May 2, 2012 – Blame criticisms of Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded — that it's half great, half disaster — on the inelegant transition from "Champion," a slow rolling rap track that ends with a furious verse from Nas, to "Right By My Side" a sunny turd of a slow jam turd featuring Chris fucking Brown. It's jarring, and it declares "rapping's over, time for pop," which turns out to be only half-true. Pull "Right By My Side" and the next track, "Sex in the Lounge" off the album (and while you're at it, Beenie Man collaboration, "Gun Shot"), and Roman Reloaded is a solid, always entertaining, sometimes frustrating major label rap album. Recall that Pink Friday wasn't received that much better. Back then, a whole year and a half ago, the narrative was that guest-verse scene-stealer Nicki gave in to pressure to go pop. That doesn't seem true.

April 27, 2012 – Gonna be one of those guys that talks about some New York party you totally weren't at and all, but man Waka Flocka Flame performing at SPIN's party for the new issue was nuts. Waka played an entire set! Wooh Da Kid was there! People were dancing! Usually these types of things are as perfunctory as possible, with the center of attention wandering up and half-assedly playing the new single and calling it a night. Nope, 45 minutes of Flocka! And the percentage of people wilding out to stone-faced, hands-in-pockets types was pretty much even! I know it's New York and we're all supposed to be boring and classy, but this is Waka Flocka show! Come on! At one point, one of my fellow rap moshers dropped their phone and everyone around her politely stopped going nuts and helped her find it. PLUR at a Flocka show. It warmed my heart.

April 27, 2012 – I know you're tired of the Tupac hologram talk, but it's hard for me to shake that spectacle from my mind. Like I said last week: A big dumb CGI Tupac was Dr. Dre's big idea, while the mega talented multitudes of Black Hippy hung out somewhere on the Coachella premises. It speaks to Dre holding tight to a '90s vision of massive rap stardom and event-making that doesn't really exist anymore. Does he even enjoy standing on a stage and cranking out the hits? You know that story about Brian Eno's plan to "accidentally" erase the hours U2 recorded of "Where the Streets Have No Name," forcing them to start over? ScHoolboy Q should find the Detox hard drive and spill some syrup on it or something. Dr. Dre should stop chasing hits and memes and just make a guest-filled, immaculately produced, weed and girls, rappin' ass party record in the vein of The Chronic and The Chronic 2001.

April 26, 2012 – When you're Goodie Mob and you're dressed in costumes best described as Jobriath meets C3PO meets Earth, Wind, and Fire, and the world's sexiest douchebag, Adam Levine, is emphatically nodding his head to your latest single, "Fight to Win," a Queen-esque a platitude-filled, pomp and circumstance, no-burner with lots of Cee-Lo singing and not much Goodie Mob at all, you've done fucked up. "Fight to Win" is an exercise in not saying anything — like the worst lyrics from Common's Finding Forever stitched together into inspirational nonsense: "I am fighting, for the liberation, of voices, with something to say." The brilliance of Goodie Mob was the way they could flesh out the sentimental and reinvigorate clichés by surrounding them with wise, lived-in raps.

April 20, 2012 – As Phillip over at Control Voltage observed, Record Store Day doesn't tend to be too exciting for fans of stuff that doesn't have guitars. And Record Store Day has a particularly dicey relationship with rap music. As I mentioned in my rant about that moronic New York Times Magazine piece, "record store" has come to mean "indie rock-friendly chillspot," and those places, which RSD mostly services (and rewards with the coolest, best stuff) are quite different from the "mom and pop" places that'll sell you mixtapes and might stock the latest Z-Ro album. There's also last year's controversy in which many of the independent record stores involved with RSD signed an open letter to Jay-Z and Kanye West about their decision to release Watch The Throne exclusively on iTunes and Best Buy for the first two weeks, before indie shops got to sell it.

April 20, 2012 – Last week, I received a package in the mail from a Chicago artist and DJ named Meaghan Garvey. It made my day. Included were Illuminati-themed prints of Nicki Minaj and Rick Ross, some hand-drawn Notorious B.I.G. stickers, and "The Illustrated Juicy," a 31-page chapbook that moves through the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy," with a drawing accompanying every few lines. The cover is, according to her Etsy page, "an authentic scanned Coogi formerly owned by [her] dad." There are also some very nice-looking prayer candles of Aayliah, Ghostface Killah, Left Eye, Lil B, Nicki Minaj, R. Kelly, and Rick Ross. It gave me the same feeling as Lil B cover artist and underground comix dude Benjamin Marra's work, and that's a good feeling. Check out Garvey's Etsy shop here and her Soundcloud here. Ab-Soul "Pineal Gland" Jesus Christ, rappers, slow down with the druggin'!

April 19, 2012 – Something is going on with this Future album. Or it's the logical conclusion of something. Maybe something is being turned into a new something. I really don't know. Flicking around in the background of Pluto, fighting with all of that incessant Auto-Tune, is the familiar stomp of Southern hip-hop. But Future's kicking against that aggressive sound with his effects-assisted sincerity. Occasionally, he concedes to Atlanta rap's visceral appeal — on "Tony Montana" (terrible, possibly autistic, novelty rap) and "Same Damn Time" (awesome, possibly autistic, catchphrase rap) — then he collapses back to the ground, burdened with the pain of the world. Hearts are broken. Uncles try to off themselves, fail, and try again. You get so high you get freaked out. And you think about being successful and it brings a tear to your eye.

April 17, 2012 – While I was reading "Hip-Hop Culture In Small Town America," the recent New York Times piece on Roanoke, Virginia, photographer Jared Soares, I also happened to be listening to NPR's Fresh Air With Terry Gross. The guest that day was Aziz Ansari and Gross seemed amazed that the self-deprecating comedian could hang out with guys like Jay-Z and Kanye West. Ansari, who stressed these megastars' humanity, played along, as well. He joked, "There's just not a self-deprecating rapper; that wouldn't work. If you're a rapper and you're like, 'I saw this girl, but I was too scared' — that doesn't work." Gross' blanket assumptions about rappers (or her audience's idea of "rappers") stuck in my craw because I was staring at Soares' gentle, thoughtful photos of rappers a world removed from the stereotypes that even well-meaning, public-radio hosts internalize.

April 16, 2012 – Dr. Dre is no longer one of hip-hop's best producers, but his Coachella performance with Snoop Dogg Sunday night finds the legendary beatmaker positioning himself as hip-hop's finest producer of camp.

April 13, 2012 – The NYU lecture thinkpiece deluge has me unsure of what kind of Lil B fan is the most annoying. Is it the scoffing LOLZ #BASED GOD hecklers? Or the new sincerists who take Lil B's boilerplate positivity a little too seriously, then spend their time scoffing at those who don't take it seriously? Guys, aggressive positivity is its own kind of obnoxious cynicism! Another type of condescension occurs when you turn his on-mushrooms epiphanies into something actually profound. Plus, that isn't even what makes Lil B interesting, anyway. His whole deal is how he takes rap's inherent contradictions and polarities to another level of absurdity. His works is affecting because of the multitude of ideas its contains. He is not a tragic new-age martyr.