Sometime this summer, Willyard will likely be able to purchase a tablespoon-size portion of the dirt into which New York Yankee's star Derek Jeter will have dug his cleats if and when he gets the 3,000th hit of his career. There are big plans to exhume the batter's box and sell it in capsules that hang from keychains, etc.

“That bucket of dirt will go a long way,” said Brandon Steiner, the chairman of Steiner Sports, who has a memorabilia partnership with the Yankees and a marketing deal with Jeter.

But once you buy it, you can do whatever you want with it.

In honor of the approach of Jeter's milestone accomplishment and the impressive consumerist frenzy that will follow, and of Willyard's forthcomingness, here are sixteen great songs about dirt. A veritable smorgasbord!

I think that song is actually called "Downtown Dirt," not "Uptown Dirt." Either way, I love it. (The way Lou Reed writes about dirt, and dirty things, too, like boulevards, etc., makes you wonder whether he has a geophagist past himself. I wouldn't be surprised.)

There are a million songs about dirty things—work, pool, South—but dirty boots would seem to dirty with actual dirt, soil, of the kind that geophagists might like to eat. So that's the organizing principle in effect here.

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Speaking of Lou Reed, when I first saw the title of Jim Jones' new song, I fervently hoped he might be covering the symphonically depressing classic Danny Boyle used so effectively to soundtrack the overdose scene in Trainspotting. It turns out that the truth is even more odd than one man's fervent hope.

A pretty blatant recasting of the Black Eyed Peas' world-ruining "I Gotta Feelin'" (which has been watched 70 million times on YouTube) replete with autotune and not-very-good rapping that takes cues from Ice Cube's "Today Was a Good Day," Jones song has something about it, something I can't quite put my finger on, that I like. Maybe it's how gentle and friendly he sounds? Or maybe it's the video, which is totally confusing and all-the-over-the-place. (A perfect day is spent visiting an old woman dying in a hospital? Or even stranger, providing medical treatment? I'm pretty sure this is the world's first depiction of a rapping oncologist.) But still, in the end, it is somehow actually engendering of honest good feeling. Maybe it's the fact Jim delivers his chorus in sign-language. Or that the video is dedicated to Jim's aunt, Sally Jones, along with anyone else who has been affected by cancer. And to the United States soldiers overseas. And also to anyone with a hearing disability! This might be the greatest casting of a wide-net shout-out since ODB showed love to Suge Knight, Eskimos, the babies and schoolteachers, among others, at the end of "I Can't Wait" (which is strangely not available in its original form on YouTube.) And so in Jones' spirit, here's wishing everybody a perfect weekend. It sure is nice outside.

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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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One of my saddest days as a person came in 2001, when I drove eight hours up to Dannemora, New York, near the Canadian border, to interview Ol' Dirty at Clinton Correctional Facility, where he was serving a four year sentence for drug charges and parole violations.

Sitting across the table from me in the harshly lit visitors room, the famously wild and spontaneous personality was muted and confused. He was scared, paranoid, and not making a lot of sense. He was in obvious poor health and seemed to be suffering hallucinations while we spoke. He was someone who needed help, and he wasn't getting it. Less than three years later, a year and a half after he got out, he was dead. A drug overdose at age 35. Five years ago today, November 13th, 2004. He is greatly missed, and Nigga Please still sounds as good as ever.

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