August 1, 2009 – MOST HEAVILY QUESTIONED GENRE: HIP HOPWith the Beastie Boys originally set to headline (before cancelling due to Adam Yauch's cancer-surgery announcement) and Jay-Z stepping in Friday as their replacement, the first afternoon and evening of All Points West 2009 took on a vaguely beats-and-rhymes orientation -- from the eagerly flailing hipster rap of the Knux to the reformed Pharcyde's good-natured '90s-jukebox to the lyrically elaborate "hypnotical gases" released by a reunited Organized Konfusion to Flying Lotus' torrent of perpetually tweaked beats to Q Tip's solo live-band excursions to Peanut Butter Wolf's always witty lessons on past/present/future, and Jay-Hova's thunderous Vegas-with-a-full-clip extravaganza that closed the rather grueling, rain-battered, mud-caked day. But what was strangely notable was how virtually every act (save Flying Lotus and Peanut Butter Wolf) repeated

August 1, 2009 – A product of the Brooklyn projects during the 1980s crack era, Mos Def is a hip-hop lifer, despite his frequent forays into Hollywood. And he's unafraid to call out his peers: "Extended exposure to commercial rap has got to have some sort of negative psychological impact." Dante "Mos Def" Smith walks the walk and talks the talk — literally. This past May, he led me on a four-hour interview ramble around Manhattan's SoHo and West Village, stopping into bodegas and smoke shops, greeting fans, giving hugs and pounds, posing for cellphone photos, like the hip-hop ambassador of some conscious-rap dream sequence. But the Brooklyn-born MC, 35, is a knottier figure than such hail-fellow appearances imply.

July 2, 2009 – "This is your anticlimax." So spake a snickering Andrew VanWyngarden, as he prepared to play the final selection of MGMT's set at Brooklyn's Prospect Park Bandshell on Wednesday night, July 1. (See a complete photo gallery of the MGMT show here.)We'd all spent the last five minutes or so hopping and swaying and grinning and giggling and hugging and wondering if we'd hallucinated those fireworks over the trees while VanWyngarden and partner Ben Goldwasser ditched their guitar and keyboards, respectively, grabbed their mics off the stands, and led the sold-out, thousands-strong crowd in a sing-along of "Kids," the 2008 boys-and-girls-of-summer anthem for anybody who ever invoked the word "hipster," ironically or otherwise. They worked the stage like fresh-faced Borgata lounge vets, as the familiar synth melody echoed comfortingly. But now that was over.

June 1, 2009 – When are reunion shows not just about a nostalgic dollar day? When the music and message still have the same vibrant snap of relevance that they did before the artist cashed out. And throughout the first of two sold-out shows this past Saturday night at New York's Nokia Theatre Times Square, Mos Def and Talib Kweli's homecoming as the duo Black Star intermittently flickered with that potential to shine anew. It was a sketchy, lengthy prelude to the headliners, however.

May 22, 2009 – Stuttering slightly, leaning up and back, running a hand through his thick, inky spray of goth-teen hair, Jack White finds himself in an extremely unfamiliar situation -- at a loss for words. Perched on a black couch in the stylish sitting area of his Third Man Records compound in downtown Nashville, the 33-year-old empire-builder grasps to explain why a certain song by his new band, the Dead Weather, expresses a harsh honesty he's never before approached. "It's a climax...of the last few years, of everything, it means so much more, um, I dunno," he says, his words running together. "I don't know whether to cry or laugh out loud when I think about it." Confident, defensive, forceful, evasive, impassioned, standoffish, playful, anxious: An array of conflicting adjectives comes to mind when White holds forth -- but rarely baffled, let alone vulnerable.

May 11, 2009 – It was the night of a thousand shooshes. And with good reason. This past Friday's intimate benefit show at Housing Works bookstore in New York's Soho neighborhood was an acoustically nuanced, elaborately voiced performance by the Brooklyn-based indie-rock theoreticians Dirty Projectors featuring pop's most likable experimentalist, Bjork. And everyone -- most of all the patrons who paid $100-$400 a ticket -- wanted to hear every carefully composed strum and croon and otherworldly hocket (listen here). So they shooshed. The unplugged evening -- instigated by Stereogum.com writer Brandon Stosuy after he discovered that Björk and Dirty Projectors leader David Longstreth were fans of each other's work -- was divided into three sections.

May 5, 2009 – Eminem has every right to portray the character of a serial killer, as he does in his new "3 A.M." video. But does he bear any artistic responsibility to explore, in even the most remote way, why that character is doing what he's doing? Motivation? Context? Anything? At one point, he sing-songs, "She puts the lotion in the bucket / He puts the lotion in the bucket," referencing The Silence of the Lambs in a half-hearted attempt at a psychosexual one-liner. But it just seems random and embarrassing. In the video, Eminem plays "a hooligan who's used to usin' hallucinogens," a shirtless, homicidal basket case who flashes back to scenes of mass slaughter that he can't remember committing.

April 17, 2009 – Whenever I've walked into a great independent record store for the first time -- from Wax 'N Facts in Atlanta to Wuxtry in Athens, Georgia, to Charlemagne in Birmingham, Alabama, to Aquarius or Amoeba in San Francisco to Village Music in Mill Valley, California, to Waterloo in Austin, Texas, to Dusty Groove in Chicago to Pier Platters in Hoboken to Birdell's or Beat Street in Brooklyn to Music Factory or Finyl Vinyl or Vinyl Mania or Fat Beats or the old Times Square Record Mart, or dozens of others in Manhattan -- I've been intimidated to the point of speechlessness. But it wasn't because I was afraid the one asshole clerk was gonna embarrass me for asking a stupid question -- though that has happened occasionally and isn't an irrational fear.

April 16, 2009 – If your beef with today's crop of rock bands is that they're sexless, style-challenged dweebs who play their instruments like they're afraid to break a nail, then the Dead Weather certainly corrected that situation Tuesday night during their first-ever public show at a packed Bowery Ballroom on Manhattan's Lower East Side. During the band's encore, "Hang You From the Heavens," singer Alison Mosshart (also of the Kills) -- a wraith-thin tangle of bird's-nest black hair, cigarette smoke, leather, and lipstick -- spat the sacrilegiously nasty come-on: "I wanna grab you by the hair, and drag you to the devil," as the trio in black behind her sounded like a late-'60s/early-'70s gang of white afro'd skeeves (plus a ringer Latin percussionist) in bell-bottoms, tiny tight t-shirts, mustaches, and unlicensed handguns, working out a four-minute version of rock, blues, funk, and soul, that would l

April 7, 2009 – The weirdest thing to me, so far, about Eminem's rather bewildering new single/video "We Made You" (an apparent effort to defibrillate "The Real Slim Shady") is that when I clicked over to watch it this morning on the blog of Em's manager, Paul Rosenberg, the first thing that popped up was an awkwardly comedic ad for "My Navy My Future," a recruiting campaign funded by the U.S. Navy.