Neil Young

So here’s the deal. Old Neil had his 1959 Lincoln Continental re-jiggered so it could run on some sort of bio-hydro-electric propulsion system, and then he wrote an album about it! Go ahead and consider Fork in the Road a concept work along the lines of Trans, and expect it…

Jim Jones

While many established rappers are being downsized from major-label deals to “independent” contracts, Harlem MC Jim Jones is climbing the food chain. After sharing the limelight with Juelz Santana and friend-turned-foe Cam’ron in Harlem group Dipset, Jones has become the act’s most popular member thanks to his 2006 monster hit…

Bishop Allen, MT. ST. Helens, Vietnam Band, Singsing & Marmar

Poor Bishop Allen. The band was Vampire Weekend before Vampire Weekend was Vampire Weekend. But though both acts possess the same musical chops, the same intellectualized wordplay and the same ear for white people-pleasing ditties, Bishop Allen never caught fire (or received a subsequent backlash) like its fellow New York-based,…

How R&B has descended into Rap and Bullshit

As one of contemporary R&B’s brightest stars, John Legend possesses Grammys and hits galore. But could he be any blander? His twinkling tunes about love and relationships are, at best, serviceable. And, lyrically, he treads the same ground as a hundred other singers. His status as a genre top dog…

Akon

The Smoking Gun Web site exposed Akon earlier this year, unearthing police documents showing he’s greatly exaggerated his arrest record and incarceration time. And so on his third album, Freedom, he downgrades himself from Konvicted (his last CD’s title) to “Troublemaker.” Even this description refers more to his tendencies to…

Plies

Da REAList is not Plies’ meditation on Platonic realism; it’s mostly just demonstrably false braggadocio and sentimental hooey. (He could have eliminated this confusion by calling it Da REALest.) The main problem is that a July Hip Hop DX report showed that, despite his claims to be a lifelong thug,…

Common

Despite his status as a happy, respected old-timer, Common has to rap about something, and his eighth album, Universal Mind Control, is a hodgepodge effort. It contains would-be club bangers full of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and would-be seduction tracks more likely to cause snickers than arousal. Having established a place in…

T-Pain

How has T-Pain done it? He’s not attractive, his fashion sense leaves much to be desired (at least for those lacking Dr. Seuss/LSD fetishes), and his voice is nothing special without the benefit of the computer program Auto-Tune. And yet, considering his hip-hop and R&B radio dominance, critics can’t argue…

The Mighty Underdogs

The Mighty Underdogs is a Bay Area supergroup that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Featuring Quannum Projects vets Gift of Gab from Blackalicious and Lateef the Truthspeaker of Latyrx plus producer Headnodic of Crown City Rockers, the crew simply tries too hard to sound playful…

Deerhunter

Bradford Cox’s oversized persona threatens to overwhelm almost anything his band does. In concert, the singer-songwriter—who has Marfan syndrome and is shockingly thin—sometimes bloodies himself and otherwise makes people uncomfortable. On his group’s blog, he battles music pirates and his own demons. But fans are wise to ignore the hype;…

The Streets

Since rising to international fame in 2002 with the rowdy, inventive Original Pirate Material, British MC Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, has released a series of increasingly sincere albums. Starting with his 2004 narrative-heavy masterpiece A Grand Don’t Come for Free, he has turned his attention to simple, heartfelt odes…

T.I.

While other MCs have created their own bogeymen to battle—Kanye has his ego, Eminem had Kim, Lil Wayne has those cough-syrup Martians—T.I.’s got real problems. Released from house arrest and currently in the midst of 1,500 hours of community service, he still has to serve a year in the clink…

Nelly

Brass Knuckles is Nelly’s Thriller. No kidding. It’s not perfect, but neither was MJ’s magnum opus; it jumped styles and wasn’t particularly cohesive. Likewise, Knuckles skips haphazardly from Dirty South jams to G-funk throwbacks to would-be empowerment anthems. It’s more of a collection of singles than an actual album—but what…

The Game

Rappers and producers who appear on The Game’s third album, LAX, include…everybody. There’s Kanye West, Scott Storch, Travis Barker, Keisha Cole and Ne-Yo, for starters, and Game says he recorded more than 220 tracks for the CD. But with the exception of two admittedly lights-out bangers, “My Life” and “Dope…

Shwayze

Most everything you need to know about horny, go-getting Malibu newcomer Shwayze can be gleaned from this line on “Polaroid,” off his self-titled debut: “Woke up with a semi-hard dick/In a fat chick/Three this week/Call that a hat trick/But everybody know hockey ain’t for black kids.” Yeah, it’s that bad,…

Nas, Talib Kweli

Since his classic debut, Illmatic, Nas has been mostly coasting on his charm, his gift for public relations, and his skills as an MC. But on his latest album, Untitled, he’s clearly hoping that by name-dropping big issues (reparations, single motherhood, media control) and dazzling you with his acrobatic flow…

Black Kids

Last year, Florida quintet Black Kids released a free four-song EP of electro-tinged dance songs addressing themes of incest and gender ambiguity. The girls went wild—well, the bloggers did anyway—and somehow the group got signed to Columbia. Black Kids’ full-length debut, Partie Traumatic, contains the entire EP and six more…

Sane in the Membrane

Lil Wayne is not batshit insane. Let’s be clear about that. Despite the fact that he regularly refers to himself as an extraterrestrial, seems to have an utter disregard for the rule of law and for his health, and kisses his surrogate father on the mouth—despite the objections of the…

N.E.R.D.

N.E.R.D.’s third album is the compact-disc equivalent of an ad campaign trying to appeal to the Red Bull/BlackBerry generation. “We gotta make it passionate,” you can almost hear Pharrell telling the guys in the studio. “And retro! And political! You know, some really fucked-up crazy awesome nuts shit!” And so…

Lil Wayne

Destined to be a stoner classic, Tha Carter III should silence critics who think Lil Wayne can’t make a cohesive album. III is pop rap to giggle to and marvel at, from “Phone Home,” where Wayne gives his outer-space shtick the full treatment, to “Misunderstood,” in which he disses Al…

Fox News Akin To Southern Rap

If there’s one thing the self-satisfied, liberal, tofu-munching, cappuccino-sipping, in vitro fertilization-using coastal elite hate, it’s Fox News. The Rupert Murdoch-owned home to such neoconservative mouthpieces as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity is known for cheerleading the Iraq war and not finding John McCain sufficiently right-wing. It even has the…

Death Cab for Cutie

Narrow Stairs sounds just like Plans, right down to the obvious production, weepy lyrics and inoffensive guitar, continuing Death Cab’s tradition of aping Morrissey lyrics without Moz’s counterintuitive turns of phrase or dark jokes. Songs like “Long Division” seem the product of some sort of indie-rock nerd-crafted lyric generator: “And…