A tribute to combined action in music, multiplying outwards from era to era and street corner to street corner like so many loaves and fishes.

Though Jay Z moves a little slower than many of the emerging rappers in their 20s, his set confirmed that he is still on top of his game.

Easily Jay’s most well-conceived album since American Gangster.

Welcome to PLAYLIST, a re-occurring feature where our staff creates a playlist (with mix tapes and CDs becoming so unfortunately passé) centered around one artist or band with a deep catalog. For each LP we choose one song and pick a writer to rhapsodize its virtue. This feature is especially challenging when facing the discography of Jay-Z. In a career …

[xrr rating=3.0/5]Victory has defeated Jay-Z. The drug dealer turned rapper turned mogul’s career is an American success story to a nearly mythical degree, like a Horatio Alger fable with a lot more guns and crack rock. And while Jay-Z has always manipulated his public image to a degree normally only seen in the most successful of political spin doctors, he …

Sky Blue Sky by Wilco (2007) Drugs help. When Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy went to rehab (no, no, no) in 2004, the band had just come off the masterful one-two punch of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002) and A Ghost Is Born (2004), two of the most experimental, sophisticated albums of the decade. Then after he cleaned up, they produced Sky …

These excellent records fell just short of our Top 20 of 2011 list. The Antlers- Burst Apart [Frenchkiss] I suspect I’m not the only one who slowly scrolled through this very site’s Top 20 Albums of 2011 feature a few times in a vain attempt to locate Burst Apart. It had to be there somewhere, right? It wasn’t, though, and …

25. St. Vincent – “Surgeon” [4AD] To know Annie Clark is to love her. The versatile songstress and musician has been making indie hearts melt since her time with the Polyphonic Spree, and her 2007 debut Marry Me was beloved for its cheeky sense of humor (see: the album’s “Arrested Development”-inspired title) and the sheer skill she exhibited. She’s released …

Jay-Z and Kanye West Watch the Throne Rating: 3.8/5.0 Label: Roc-A-Fella / Roc Nation / Def Jam The superstar monumental collaborative rap album isn’t a particularly new concept in hip-hop. From 2Pac and Scarface’s mid-’90s album through Ghostface Killah and MF Doom coming together to make an underground rap fan’s wet dream, the genre has had its attempts at chocolate-in-peanut …

Decoded by Jay-Z Rating: 4.1/5.0 Publisher: Spiegel & Grau I’ve always taken issue with Hip-Hop academia, especially when it comes to actual books about rap music. With few exceptions, most of them tend to function as a soapbox for authors to validate their thesis on how “Tupac’s views of women through the masculine gaze of capitalism as deconstructed by the …