My latest hip-hop’s gratification is the southern soul from the Underground Kingz. With heavy, hypnotic productions, meticulous flows, lustful lyricism, and a handful of guest list including OutKast, Too $hort and Talib Kweli, the dynamic duo from Port Arthur, Bun B and Pimp C, delivered a double joint that filled with guilty pleasures. From the catchy keyboard tinkling on “Tell Me How Ya Feel” to the luscious guitar sampling on “Trill Niggas Don’t Die” bring back the authentic vibe of the underground south. Still, twenty-nine tracks straight is simply too much. The album would have been tighter if the dull fillers had left off.

It’s about time somebody makes a music sheet I could read.

NPR profiles Mel Tormé:

Blessed with impeccable timing and a smooth, mellow timbre, Mel Tormé was known during his heyday as “The Velvet Fog.” Tormé was the consummate entertainer: as a drummer, singer, composer, arranger, lyricist, writer and actor, his career spanned nearly the entire 20th century of American pop culture. Of course, underlying it all was an intuition for jazz composition and vocal phrasing.

Listen to the entire program here.

But “Please Don’t Marry Our Daughters“:

[MarryOurDaughter.com] has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and now elicits around a thousand, mostly angry, emails a day.

50 Cent’s iTunes bonus track. Tight!

Greg Tate’s “In Praise of Assholes” gives Kanye West and 50 Cent a critical beatdown:

Mr. West and Mr. Cent may indeed be assholes, but they’re symbolic assholes who remind us that American Darwinism has produced a species of Negro Male who can now exploit his fetishized vernacular aura as profitably as multinational corporations can the minerals in your whole damn ancestral homeland. Mr. Cent will never win the NAACP Image Award he deserves for this achievement, mainly because that lot’s more interested in “burying” the word nigga or “redeeming” Michael Vick’s dog-mangling ass than applauding or even analyzing it.

I love this guy’s writing.

Martin Klimas’s stunning artwork:

Martin Klimas destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.

An obsessed one too. Leave Britney Alone!

50 Cent doesn’t want Beyonce to kiss him. He wants her to fuck him. Or maybe Fiddy prefers Paris?

University of Notre Dame is going a for a dark look and Apple’s Cover Flow feel. The carouseling motion gives me nausea.