March 23, 2012 – When Danny Brown turned 31 earlier this month, the occasion marked a bigger milestone than it would for most people. Brown's 2011 breakthrough, XXX, alluded to his then-age of 30 in its title as well as in its opening and closing tracks. As that free download album finally receives a physical release, with a limited double-vinyl plus bonus 7" edition due out on April 21 for Record Store Day, the idiosyncratic Detroit rapper looks to be on the brink of something big at an age when too many MCs are already considered washed up. "Us older rappers can say it, and we know the outcomes of the street, but the kids are living it," he acknowledged in a recent Village Voice interview. "Grown Up," which premiered yesterday at the Fader, is, like all things Brown, a hybrid.

March 22, 2012 – Call her Game Genie. Rye Rye cracks video game after video game in the new video for feather-light electro-pop earworm "Boom Boom," from the Baltimore rapper-singer's long-awaited Go! Pop! Bang! (due out May 15). It's a winning approach for the song, which already resembles video game music in its Vengaboys-derived hi-NRG simplicity. Where Lana Del Rey prefers to watch her man play "Video Games," Rye Rye would rather take over. And where recent video game release Street Fighter X Tekken combines two rival fighting game series, the video for "Boom Boom" mashes up elements from old-school games of all stripes, with the colorfully coiffed popster always as the star.

March 22, 2012 – Jason Mattera finally bum-rushed the wrong liberal celebrity. Which, well, the person he ambushed wasn't a celebrity at all. Mattera, a conservative activist who gained attention for previous gotcha-style interviews involving Chris Rock and Vice President Joe Biden, earlier this week posted a video purporting to show him firing tough questions about taxes at U2 frontman Bono during a pre-Grammy event in Los Angeles. The trouble is, he was directing his charges of hypocrisy at a Bono impersonator, who didn't even bother to answer in an Irish accent and was actually kind enough to throw in some hints that he's not the real McCoy, er, um, Bono. Gawker calls out a particularly amusing exchange: Mattera: You have no say in what U2 does? Bono: Not particularly. Mattera: You don't?

March 22, 2012 – Cornershop's 1997 breakthrough When I Was Born for the Seventh Time is a quintessential example of a record that awoke listeners with a forward-thinking sound in the moment. The Anglo-Indian outfit led by Tjinder Singh are having a different kind of moment now: As online connectivity has made the pop world so small that Switch, Q-Tip, Nick Zinner, and Buraka Som Sistema all have production credits on Santigold's hotly anticipated new album, here's Cornershop merging elements of dub, hip-hop, and Singh's own Punjabi folk roots on "Milkin' It," the groove-driven advance track from May 15 album Urban Turban (itself the follow-up to last year's sadly slept-on Cornershop & the Double O Groove Of). Directed by Astrid Edwards, the video spotlights the Oakland, California, dance style known as turf dancing.

March 22, 2012 – "Now everybody seen that shit," Kendrick Lamar boasts coolly at the end of "The City," from Game's tepidly received summer 2011 release The R.E.D. Album. And everybody really has: The younger of the two West Coast rappers demonstrated his criminally high-wattage star power at SXSW, made the jump to Interscope for his next album, and demonstrated not only impressive technique but also, more importantly, a distinctive conscious-yet-totally-fucked-up perspective to one of last year's best rap albums, debut Section.80. He also shared the mic with hip-hop up-and-comers from Tech N9ne to Drake (and, more recently, Gunplay). Lamar's guest spot on "The City," for its part, is a passing-of-the-torch moment on an album with only flickers of Game's old fire.

March 22, 2012 – "Semper fidelis," the U.S. Marine Corps' slogan, takes on an an ironic shade of meaning in the military-themed new video for Katy Perry's latest single, "Part of Me" (from aptly titled March 26 deluxe reissue Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection). The Latin means "always faithful," and Perry's lover in the clip — who, as it happens, looks more like Chris Martin than real-life ex Russell Brand — decidedly isn't. As singles from Perry's chart-dominating 2010 album Teenage Dream go, her latest uptempo electro-popper isn't as frothily exuberant as, say, "California Gurls," but in the weeks since its debut the recent pop No.

March 16, 2012 – The second track to leak from Killer Mike's upcoming album, R.A.P. Music, produced entirely by El-P, is a different animal, but no less ferocious. The Atlanta rap firebrand and the New York indie-rap luminary previously brought together their respective brands of non-self-righteous righteousness on "Big Beast," a clanging, exuberant burst of fury featuring Southern aplomb courtesy of T.I. and Bun B. A second cut, this one titled "Untitled," premiered earlier today on satellite-radio channel Shade 45's Sway on the Morning. While it's a more contemplative, solitary affair, it's similarly compelling. This morning, Killer Mike introduced the track, saying it was inspired by the thoughts of mortality that truth-speaking civil rights leaders must have shortly before they're killed, and he said his grandmother recently died in his arms, which, wow.

March 16, 2012 – Hot Chip's new album In Our Heads won't be here until June 12, but the British dance-poppers are already looking ahead to the summer. "Flutes," the first track from the group's upcoming debut for Domino (and follow-up to 2010's One Life Stand), is euphoric 21st-century disco that stretches out for nearly eight sun-baked minutes, with deceptively bittersweet lyrics. Pitchfork brings us the track's low-key in-studio video, which basically involves the camera going around in circles to such an extent you might be better off looking away while you listen. Unless giddy disorientation is the point? "One day you might realize / That you might need to open your eyes," goes the song's serenely cooed mantra. It's not so different from the indie electro-pop of its predecessors, albeit with a broader, more club-oriented palette. Earlier today, Hot Chip also announced their summer tour.

March 16, 2012 – For those keeping score at home, Nas has notched two great songs in a row — hard-edged, hurtling New York Hip-Hop Master Classes that have mostly eluded him over the past decade-plus. Nine months ago, "Nasty" showed the '90s hip-hop legend could still do a virtuosic, no-hooks verbal tour de force over take-no-prisoners production. On his latest, "The Don," Nasir Jones stays in the NYC rap lane where he can still out-race just about everyone. It's a cause for celebration. In recent years, Nas has frustrated his longtime followers with media-baiting album titles and empty political slogans, to the point where it's hard to know when it's safe to get excited.

March 16, 2012 – The tracks to surface from Odd Future's long-awaited OF Tape Vol. 2 so far, "Rella" and "NY (Ned Flander)," have mostly been in keeping with the L.A. hip-hop crew's familiar shock-rap template, accompanied with harsh beats, child-abuse jokes and woman-smacking videos. Enter Frank Ocean. "White," the mixtape's only solo joint, is different, and grandly so. "Could this be Earth? / Could this be light? / Does this mean everything's going to be all right?" begins the supple-voiced singer-songwriter, atop sustained keyboard chords, his spacey vocal echo and slightly spacier lyrics all that separate this gentle koan from, say, vintage Stevie Wonder. After continuing his wonderfully emotive meditation on love, maturity, and, you know, the stars and the planets and such, all the way through to a TV analogy, he's done by the minute-and-a-half mark.