Life It Ain't Real Funky…

Unhappy people: mailman jerking you around? Depressed 'cause no one says "slizzard" enough? Have a cookie. Cookies are good.

Proletarian princess: Kelis

I must confess: Of late I’ve been more than enamored by pop music. Not the rap-y stuff, mind you. With the exception of Skateboard Lu and, um, Busta, I ain’t fuckin’ with rap—period. (Word to the post hip-hop movement already in progress.) I'm talking Xtina or—how you say?—Kelis. Yeah I know both "Bossy" and "Ain't No Other Man" have been discussed ad nauseum; I just think these songs are such shrewd pieces of pop perfection. The former being a minimalist mannequin of womanist prose, wherein bossiness is measured by one's 808 late fees. I love how the hook is so user-friendly (like a tire swing). It’s totally not a stretch to picture hotel cleaning ladies paraphrasing on some cocksure “I’m back with the 409/’Cause I’m bossy!" Meanwhile, Aguilera seems to be having Beyoncé’s summer. (Girl you hurtin’ that!)

• Gwen to Nelly: "You gon' need help trying to study my—bounce!—flow."
• Rick Ross is dead to me.
  
• Swizz Beatz on Northeastern impotence: "Get it up! Get it up! Get it get it get it up!"

I speak on Gnarls; it might take up some time:

Mini-wheat masterminds

The 900-lb elephant you probably ignored today is Negro music in its presently vacuous state. In case you've—for the last 18 years—been living outside The Matrix, where rap is still the underdog and "My Name Is Prince," that sine qua non of intergenerational plea-coppers, never happened, I'll bring you up to speed: Clear Channel killed the non-payola prompted radiostar and hip-hop, God bless its ever-loving soul, just up and ate its mama. (Word to rappers eclipsing spineless-ass singers as the sole conveyers of populist, post-soul negrocity.) That's kosher, I guess. Was Nice & Smooth (who ought to know these sorta things) once said: "This is how we take the old to the new." But what—in an age when rap is the new R&B—do we do with all the joy and pain and rage that won't succinctly fit into the confines of a hot 16? Some have gone so far as to get all Afro-punk'd and form their own bands on some Black Rock in the Hour of Chaos (I see you, Dante Smith). Others, like rappa-ternt-sanga Cee-Lo Green most definitely point to the future, singing—on the wickedly trippy St. Elsewhere—about everything from suicide to necrophilia to the joys of insanity, while careful not to get too much hip-hop on the soul side of his musical shredded mini-wheat.

Smell me?

They pray and pray for my downfall.

New York: Is this what's hot in the streets?

Um, are we gonna talk about this?

A grand don't come for free!

Stacey,

If your right leg was Christmas and your left leg was New Year's, could I visit you in between the holidays?

On the reals: I got big hands and feet, ma; get familiar.