleader to Cold 187's swaggering quarterback, though those times when he does rap more extensively, he earns his moniker "The Illustrator." From Livin' Like Hustlers' title track: "KMG, the number-one mack daddy / Eatin' chicken like a motherfucker, rollin' in my caddy / With my brim cold bent to the side, I bump and slide / Go mack in the back, 187 to the side / Street pilgrims, pioneering the land / Above-the-law status, with a gat in my hand." Those first few lines are, wel

July 6, 2012 – Heads up to anybody who was entertained by my interview a few months back with underground comics dude and Lil B cover artist Benjamin Marra. His latest comic book, Lincoln Washington: Free Man, is now available to purchase, via Traditional Comics. Like Marra's Gangsta Rap Posse, it's a pulpy, often absurd satire in the guise of a revenge tale that's not for the squeamish or easily offended. Marra's one of the few guys in comics really pondering race in a way that is brave and dicey. He isn't just doing, say, what New Yorker-approved graphic novelists like Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes do when acknowledging America's history of racism — directly tying it to just how horrible everything seems to be.

July 5, 2012 – There is an Internet niche for everything, so who even knows what "slept-on" means anymore. Here, my definition here leans towards those releases during the past three months that seemingly came and went with little to no fanfare, or were met by a majority of websites and blogs with a shrug or an, "Eh, pretty good." It's my experience that a lot of "pretty good" records turn out to be masterpieces that need to sit there and really stick in your craw, and that often, the appeal of those amazing-from-first-listen records decreases exponentially. There's "good" and then there's good, and sometimes you have to slow down to appreciate an album, and very few of us have that kind of time. Or, we've convinced ourselves we don't have that time.