Personally, I'm somewhere between the two. Yeah, Badu and Portishead dropped two monster records this year that pretty much sonned nearly every hip-hop full-length. But Bun B, El-P, EMC, Elzhi, Metaform, Why? and The Kidz In the Hall have all made albums that I would've happily purchased had the Internet not turned the music world into a cheap all-you-can-eat buffet. Moreover, the year has produced a bonanza (yes, a bonanza) of great singles, many of which are on albums still forthcoming (in theory).

So if you've glossed over most of what I've posted this year in hopes of the rare chance that I'll make fun of the Iron Sheik or something, the muxtapes are below. I purposely omitted songs that were on my first tape, so "Royal Flush" didn't make it despite being easily one of the year's best songs. Next time, I'll do best non-hip hop stuff for the four of you into that sort of thing. In the meantime, peep the tapes below to find 24 of the finest rap songs made by rappers that contain rapping, sometimes in rhythm, occasionally on-beat, often high. In the words of William Mulholland, "There it is. Take it."

Weiss' Muxtape #3: The Best Hip-Hop Songs of the Year Part 1

Weiss' Muxtape #4: The Best Hip-Hop Songs of the Year Part II

Once upon a time, near the dawn of this decade, James Lavelle's Mo'Wax label ruled the record store import bins. Blackalicious, DJ Shadow, and UNKLE 12" singles in elaborate packaging fetched tidy sums for their three long, similar-sounding remixes.

Though it might be hard to place them as part of that scene now, South was indeed a member of the Mo'Wax family, with a debut album, Overused, produced by Lavelle himself. In 2006, on the unfortunately titled Adventures in the Underground Journey to the Stars, South stripped away most of the electronica elements and cast their lot with the trusty guitar/drums approach.

In theory, it should have worked wonders. In reality, they're eight years and five albums in, and playing to only a couple hundred people tonight. So something didn't go exactly right somewhere.

Tonight, live, I want to like them more. I do like them. And they've managed to bring out dozens of cute girls from two camps: Those who remember their song featured in The O.C. and the die-hards who remember them featured regularly in NME and Melody Maker. Last week at the Elbow show, Timothy Norris wondered, "Why aren't they bigger than they are?" The same could be asked about South, with whom Elbow once toured the U.S. when both had bigger buzz. I'd change it up to read, "Why aren't South at least as big as Elbow?"

Sensitive lyrics delivered from Joel Cadbury's cute, young mug should melt many a girl's heart - or if played at the right time - get her to forgiver her guy's sins.

But there's a lack of edge, which makes it seem a little too normal. Cadbury's on stage in a light blue t-shirt, not speaking to the crowd a lot. And while he's by no means uncharismatic, he's not holding us in the palm of his hand either.

Guitarist Jamie McDonald's looks like a less skeletal Richard Ashcroft. He stomped along in place throughout the songs, delivering tasteful solos and a couple of surprisingly strong lead vocals. One of those, "Wasted," opens their just released album, You Are Here. Another goodie, "Better Things" appeared on an earlier record but shows up again on the new album.

It's hard to know where South goes from here. A couple more well-placed songs in TV shows could give them a huge kick-start and put them on playlists of 20 year-olds everywhere. If it doesn't happen, maybe they'll just be content to keep playing to the faithful for as long as they can. There are worse things in life after all than being in a band with half a dozen full-length records and the ability to tour regularly.

To understand the difference, I ask that you read this wonderful essay just posted by critic, musician and arts consultant Greg Sandow on a BLOG for this year's National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, CO. (The convention kicks off in early June.)

It's a bit long-winded but remember this is a BLOG not a formal printed essay -- there is a difference -- and that this is a point that has to be hammered into the brains of arts presenters and classical music aficionados in much the same way that you might struggle to explain punk rock to your grandparents.

So why am I telling this story? To introduce my thought that art and the arts aren't the same thing. Art is an activity, sometimes sublime, and also the result of that activity. By now we know - or certainly we ought to know -- that it might be found anywhere, in vacant lots, in silence and graffiti, in overheard remarks (see the poetry of Jonathan Williams, an advocate of outsider art, who died not long ago), and in popular culture. The arts, by contrast, are a set of interest groups, whose claim to glory (and to funding) is that they speak for art, which is only partly true. They don't speak for all art, and when someone speaking for the arts - by which I mean for the interest groups - says that only the arts can offer meaning in our society, we've strayed so far from reality that we might as well be jumping off a cliff. Especially if we're looking for a younger audience!

Here's an example. Dana Gioa, the chairman of the NEA, gave a widely circulated commencement speech at Stamford, in which (among much else) he longed for the good old days, when art was in its glory, and opera singers like Robert Merrill could be heard on network TV. But Robert Merrill didn't have a brain in his head. I can say this affectionately, because I love opera, and Merrill can ravish me with his voice. But he had nothing to say in his singing (something that certainly was noticed back in the day), and to imagine that putting him on TV brings art in all its glory to an audience of millions is really pretty funny. Contrast what happens now, when we have pop stars like Bruce Springsteen, who write their own words and music (something Robert Merrill couldn't do), who sing about serious things, who both reflect profound things in our culture, and influence them (see for example the book about Springsteen - Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing -- by Robert Coles, one of our most profound and literate psychologists). And who go on 60 Minutes, talking about society and politics, in a completely serious, compelling way. Is that a step backward? I'd call it a big step forward, at least if you want art to mean something, and to help form both our consciousness and our reality.

But wait! How can Springsteen be an artist, if he's a pop musician, and therefore (horror! horror!) commercial? To me that question is based on a misunderstanding both of commerce and of art. Or at least of the history of art. My field is classical music, and you can't study its history without noticing that many great musicians of the past were commercial, including many of the great composers, or maybe even most of them. I've just been reading a lively little book - Liszt: My Travelling Circus Life, by David Lee Allsobrook -- about one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt, and his two tours of England in the 1840s. He made those tours purely for money, flacked for a piano manufacturer, whose pianos he endorsed, and packed his programs with popular opera arias and comical songs, all to please an audience that would have run away from more serious music, by the likes of Mozart or Beethoven.

...

... Why was commerce, for an artist, OK in past centuries, but bad in this one? Someone's going to say that our culture has degenerated, but I don't buy it. Things were better in the days of slavery? Should we look back with admiration at an age when women were their husbands' property, just because people (or so we think) liked better music then? Picasso knew exactly how to sell himself. Should we condemn his art?

...

... Orchestras and opera companies, not to mention big classical record labels and classical radio stations, are terrified of their audience. They're afraid to program things that their audience won't like. Yes, they do it sometimes, but they always know that some large part of their audience might not like anything new or adventurous - and that it would be commercial (that word again) suicide for them to do too much of that.

After the jump, more proof that Art can be found in the places you'd least expect!

There's a few weird aspects of this. First there's the fact that firing your music biz reporter at this moment in time is a bit like firing your campaign trail reporter during an election year. Leeds has been a consistently solid reporter on the industry as evinced by this archive of his writing. Second, only four years ago -- granted, a lifetime in newspaper land -- the NY Times snatched Leeds from the LA Times in what was considered a large scale effort to make in-roads on west coast audiences. Oh let's reminisce with this 2004 post from our buddy in BLOGging, Nikki Finke.

In the past week, the NYT captured three other high-profile entertainment/culture writers from the LAT — film critic Manohla Dargis, music business writer Jeff Leeds and architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Already in the dumps over parent company Tribune Co.–ordered layoffs, the LAT newsroom was in a bunker mentality anticipating the dampening effect the NYT’s body snatching would have on its Pulitzer-pumped national prestige. And someone needs to argue with the LAT’s bean counters that the year-old controversial subscription model for its online Calendar coverage may be sending at least some of its superstar scribblers into the arms of the enemy.

The latest NYT moves on the LAT are part of a carefully thought-out campaign to make circulation inroads in the West and gain even more exposure in Hollywood. This does not come as a surprise to the LAT staff, either.

As one Calendar source rues, “We’d always heard that once it got its act together [post-Raines] The New York Times was coming to get us.”

So wha' happen? Leeds was a consistently great reporter on this beat for the LA Times. I'll admit I've noticed his pieces less in recent years. But is this because my news reading has increasingly transitioned to the web; because he just hasn't been getting his pieces published; or because he's lost his stuff?

There's been a fair amount of blogging activity about this. (Here's pieces from Finke & TheDailySwarm.) But there's been few explanations as to why?

Anyhoo, with Leeds gone readers have few reasons now to go anywhere else but Coolfer & TheDailySwarm for their daily hit of music industry factage.

Previously:
- Newsflash: LA Times ruins P. Diddy's weekend
- Chuck Phillips should not resign from being a reporter, but it would be fantastic if the LA Times resigned from being a newspaper

Metallica, with Flea, at last night's benefit, simultaneously filling their diapers.

There’s an irony to a benefit show for a school that aims to make music more accessible charging $200 for tickets. Yet this fund-raiser for the nonprofit Silverlake Conservatory of Music succeeded as a graphic, almost shocking, reminder of the medium’s powers of catharsis and communion.

Most of the black-shirted, older-skewed crowd came to witness Metallica breaking a long absence by performing (by their standards) in intimate surroundings. The veteran Bay Area bruisers, now in varying states of hairiness, unfurled a relentless “best of” set with the palpable glee of parolees, embracing each horns-aloft classic (“Seek and Destroy”, “Battery”, “One”, “Master of Puppets”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” - count ‘em) like lost loved ones. Adding a wide-eyed, garage-band zeal to their seasoned, brutal precision gave Metallica’s chugga-chugga-widdle formula fresh legs and incongruous warmth. Strutting figurehead James Hetfield both bathed in and projected the togetherness his band’s music instantly elicited, front-to-back, in this most cynical of cities.

Metallica marry metal’s technical prowess and hot-rod histrionics to the guttural venom and velocity of hard-core, producing something melodic yet monstrous, trained but untamed. Their earlier efforts, personified by 1984’s “Fight Fire With Fire” (for which Conservatory co-founder/Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea joined them), are more bile than guile, while height-of-their-fame hits like “Enter Sandman” (from ‘91’s giga-selling Metallica opus) over-buff their streetwise savagery. Somewhere between the two – i.e. the rest of tonight’s set – lies Metallica’s mongrel magnetism.

Bassist Robert Trujillo bookended his bestial prowl with bouts of unfettered bedroom mirror mane-flailing, while ringlet-shrouded shredder Kirk Hammett nurtured climbing vines of squealing virtuosity and Lars Ulrich punctuated ‘tallica’s mini-operas with rabble-rousing behind-the-kit showmanship. But all this would’ve counted for naught without Hetfield’s machine-shop rhythm guitar, fatherly growl and truck stop charm.

Metallica justified the night’s hefty price tag and supported its cause by example: when Hetfield uttered “this is why we’re in a band” as his final words he surely did propel hundreds of fingers to fretboards, sticks to mitts and mouths to mics.

-Paul Rogers

Split between instrumentals, remixed tracks and original raps from El Producto, "Mike Douglas" stands out as my favorite of the bunch, with its savage uppercut at white music journalists who apparently play apologist for crack rap. (Who knew?) I'm not going to play the transcribe game, but it's either this or Elzhi's "Motown 25" for my pick this for the month's imaginary Hip Hop Quotable. If you aren't a fan, I don't see something called Theweareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2 convincing you to join the Def Jux fan club**, but if you are, it will inevitably be vital for the next time you decide to have your next Blade Runner party. I call Edward James Olmos.

*Correct answers can also include Madlib, Black Milk and one or two others I'm probably forgetting. Answering Timbaland results in 10-year purgatory where you are forced to listen to Madonna's Hard Candy ad infinitum.

**Admission to the Def Jux fan club includes free Mr. Lif-inspired wigs and a chance to Win a Date with Rob Sonic.

Stream tracks at El-P's Myspace