February 22, 2013 – Did you watch Life Is But a Dream, the Beyoncé documentary? Of course you did. Well, there's an interesting sequence of events in which  Beyoncé, who is so famous that she's supposed to start pushing that whole self-made myth, instead addresses the still-ridiculous reality that women make less money than men. Obviously, that affords men way more resources and ways to control how women are presented. Around the same time in the documentary, you get to hear Bey stridently but politely tell her crew that they are fucking up big time. Not long after that, you get footage of choreographer Frank Gaston Jr. freaking out at the dancers for not gluing their hats to their heads to hold them in place. It's a moment of contrast, a subtle one really, that presents someone being cool, calm, and collected, and contrasts it with a moment of candid frustration.

February 22, 2013 – Let's just get this out of the way because at this point, the show is in full-on competition mode and these contestants actually kind of matter. Wednesday night's show narrowed the women contestants down to Tina, Kree, Angela, Amber, and Adriana. Thursday night's show gave us these dudes, in the end: Devin, Charlie , Elijah, Curtis, and Paul. Okay, the actually interesting stuff.You really can't underestimate how important Nicki Minaj is for American Idol, this year. She's the only breathing judge, and just when you you thought that fact couldn't become more palpable, Jimmy Iovine entered the picture.

February 20, 2013 – Where'd all the good Internet rap go? Rappers of all stripes from all over the map, meeting on Mediafire, felt so necessary a year or two ago. Now, that scene has congealed into an endless loop of RSS-feeding “collabos,” irksome nostalgia trips, and PR firms and quasi-labels shoving all the interesting, engaging personalities who don't play the game to the side. We're stuck with Joey Bada$$, Spaceghostpurrp, and a metastasizing clump of interchangeable, attention-starved streetwear-rockin', Tumblr-surfin' douchebags who show up for a few months before cashing-out for blog love. It's as codified as the old underground. A$AP Rocky looks pretty promising these days.Good thing there's Antwon, now signed to Greedhead, and in his own miniature way, having something of a mini-moment, but continuing to make willfully strange, deeply personal rap music.

February 19, 2013 – Baauer's "Harlem Shake," that squeaky, wubby trap-dance instrumental that has, over the past few weeks, gone full-on viral thanks to endless videos of people dancing to the song, is a moderately interesting slab of post-drop dubstep or EDM. But the Harlem Shake is already a dance. A once-popular and very loaded dance, at that. A few decades old, it rose to the mainstream in 2001 thanks to Harlem rapper G. Dep (“Let's Get It” and “Special Delivery”) and later on, in a slightly mutated form, as the Chicken Noodle Soup via DJ Webstar's 2006 song of the same name. And the actual Harlem Shake — a joyful, free-for-all rhythmic vibration of one's body — is quite different from the meme dancing found in these "Harlem Shake" videos, which is just kind of people wilding out in front of a camera.Appropriately, the television show Totally Biased With W.

February 15, 2013 – So, Fox News hired Herman Cain. This will be fun. More importantly though, it is a chance to resurrect my dream remix project: Jamie xx & Herman Cain's We're New Here. Come on bored DJs. The instrumentals for Jamie xx & Gil Scott Heron's remix record are readily available. By the end of week one, Cain will have delivered enough legendary nonsense to flesh this thing out. Glitch-ify some of the vocals, slur a few, layer it over Jamie's beats and you will make my year. Savvy photoshoppers, get working on the cover!Gucci Mane ft.

February 15, 2013 – So, Randy Jackson was absent for much of Wednesday's show because he was “busy in the studio.” Is Aldo Nova recording a comeback record? What could the only remaining O.G. American Idol judge have to do that's more important than the show? Kind of feel like he just caught feelings because Keith Urban gets to wander off whenever he wants to, and Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey's lateness was a plot point a few weeks back. Not to mention, the dude's entire angle this year has been how he's the seasoned professional who has been in the biz for decades and knows music, so everybody else just needs to fall back. And now he's laying some bass lines down somewhere ignoring his Idol duties?As you can probably tell by my cheap shots, I'm really stalling here.

February 14, 2013 – The first thing you'll notice about Waka Flocka Flame's DuFlocka Rant 2 (besides the stunning, syrup-rave lurch production), is how often other rappers steal the tape out from under him. Lil Wayne, who has been flopping around for years now, gets witty again on "Stay Hood," threatening to "beat yo' ass with [his] skateboard." That's him straight-up owning his mall-prick douchebaggery, and turning a supposed negative — just like say, being a martian or a weedhead — into a positive.

February 13, 2013 – How about that brostep State of the Union address advertisement? Did Tim & Eric direct that thing, giggling the whole time? Nevertheless, contrast it with Republican hero of the moment Marco Rubio (who will soften on some all-important policy or another and be abandoned soon enough), and his perfunctory nods to '90s hip-hop and Democratic wub-wub-wub is, well, at least contemporary. Maureen Dowd's "The Rap on Rubio" in the New York Times takes on Rubio's rap shtick, and acknowledges the only curious element of this recent GOP move: "Gangsta rap used to be a reliable issue for politicians, but they were denouncing it,” she writes, “now Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is praising it." That's right-wing progress.

February 12, 2013 – David Ayer's End of Watch, now out on DVD, is a jittery, picaresque cop drama that follows Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Richard Peña), two well-meaning, good-hearted though bro-ish cops in Los Angeles. The movie makes no wrong turns and never stumbles, despite being ostensibly caught up in a chintzy found-footage conceit and saddled with a loaded, unabashedly pro-police stance. At the least, director and writer Ayer does not believe that each and every person with a badge is a racist piece of garbage, which is sort of a big deal in the intellectually rigorous American crime genre.Heroism exists in End of Watch, even though our heroes, upon saving some children from a burning building, admit they don't feel like heroes much at all.

February 12, 2013 – The Carioca Bass EP, out now on Little Owl Recordings, is a collaboration between Brazillian MC Zuzuka Poderosa and Bay Area beatmaker Kush Arora. They're mining the still-fertile world of baile funk, tweaking the formula made popular by bigtime musical globetrotters like Diplo until it rubs up against an ever-expanding global bass music scene that's still figuring itself out (and never standing still).The EP is set up like an old-fashioned dance 12-inch, with two mean tracks ("Pisicodelia," an almost industrial Lady D-like smack upside the head, and "Seda") and a whole bunch of wide-eyed remixes (including contributions from Chrissy Murderbot and CEE). "Seda" is a pro-pot, anti-criminalization party track that's all peaks and no valleys, one storm of grinding energy after another, with a gloriously extended beginning of choppy muffled grunts.