Five Spot: We Would Very Much Like Someone to Send Us an Advance of Swishahouse's New The Usual Suspects Comp

Welcome back to Five Spot. Every Friday, we'll examine a recent bit of music news and, sometimes awkwardly, tie it to a bit of Houston rap. It's five videos and occasional cussing. Send tips to [email protected].

First, a bit of housekeeping: In this space last week, we wrote about the rumored Z-Ro album, Cocaine. It is, in fact, real and we were able to get our light-brown little hands on a copy. After listening through it, we're 100 percent certain it isn't the Cracc mixtape everyone has been waiting on, but it is very clearly a mixtape. It's hosted by a husky-voiced woman named DJ Drama Queen (we've never heard of her either) and is a double-disc feature.

There's certainly some solid stuff - that "Round Here" song 'Ro did with Billy Cook is used, which might be reason enough to get it - but it also has far too many skippables. Get it if you're a collector (the cover is very cool), but you won't be missing a terrible amount if you don't. Your call.

Now, for this week, we've got a new tape we're lusting for. Courtesy of the Screw Heads Only site, which, if you're a Texas rap fan, you should check out because the dude that runs it periodically puts some gems up there, we caught a glimpse of the new Swishahouse compilation tape and it looks fly as eff. We're totally pretending like we don't know Justus League did something very, very similar.

We're going to call this now: Yung Redd is going to be a beast on this tape. Each of Redd's Eviction Notice tapes have gotten stronger and stronger. He will be contribute no less than the fourth best work, and might possibly creep up to third or second depending on how on point Slim, Ro and Keke are. Looking forward to a proper full-length LP from him.

'Ro, very clearly a perturbed Rap-A-Lot soldier, has always repped SUC. As soon as this cover started to circulate, so did speculation that he was going to leave RAL after Heroin dropped (new release date 10/27) for Michael Watts' camp. Very curious to see how that plays out.

This is the femme Swisha has been dangling out there for a bit. She's cool in spurts, but we suspect that whiny, cackly flow she yields might not have long-term appeal. Hopefully we're wrong.

How can you not root for a skinny gangsta rapper named Coota with a cohort named Archie Lee? It's downright un-American. As a side note, it was a good two weeks of looking at this album in our iPod before we realized that Coota was holding his necklace in between his thumbs and not a light bulb on a string. Whatever. We don't know. Sometimes rappers do weird things like that.

We saw this guy at Trae Day a week or two after someone emailed us his MySpace page. Our first impression: Lil' Young? That's his name? Really? He didn't try. He just took the two nicknames most synonymous with young rappers and mashed 'em together. How was this allowed to happen? What kinds of friends are those?

Imagine a board meeting at Arby's and they're like, "Okay guys, we've got this new burger that we just put together. What should we call it?" Then somebody stood up and said, "Hmmm, why don't we call it a Whopper Big Mac?" And everybody was like, "That's perfect." That's exactly what happened here. Lil' Young.

Have a safe weekend. Thanks for you support.