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.

July 5, 2012 – Ubiquitous major-label last great hope 2 Chainz makes four appearances on this list. None of those appearances are on any of his own songs, though he is a nice addition to each and everyone of them, particularly "Beez In The Trap," where he mentions Nicki Minaj's "doo-hickey." But this is just the story of major-label rap music this year: A whole lot of nothing you didn't ask for, to get to that something you actually want to hear. And so, to provide a little more variety to this glorified list of my favorite songs from the first six months of 2012, I've included some non-rap picks, as well. 50 Cent, feat. Kidd Kidd "O.J." Fiddy goes dumb, samples Kirby's Epic Yarn, makes his best song since "Ski Mask Way." Ab-Soul "Pineal Gland" DMT is a moderately popular, kind of scary drug, and it still is. BBU, feat.

July 2, 2012 – Don't take Kanye West's petulance for granted. When he jumps on a stage and turns a Taylor Swift victory into a muddled comment on white standards of talent and beauty, or interrupts a well-groomed live broadcast to remind everyone that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," it's big, dumb grandstanding and, in its own contrived Kanye way, speaking truth to power. His simple appearance — ambitious, bold, often crude — is a culture jam: Kanye standing, stone-faced at Occupy Wall Street confusing corporate and ticking off Zucotti Park's denizens; the swirling decadence of the "Power" video, premiering after a body-shot and fist-pump-filled episode of Jersey Shore; the tedious playing of an MPC for an MTV Music Awards audience that doesn't know or care what the heck a drum machine does. The latest Kanye culture jam crashed through last night's BET Awards.

June 29, 2012 – Three of this week's five songs aren't rap songs. And of the two rap songs included, only one of them is actually any good. The other is like, mind-bogglingly stupid. I don't know, man, this is just what I'm into this week. It's certainly representative of where my head is at. I'm consumed with the idea that rap fusion is finally like, a thing that musicians have figured out how to do, you know? I don't mean party pop with a Flo Rida verse wedged in there, or this "post-regional" B.S. that people who know nothing about hip-hop keep blathering on about. And not the hipster redundancy that is the "trap remix" trend, either. I'm talking like, delicately mixing influences. That's what this week's Friday Five demonstrates, I think.

June 28, 2012 – Last night, Danny Brown, still running on the momentum of last year's Fool's Gold-released XXX (SPIN's rap album of the year), performed on our office rooftop — a short set full of screaming-all-the-lyrics love and a fairly off-the-chain vibe for a SPIN Live event sponsored by Thrillist and Jack Threads. A roof full of people bleated back "blunt after blunt after blunt after blunt" into the night air, the number of New Yorkers too cool to participate shrinking each time Danny threw the mic in the direction of the crowd. Brown went in on his strongest, weirdest stuff, leaning towards newer tracks (XXX deluxe edition track "Witit," his A-Trak and Juicy J collaboration "Piss Test"), anchoring the set around what can only be accurately described as a suite of pussy-eating songs.

June 27, 2012 – Conservative columnist David Brooks is just smart enough to get by. He's armed with hubris that allows him to wander out of his house and fit whatever he sees into an already formed thesis that sounds pretty reasonable if you don't think about it too hard. Yesterday's column by Brooks, a wide-eyed, close-minded Stanley Crouch rip-off called "The Power of the Particular," is ostensibly about seeing Bruce Springsteen in Spain and France. But woah, man, you know all those foreigners over there in Europe? Well, despite not being born in the U.S.A., they somehow manage to relate to the Boss' distinctly American/New Jersey sensibility because it's just so authentic and real, and, why, that got David Brooks thinking about how pandering politicians and bantering business fucks reaching for universality have just got it all wrong.

June 26, 2012 – Because it makes for some nice PR copy, the relative youth of an MC has become something of a big deal. But all the excitement over teenaged rappers that act like teenagers like Tyler, the Creator (19 years old when Bastard began to buzz), Chief Keef (16), Joey Bada$$ (17), or Kitty Pryde (19) seems pretty ridiculous when you consider the fact that Rakim was 19 when Paid in Full dropped, and Mobb Deep's Prodigy famously rapped, "I'm only 19, but my mind is older," on "Shook Ones Pt. 2." The whole point of praising some precocious prick teen who made a rap album is not that they did it, but that they did it very well, and seemed wise beyond their years.

June 22, 2012 – How do you honor an R&B legend? Do you drop said legend in 2012, pair them with hip musicians like Damon Albarn and buzzy artists like Lana Del Rey and take full advantage of their straggly old man voice, as is the case with Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man In The Universe? I don't think so. This new Womack record makes a good case for his scruffy old dude mortality, but who cares, because this is music we're talking about. The cool kids sure do love redundancy, though, don't they? Womack has a whole discography of pain and loss and mordant humanity, but that isn't enough, it's all gotta be underlined and highlighted with broken-down electronic beats and ghostly vocal samples. I think in a few years, The Bravest Man will sound about as dated as the quiet storm-tinged '80s records Womack has pretty much disowned. There are exciting ways to selfishly reinvent a artist from the past.

June 22, 2012 – Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, features everybody from the Cold Crush Brothers' Grandmaster Caz to Common, hanging out and discussing the intricacies of their craft. Director and host Ice-T's OG status gives him the access that similarly styled "art of rapping," straight-to-DVD docs like The MC: Why We Do It could never obtain. The relatively high-profile of this documentary also affords it the chance to reach out to a larger and therefore, more hip-hop ignorant audience, and perhaps, convert them.

June 20, 2012 – Tito Lopez's "Mama Proud" has that rough, bubbling with passion intensity symptomatic of MCs too big for their hometown, but maybe a little too ragged to really break through. We'll see. "Mama Proud" currently sits at No. 91 on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Much of the song's charm comes from realizing that there is absolutely nothing cool about it. This is some stridently traditional hip-hop, with a beat that's thoroughly boom-bappy though foggy enough to swirl around like the smeary R&B that's all the rage right now, and on the hook, the Gulfport, Mississippi rapper intones, "I just want my momma to be proud of me, that's all I want," which is devastating and adorable, and kind of badass, all at once. Lopez has been co-signed by Dr.