Irrational exuberance is so widespread in hip-hop right now that Alan Greenspan might freak out — if he understood rap lyrics. There are no two ways about it: Hip-hop sales stink. Album sales dropped 30 percent in 2007, a figure that includes digital downloads. And ringtones, which have given folks…

True to its title, Distortion — the latest album from Stephen Merritt’s long-running prickly pop project The Magnetic Fields — is full of feedback and reverb. Though one might fear that such sonic intrusion would disrupt these carefully crafted tunes, it’s not the case. In fact Distortion is as pretty,…

Kate Nash’s debut LP, Made of Bricks, was released last summer in the UK, where she became an overnight sensation; both the CD and single “Foundations” charted at number one. The 20-year-old from a London suburb pals around with Lily Allen, to whom she’s frequently compared. Yet unlike Alright, Still…

It’s a hard time to be an Avril apologist, especially if you’re a heterosexual male music critic. Her 2007 effort, The Best Damn Thing, isn’t destined for any critical top 10 lists. Truth be told, it won’t be on mine, either, but I gave it serious consideration. The CD is…

Though some believe Lupe Fiasco is too smart for mainstream rap, that’s not exactly true. Most of the lyrics on his sophomore release, Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, are pretty basic, cliché stuff, right down to the CD’s opening monologue: “They thought it was cool to tear down the projects and…

Beanie Sigel’s rough and ready new CD, The Solution, stands in contrast to the latest from his mentor, Jay-Z. American Gangster saw Jay reminiscing about the days before he settled into his plush corporate lifestyle, but Sigel is still living hard. Having been acquitted of attempted murder and done a…

A pint-size novelty act who made preteen girls swoon with his 2000 debut, Beware of Dog, Bow Wow has somehow evolved into an elder statesmen in the hip-pop genre. Now 20 years old, he has split with longtime producer Jermaine Dupri, and his sixth CD, Face Off — a collaboration…

Wu-Tang Clan’s fifth album, 8 Diagrams, comes at a time of strife for the group. Ghostface Killah and Raekwon have publicly laid into Wu ringleader and beatmaker RZA for the album’s creative direction. Calling Wu a sinking ship and RZA a “hip-hop hippie,” Raekwon says the beats on 8 Diagrams…

Chris Brown has been well known to the screaming underage masses for a minute now, but he broke out to a wider audience at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards show. There he perfectly parroted the Gloved One’s moonwalk dance, prompting Justin Timberlake to tell the world he felt old…

‘N Sync was so popular around the turn of the millennium that even I — jaded, posturing music critic — bought the band’s second album, No Strings Attached. It sold more than a million copies the day it was released in March 2000, and I was swallowing a lot of…

American Gangster the album is not the soundtrack to American Gangster the film. Jay-Z came up with the idea for the CD after watching the movie about Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas. But the album isn’t about Lucas; it’s about Jay. Get it? Pandering, reactionary, and megalomaniacal, the disc should…

“I came back from NY, nigga lost his deal/Felt sick to the stomach, almost lost his meal,” raps Phonte on Getback’s first track, “Sirens.” He’s referring to his duo Little Brother’s exit from Atlantic Records after sales from the group’s major-label debut, The Minstrel Show, failed to meet expectations. Getback…

During the making of None Shall Pass — Aesop Rock’s gentler, narrative-heavy new CD on Definitive Jux — the hip-hop MC moved from his beloved New York to San Francisco, got married, and turned 30. “So those were the three punches in the face I took,” he says with a…

Band of Horses’ lyrics are drenched in utopian platitudes (“Lucky ones are we all till it is over”) and cringe-worthy pillow talk (“When you smile, the sun it peaks through the clouds”). The weakest songs seem ready for a campfire sing-along; the group’s touring bassist, Bill Reynolds, even comes from…

Derivative, repetitive, insipid, insincere, and pandering, Songs About Girls also has the worst insert booklet in recent memory — seven pages of will.i.am mugging in a checkered suit. Get over yourself! Let’s be fair, though: The first song, “Over,” a lover’s lament featuring a sample from Electric Light Orchestra (never…

Zach Condon, Beirut’s 21-year-old frontman, is too young to have any stories of his own. So he imagines other folks’ — and usually folks living on other continents, in other centuries. On “The Penalty,” he speaks from the perspective of a worker caught in a time of plague: “Yesterday fever,…

Val Kilmer has been a lot of things — Batman, Iceman, bloated — but he remains a renaissance man. The classically trained actor has done David Mamet and Shakespeare, and has even released a book of poetry. (Used copies of the rare tome, My Edens After Burns, go for upward…

Thankfully I was nowhere near 50 Cent when he learned Kanye West’s new CD was going to beat his. 50 famously vowed to stop making solo albums if he lost their first-week sales battle, and he did lose — by the score of 957,000 to 691,000 — although he had…

When did mainstream rap become more relevant than its underground counterpart? Talib Kweli and El-P released self-congratulatory pap this year while Kanye West’s sincere, introspective effort sold a million copies in its first week. Now we’ve got Chamillionaire, whose Ultimate Victory is perhaps the most topical album ever. Though what…

Georgie James — actually a duo — seems destined for success; it opened for Camera Obscura and played the annual South by Southwest music showcase before it even had a record deal. The group’s debut, Places, is generating buzz far beyond the band’s Washington, D.C. base. The personnel are blondies…

On the afternoon of August 15, Allen Scott, co-owner of San Francisco club The Independent, got a phone call from underground rapper MF Doom’s agent. The masked MC, it seemed, would likely be too sick to make his scheduled performance there that evening. Later, though, the agent called back and…

“Conscious rap” needs to be eliminated from hip-hop’s vernacular — or at the very least, Talib Kweli’s name should be stricken from its rolls. Nobody’s quite sure what the term means: Music that doesn’t focus on rims and butts? Songs wherein the listener’s life isn’t explicitly threatened? Kweli has said…