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

Friday:

So this week Michael Stipe revealed some of his roots, and confessed that when he bought that Patti Smith album as a teen that changed his life, he also bought a Foghat record. Which is awesome, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Stipe was living in Collinsville, Illinois then (I grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, which was Collinsville’s archenemy), and Foghat was everywhere. Well, if you’d like to visit the road that Stipe ended up not traveling (think about consequences had he been floored not by the Patti Smith album but by Foghat Live), Foghat’s playing at the Canyon tonight.

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?"

It's going to take a lot for me to forgive John Mellencamp for 2007 and that the whole Ford Chevrolet commercial nightmare. While it's true that maybe I was watching too much TV that year, that god damned “Our Country” song, which I hesitate to say out loud because it'll likely spark an earworm that will repeat in my head for the next week, ruined my life. It haunted me, made me feel schizophrenic, as though I had no control over my brain. That line, “This is our country,” repeated ad infinitum like a taunt and a stab. But you know that, because it ruined your year, too. Over and over again it came on TV and radio, seeped from passing cars and seemingly out of every gas station loudspeaker in Our Country.

That song, and that moment in history, still irks me, and not just because I drive a girly-man Volvo and not a domestic truck. It felt like a Big Brother thing, and revealed to me a truth that, given enough money/blanket access to media, a corporation, if so inclined, can pound a song into America's collective skull at will, can control our internal stereo with sheer ad-buying power. It wasn’t even the sentiment, either, that bugged me. It’s kind of a protest song, in a neutral kind of way. But still, it felt like some sort of assault. It hurt most because I actually like the Cougar, and think he's written some decent, earnest songs.

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!

Item one: BLOWFLY.

Last year, I saw Blowfly open for Bonnie “Prince” Billy in Louisville when the ersatz Will Oldham performed the entirety of I See A Darkness. Oldham was the draw, of course. But Blowfly, known best for his ridiculously stoopid dirty records of the 70s, was a worthy foil to Oldham's pleasantly surly presentation. Blowfly's getting on in age, but that doesn't mean he doesn't still have very naughty thoughts. He follows Antiseen, Suckerstar, Angus Khan at the Knitting Factory.

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.

American Music Club’s new album, The Golden Age (Merge), begins with what seems to me two perfect Southern California couplets that capture a particular feeling and a particular breeze: "I wish that we were always high/I wish that we could swim in the sky/If we believe, we won’t fall/We’ll leave our lives and rise above it all.” It’s a hopeful introduction, a leap off a springboard and the consequent float, one that Eitzel and his band, guitarist Vudi, bassist Sean Hoffman and drummer Steve Didelot, manage to maintain throughout The Golden Age’s thirteen songs. Eitzel founded American Music Club in San Francisco nearly 25 years ago, returned in 2004 after a decade long hiatus to record their eighth album, Love Songs for Patriots. Last summer the band convened in Echo Park to record the follow-up, The Golden Age with producer Dave Trumfio. Eitzel recently spoke over the phone during the Arlington, Virginia stop on their four month European and American tour. The band will close the journey at the Echo this Friday, May 16.

LA Weekly:You were living in LA for a while this summer while you were working on The Golden Age, and I’m wondering whether any of that LA stuff made it onto the record.
Mark Eitzel: I think so. I mean, I was writing a lot in August in LA. Getting home late and having the door open all night long. My view was this parking lot [and] of this recording studio called The Ship.

No, really, you should listen to Neil Hamburger's guest DJ slot at Dublab right now.

Ultimately, it was a ballsy essay with some valid points and some not-so-valid ones. Despite their obvious talent, I've quite often found myself disinterested in the more vanilla "indie groups" like The Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie* and Sufjan Stevens, who Frere-Jones rightfully declared lack, "swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies-in other words, attributes of African-American popular music. "But as Carl Wilson's excellent Slate rebuttal, pointed out, "indie-rockers" like "Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem and Spoon," fuse indie-slanted guitar rock with soul, funk and R&B, to produce music so danceable that it conned my reverse-racist sense of rhythm into getting down. Not bad.

The inimitable Neil Hamburger

Sadly, you already missed Jimmy Tamborello, but check the schedule out. We're pumped to hear what Neil Hamburger has in store for us tomorrow from noon to 2 p.m., given his recent Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners release. Ditto the rest of tomorrow, actually, with Peanut Butter Wolf segueing into Anticon's Telephone Jim Jesus and directly into the remarkable Mia Doi Todd. Thursday's Lucky Dragons set should be interesting, as well.

And there's no way we're missing the final session: Tuesday, May 20th through Wednesday, May 21st: A 24-hour no-sleep session from 10am - 10am featuring Ale & frosty.

The complete schedule follows.

Passing Strange, the Broadway musical created by longtime fixture on the LA music scene Stew, received seven Tony Award nominations this morning. The show, which started Off Broadway but moved to the Big Dance in the spring, has gone on to become one of the most critically acclaimed and successful musicals of the season.

The nominations for the former leader of the Negro Problem are some of the biggies, too. Stew himself is nominated for Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Musical, and Passing Strange is nominated for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score, among others. (The entire list of nominees can be found here.)