Dan Leroy

For a primer on the power of golden-age hip-hop, meet Chicago's Cool Kids, exhibit A. The signifiers are everywhere you listen. There's the Detroit Pistons' "Bad Boys" Starter cap, lovingly described in the opening bars of "Black Mags." There's a song simply titled "88," which pays similar homage to Guess...

5. DOOM, Born Like This (Lex) The man behind the metal mask, Daniel Dumile, emerges from a mysterious exile to turn in his best effort since 2004's Madvillainy collaboration with Madlib. The dense verbiage and the beats (some of them reclaimed from the late J. Dilla) are familiar, but DOOM's...

While year-end, catch-all wrap-ups are common to every musical genre, in no other style of music do they turn into the hand-wringing, "state of the game" examinations that hip-hop seems to provoke. We worry because we care, of course. But at some point, like a thirty-something parent, those of us...

If Anthony Hamilton's R&B seems grittier than the airbrushed variety common to today's charts, it might have something to do with his biography. It took Hamilton a decade of hook-singing — for Eve and the late Tupac, among others — and failed solo deals before connecting with 2003's platinum­-selling, Grammy-­nominated...

Name a pop music A-lister, and he or she has either worked with Pharrell Williams or probably wants to. Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Britney Spears, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Madonna all already have. Need more proof? But, as half of production team the Neptunes, as Williams has transformed himself into...