Remember that great Alan Parsons Project video from 1984?

I love that one. Maybe Jay-Z should sample it for his response record. The title serving as a subtle way of saying, "Let's let this be the end of this."

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Here are a bunch of other good rap songs that came out this week.

Project Pat is the older brother of Three 6 Mafia's Juicy J, and an important part of the storied Memphis group's greater collective. He voiced the hook on Three 6's year 2000 hit "Sippin' On Some Sizzurp," and had a national hit of his own with "Chickenhead," from the wonderfully-titled 2001 album, Mista Don't Play, Everythangs Workin. For connoisseurs of the dirtiest of Dirty South rap, it gets no better than Project Pat. Hearing him over this tantalizing beat from the young super producer Lex Lugar is a joy, and the verse from lady rapper Tatalicious is some good give-as-good-as-she-gets stuff, but be forewarned, this song is very, very dirty. The video makes great use of terrible lighting. It's like an amateur porn film, I guess. (But don't worry, no actual nudity occurs.) Also, if you don't want to use your head in the way Pat suggests, you can always put it into his wine glass.

Next is the Bronx's Fat Joe, rapping with Harlem's Vado over an AWESOME AWESOME track produced by Washington, DC's Mark Henry. This is my favorite song of the week.

Raekwon the Chef released a new album this week, Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang (a confusing title, as I thought Wu-Tang were from Shaolin, but I bet it makes sense if you've watched as many kung-fu movies as Raekwon has.) It sounds great to me so far, full of vintage, mid-90s-era Wu-sonics and verbal swordplay (as Rae and co. might put it.) Especially "Mollases," featuring Rick Ross—who, I must admit, though I've never been a fan, is sounding better and better with his raps—and this song, with GZA and Killa Priest. Oh, Raekwon compares himself to Hitler in his verse. So, there you go.

North Carolinian producer 9th Wonder slices up a famous Flavor Fav clip and pastes it into a dreamy backdrop for Lil B's latest stream of stream-of-consciousness rap. Where it sounds just right.

Lastly, I was very excited to hear the news that Big Boi was getting back together with his protege Killer Mike (a.k.a., "Mike Bigga") and fellow Atlanta rapper Pill to make a full-length album as a supergroup trio. From the sound of this remix that Big Boi just did for "Ready Set Go," the excellent song that Chicago's No I.D. produced for Mike and T.I. last year, very good things could be to come.

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That said, objectively speaking, this, right now, is a really good time for rap music. What's popular, I mean. Except Drake.

Kanye's album probably has something to do with it. It was a work of great artistic ambition, and the fact that it succeeded as it did was bound to have a positive effect. More than Kanye, though, I'd give credit to Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane for leading the way to a point where, as G from the underground-championing site Grand Good put it:

"We should celebrate the fact that Jay Electronica and Tyler, The Creator can comfortably co-exist in that misty plane of rap popularity. And our freedom to consume and process and react to both, the adult and the child, without feeling compromised. Or something like that."

Jay Electronica is the deep-thinking New Orleans rapper who Jay-Z signed to his Roc Nation label in November. He's older for an up-and-comer, 34, and has been working for years below the mainstream radar. And you probably read about Tyler the Creator recently. (He's the 19-year-old member of the L.A. collective Odd Future, who made a huge splash with their performance on Jimmy Fallon's show two weeks ago.) They're both really good. What's more important, they're both proudly, defiantly, weird.

Here's another Odd Future video, this one for a song rapped by Tyler's colleague Earl Sweatshirt. It's excellent, but a warning: this video has lots of blood and gore. I find some of it extremely unpleasant to watch. You may want to close your eyes. (But keep listening while you do. The song is dynamite.)

Also very weird, and also getting a great deal of mainstream attention lately, is Berkeley, California's Lil B. A member of the Bay Area group The Pack, and the progenitor of a largely spontaneous style of rap (a style of being, really) he calls "based," Lil B is quite unlike anything hip-hop has ever seen before. (Though he is reminiscent, especially in his cold, nasally voice, of Oakland forefather Too Short.) Lil B calls himself "Based God," films videos in churches, and compares himself to Jesus, Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Beiber.

He also calls himself a "nerd" and a "faggot," though he says he's heterosexual. The faggot part is really, really different and new for rap. And, one would hope, might actually lead to a time when there could be a popular rap artist who was openly gay. Lil B is nothing if not interesting.

It's particularly interesting to see him working with Tony Yayo. Yayo is a member of 50 Cent's G-Unit, a brawny, unforgiving crew that in many ways represents the strictest sort of conservatism and conformity in rap. Which is very much mainstream rap. Rap is one of the most conservative forms of popular music going. Generally, rap artists break codes of dress, behavior and subject matter at the peril of their commercial viability. This is incredibly self-defeating. How ridiculous is it that Jay-Z needs to worry about what shoes he wears when he's on vacation, because someone's going to see a picture of him and use it to score points in a diss song? How many free-thinking MCs have shied away from rhyming about “that crazy space shit that don’t even make no sense,” because someone else might not like it and punch them in their face "just for living"? (Some of this can be chalked up to the hyper-competiveness which also serves to make rap as vital and compelling as it is. So you take the bad with the good, I guess. It also speaks to the way that non-music aspects of a rap artist's life can affect the reception of the music—in this way, I think, rap was prescient of the 24-hour-news, reality-TV-style of 21st century entertainment culture in general. But that's a different essay.) Even an artist as brilliant and beloved as OutKast's Andre 3000 has had to strain against voices questioning his realness or his manhood—those who would punish him for expressing his individuality. It's depressing to think about what the world might have missed out on had his partner Big Boi's more traditional rap style not provided a sort of street anchor for Andre's artistic ambitions.

Which is not to impugn Big Boi's own creativity or sense of adventure—he put his capital to great use a few years ago when he wrote and produced a ballet. And he's like the world's biggest Kate Bush fan. But in the OutKast schemata, he's the cool guy. As opposed to the freak. And that, the cool guy, is by far the dominant persona adopted by rap artists. Machismo is so important in rap, vulnerability so taboo. Most of the music's stars have held themselves like masters of their domains. Think of LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Master P, 50 Cent. The kings of rap act like the most popular kids in the school. The prom kings, the bullies, not the bullied, not the nerds. Misfits, for the most part, have had a hard time in rap.

There have been important exceptions, to be sure: Biz Markie, Flavor Flav, De La Soul. The Pharcyde, Wu-Tang, Kool Keith.

"I'm crazy" is a common attitude to cop in rap, but only in terms of "I don't give a fuck." Not in terms of "I am unhinged from reality." Even someone like Eminem, for all his enthusiastic exploitation of shock and exposure of childhood psychological damage, has never really let himself look out of control in public. If anything, he's always seemed coiled more tightly. As passionate as he is about his art, he has always kept a certain cool. And thus, kept himself more in line with standard rap behavior.

Again, there have been important exceptions.

Tyler the Creator eating cockroaches in his videos and rapping about dancing around his house in a pair of pink panties pays Ol' Dirty Bastard a appropriately terrific posthumous tribute.

But really, I think the roots of the freedom of expression flourishing in today's rap can be found in the way Lil Wayne shot to superstardom five years ago. (Popdust's Christopher Wiengarten made this point in a nice piece last week—though I actually don't so much hear the similarities between Tyler's "Yonkers" and Wayne's "I Hate Love" that Weingarten does. Different ears hear differently.) Wayne has been famous since the late '90s, when he was a teenaged member of Cash Money Records' troupe, the Hot Boys—a situation in which he played second fiddle to his cohorts Juvenile and B.G. Around 2005, though, Wayne enjoyed an explosion in artistry of a sort very rare in rap or any other genre. Suddenly, a rapper respected for his flow and charisma, but not previously known for elevated lyricism, was doing things with words we'd never heard before, and being rewarded and revered for it. And in the South—a region so long maligned as lacking great lyrical ambition and talent. Best of all, his technical blossoming was accompanied by that of a wild and charming (and, okay, openly drug-fueled) personality; a distinct and refreshing willingness to be different, nonsensical, silly—to be a weirdo. "We are not the same," he said to listeners, fans, rival rappers. "I am a Martian."

Wayne turned himself into the biggest star in rap by letting his freak flag fly. And this was very healthy for the music. In the past couple years, folks like Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame have followed suit, with their own quirky takes on the mien.

Again, I think its great. And that rap music as a whole is very much the better for it. Everybody should get ice-cream cones tattooed on their faces. Metaphorically, I mean. Just that, everyone should have their own different flavor.

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To give credit where it's due, Wiz Khalifa is a perfectly likeable pothead. And it's really great to have a rap star emerge out of Pittsburgh. A great city, Pittsburgh, with a strong tradition of heroic sports teams living the high life and grooving to good music. And it is pretty cool kizmit that the success of the Steelers has dovetailed so nicely with that of his first national hit—one that celebrates the team colors, his city's colors, over a super-catchy keyboard riff. It must have been a hug thrill for him to get to perform it at Heinz Field Stadium before the Steelers beat the Jets in AFC conference championship game last week.

"Black and Yellow" currently sits at no. 4 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart, down from no. 3 last week. But you have to think if Pittsburgh wins Sunday, it might push it up to no. 1.

For a hook, the phrase "black and yellow" is a good one, it certainly rolls off the tongue more easily than "green and yellow." But other than that, as far as the rhyming goes, "Black and Yellow" strikes me as lazy—nothing terrible, but nothing much inspired, either. Which, again, Khalifa is a super-stoner. You find a nice beat, ride it on the radio. It's fine. But Lil Wayne is a virtuoso, and he just completely eats Khalifa alive over his own beat. From the minute he calls him "Cheez Whiz," you know what's happening, and by the time he toasts the Steelers as "pop tarts," it's a done deal: there's ten times as much cleverness and verve in Wayne version. And it's nice of him, too, to repeatedly point out that this is not a diss song, but the friendly ball-breaking that goes on between fans of rival teams. You wouldn't want a real rap beef to break out over something so trivial. (Not that such things haven't broken out over less in the past.)

It's supposed to be a close game this year, so maybe this will help with the gambling. I'm taking the Packers by three.

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I mean, I've just started Keith Richards' book last week. And so far it's as charmingly written as everyone says it is. But it's long—547 pages. And I'm hoping to get to Patti Smith's book next, which won the national book award. And Jay-Z's, with the cool Warhol cover. Sheesh! Rock stars need to stop writing good books. There's enough stuff you want to read from people who don't also make music you like to listen to.

(I thought for a long time that the first line of the second verse in that song was, "Sometimes I wonder what's going on with these eggs." I recently learned, from Dylan's big book of lyrics, Lyrics, that it's, "What's going on with Miss X." I'm a little saddened by that. I liked to think of Dylan sitting in a roadside diner, staring down at his plate, pondering a pair of undercooked sunny-side-ups.)

Speaking of this, according to Andy Greene's preview of the new Rolling Stone cover story, Lil Wayne told writer Josh Eells that he got through his recent stint in jail by reading a lot of rock biographies—Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Joan Jett, Anthony Kiedis. He must be referring to David Henderson's 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, about Hendrix, probably. And Barry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, about Morrison. And David Ritz' Divided Soul about Gaye. And Wayne said he really liked Keidis' Scar Tissue. The problem is, what Joan Jett book was he talking about? Is there a Joan Jett biography? I don't know of it. Amazon doesn't either, it seems. Nor does Wikipedia.

Lil Wayne might be excused, I think, for a certain cloudy-headedness. But I wonder what he thought he was talking about. Maybe Todd Oldham's photo book. That's probably it. Or maybe he meant Cherry Curie's book, Neon Angel, which was about her time in the Runaways with Joan Jett and probably had lots of stuff about Joan Jett in it? It was probably one of those. I really like Lil Wayne. I'd hate to think...

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Also, Wall Street has its "groove back." The Times reports that executive bonuses will be fat and juicy this year. And traders and investment bankers are already celebrating. "We are seeing a lot of luxury purchases, like vintage Bordeaux, things that we haven’t seen sell well in a few years,” said restauranteur John Delucie, who recently sold a sold a 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild for $3,950 at his Greenwich Village spot The Lion.

“Senior executive pay will go up more than the rest,” said Wall Street compensation expert, Alan Johnson. “I think executives are saying ‘I didn’t get paid much for two years and now I want something.’”

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Despite the fact that he has one of the most distinctive voices hip-hop has ever known, it's hard to root for Mystikal. Recording for Master P's No Limit Records, the Operation Desert Storm veteran played a major part in putting New Orleans rap on the map in the late '90s-remember "Here I Go," or "It Ain't My Fault" or "The Man Right Chea?" Then, even as No Limit went into decline, he rose to greater stardom with a string of hits produced by Neptunes that more effectively channeled the spirit of James Brown better than any rapper ever did before or since. "Shake Ya Ass" is one of those songs that have you remembering exactly where you were the first time you heard it. (Nowhere interesting in my case, just in a car, parked in front of a friend's house in Massachusetts. But still, I remember it very well!) And "Danger," and "Bouncin' Back." He really caught something special there for a while.

I went down to New Orleans to interview him for Vibe magazine in March, 2002. He was perfectly nice, but he travelled with a large crew of bodyguards that, while also perfectly nice, to me at least, boasted of having spent time in jail and threatened people in my presence. I was sad and horrified to learn, five months later, that he had been arrested, along with two of the bodyguards, and charged with the rape and extortion of his hair stylist-apparently enacted, and videotaped, as a form of vigilante justice because they suspected she had stolen money from him. He pleaded guilty to sexual battery the next year, and in 2004 was sentenced to six years in prison and you didn't hear much more about him after that.

He got out this past January and is back to making music. And I'm surprised by how much I like this new song, "Paper Cuts." The beat is sort of industrial (I think it's supposed to sound like a money-counting machine... and it does) but an echoey underlying bass line gives it a very appealing warmth. And it features what is definitely the best verse I've heard from Lil Wayne in a good long time (I imagine it was recorded before he want to prison in March) and Mystikal's old No Limit crony, Fiend, who sounds sweaty and hungry and energized. And Mystikal himself, with that great, gritty hoarseness in his voice (he's the rap Rod Stewart, maybe?) leaping off the track like it used to, making up for lost time. "Feel like I haven't dropped an album since the Beatles!" he says, and you can feel it, too.

It's a lesson in the amorality of art, I guess. The artist does the work and the work now stands as a thing unto itself. It doesn't matter what you think of the artist as a person or any of the other things he or she has ever done. If it moves you, it moves you. So even if it's hard to root for this, I can't help but dig it.

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