People that would definitely not be named "Person of the Year" by Philadelphia rappers Black Deniro and Freeway: 1) The "Twitter Thug" 2) The "Fake Baller" 3) The "Bougie Chick" 4) The "Phone Gangster" 5) The "Goon Rat" 6) The "Sneaky Groupie"

There were differing opinions about this song when it came out last year. And it's always a technical challenge to get rap to sound good live. But I think these two old pros came off pretty sharp last night at New York's Highline Ballroom. (Judging from this video, I mean. I wasn't there.) They were guests of the headliners, the underground supergroup Slaughterhouse, who recently signed with Eminem's Shady Records.

Last week, HBO put out a promotional video for their vampire series True Blood that featured Snoop Dogg rapping about the show's characters. (I liked it. Not everybody did.) Now the great Port Arthur, Texas-based MC Bun B has recorded a rap over the instrumental track from Outkast's "ATLiens" in celebration of the seventh anniversary of the Japanese clothing company Lafayette.

Here is something good: Houston mayor Annise Parker has declared today, August 30th, 2011, "Bun B Day" in her city. Bun, who made up one half of the rap duo UGK until his partner Pimp C died in 2007, and is now is about to start his second semester teaching a course on Religion and Hip Hop Culture In America at Rice University, is actually from nearby Port Arthur. But he is easily awesome enough to cross municipal borders.

In a victory for subjectivism, the rap music magazine The Source and mostly-rock music website Pitchfork have both awarded Texas rap legend Bun B's new album Trill O.G. a quantitative rating of 5 in their record review sections. But the two ratings mean very different things, as a 5 is The Source's highest rating, while Pitchfork's scale goes up to 10.

It's always worth checking out Houston's Bun B. Here he is, joining Reflection Eternal's Talib Kwelli and DJ Hi-Tek on a new song called "Strangers."

I like all the bright colors in the video for this remix of "Country Shit," a song by one of my favorite young rap artists, Big K.R.I.T. I like the green trees and the red fruit punch and the shiny interiors of the tricked-out Cadillacs with their wobbling woofers. And I like guest rapper Bun B's matching attire: blue cap, blue shorts. And I like that Bun B's wearing shorts, too.

The new song from Bun B really does seem, as the venerable MC says at the outset, to have been "a long time coming." It was produced by Gangstarr's DJ Premier, and so brings together two of hip-hop's very most revered practitioners. Bun and Premier are both from Texas, too, though Premier made his name after moving to Brooklyn in the late '80s. What's most interesting about the song to me today, besides the mesmerizing beat and the jaw-dropping rhymes ("When I get to gladiatin' on haters like Leonidas/Niggas just gonna have to admit that he the tightest…" Triple exclamation points) is how old these guys are. [...]