Cookin' With Coolio.

​Today, excitable Long Island-raised rap firebrand Flavor Flav will open his House Of Flavor restaurant in Las Vegas. The restaurant—which will have fried chicken and something called a "red velvet waffle" on the menu—is Flav's second attempt to break into the food world, following the disastrous Flav's Fried Chicken experiment in Iowa. (In brief: It bombed, lasting for just four months, and also stoked the ire of his Public Enemy partner Chuck D.) But Flav's far from alone in deciding that sometimes the rap game reminds him that he's, well, just very very hungry. Here's a guide to the new rap food movement.

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The Revolver cover.

​On Thursday Jive Records announced that T-Pain's fourth album rEVOLVEr would be out on December 6. That same day, the rappa ternt sanga's single "5 O'Clock" reached a new Hot 100 peak of No. 25 . The timing wasn't exactly coincidental. The track, on which T-Pain is supported by Lily Allen and Wiz Khalifa, is the sixth single he's released in support of the album, and it has quickly become the most successful to date. But for over two years, he was lobbing one song after another into the marketplace, and each time it would quickly fall off the charts, and Jive would delay the album and start over from scratch.

The press release announcing the album calls "5 O'Clock" the second single from rEVOLVEr, designating "Best Love Song" featuring Chris Brown as the first. Truthfully, they're the sixth and fourth singles, respectively, but they're also the only top 40 hits from the campaign so far—which means everything else that missed will likely be tossed out, or only included as bonus tracks on certain editions of the album.

Not long ago, an album with half a dozen Hot 100 hits would be considered a runaway success. But the bar for singles-chart success to serve as a benchmark for potential album sales has been raised so high in recent years that rEVOLVEr has struggled for two years to find its way into stores, and other albums like it have as well.

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It should be noted that your correspondent is no great fan of 50 Cent, the Queens-born MC/smart drink mogul who has made himself over into something of a Twitter celebrity in recent months, simultaneously acting like a prankster and making big declarations about healing the world in a way that has so profoundly affected some, they've gone so far as to commit online shenanigans in his name. (It's like a religion!) But his announcement that he's no longer releasing albums is certainly worthy of note.

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The rat who symbolized 50 Cent at Summer Jam 2005. Ah, memories.

​Verbal insults! Wanton violence! Temper tantrums! Comical jpegs of foes! Mock lynchings live on stage! Sunday brings us another installment of Hot 97 Summer Jam, wherein rap's leading lights get the chance to prove the accuracy of the adage about modern hip-hop being closer to the world of professional wrestling than anything Afrika Bambaataa ever envisaged back in the '70s. So as a glittering lineup of Lil Wayne, Drake, Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa, and the peculiarly titled Lloyd Banks And Friends—which may just be a titular ruse to get committed Ross enemy 50 Cent into the venue, what with rumors of Curtis being banned from Summer Jam events—all prepare to take the stage this Sunday, here's a far-from-virtuous look back at Summer Jam's most controversial moments.

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​The phrase "the calm before the storm" appears in virtually every chart-related story this week. That's because the latest edition of the Billboard 200, which covers sales from the week ending May 22, is topped by Adele's 21. That album is No. 1 for the ninth and (presumably) final week before Lady Gaga's monster Born This Way makes its foregone chart-crushing debut.

But, come on now... "calm"? For chart-watchers, industryites and Gaga fans, I'd say the storm is already happening.

A meta-discussion has been raging all week around just how many copies Gaga's album will sell in week one, and whether all of the downloads she's racking up should count. Amazon's jaw-dropping decision to sell Born This Way for the unprecedented full-album price of 99 cents has not only engendered controversy—so much that Billboard's editor felt compelled to respond to some angry Britney Spears fans—it's rocket-fueled Gaga's sales.

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This cat is embarrassed on all our behalf.

​"SEO Pop," for those of you who might be confused by the genre named by pop-lyric scholar Andy Hutchins, is the umbrella term given to those songs about bleeding-edge-current topics that are released via the speedy dissemination tools offered by the Internet, whether they're covers of currently popular tracks or riffs on the day's most-searched-upon news; they're frequently used by musicians to draw attention to themselves in a very crowded landscape. In general these sorts of songs are not very good or insightful because they're rush jobs, and they tend to make everyone involved in their internet-wide dissemination feel if not bad, then vaguely icky--which is to say that they're pretty much designed for the current moment of too many media outlets and not enough eyeballs. So it is that the California MC Hot Rod, a protégé of SEO Pop pioneer 50 Cent, has capitalized on the Google Trends of the moment by releasing "Osama Bin Laden Is Dead." It samples LMFAO and has "cover art" that's a ripoff of the George Condo painting on the cover of "Power." There are also Charlie Sheen references. May 2011 in a super-lazy nutshell, after the jump.

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Anything to keep him off Twitter

​Don't look now, but 50 Cent is off in his little corner making compelling music again. Actually, you had better look now -- he only does this once a year or so, in between failed commercial projects. (Although here's a secret almost no one knows: His last such effort, 2009's Before I Self-Destruct, was one of the year's best rap albums. Really!) He may or may not be releasing another full-length record sometime soon; it may or may not be called Black Magic. But it's hard to get too worked up over these niggling details when you live in a 9,000-room mansion and will never, ever run out of money. Music is a demanding beast, after all, requiring hours of focused effort, and when you can get the same return on investment publicity-wise by filming yourself interrupting one of Shyne's conference calls, honestly, why bother?

But if there's one thing Curtis Jackson needs to feel, it's that he can still command your attention, should he want it. And when this itch grows burdensome, he goes on a small tear to relieve it, issuing a torrent of deeply entertaining, cheaply recorded freestyles and mini-songs over which he rants and raves like a gangsta-rap Yosemite Sam about his dwindling legacy. Usually, this music -- released on G-Unit mixtapes, or lately just sent willy-nilly to blogs as he finishes them -- is all the things he's good at being without even trying: undeniably funny, acridly contemptuous, cynical, openly hostile and bullying to anyone/everyone, and basically cartoonishly dickish. This latest salvo is no exception. There seems to be no "strategy" surrounding their presentation: no mixtapes, no themed projects, no "one song a week" roll-out schemes. Just a random spray of freestyles, original songs, random remixes of pop hits, and left-field collaborations with random West Coast street rappers. Black Magic, or whatever it is, exists in a purely theoretical realm right now; if and when it ever surfaces, it will likely boast half the entertainment value of what we've collected here.

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This video of 15-year-old YouTube star Keenan Cahill, better known as BeenerKeeKee19952, raises a lot of questions. Like, if this kid is famous for lip-syncing pop songs, why does he never actually know any of the lyrics? Where did he come from? What song is this? How exploitative is the propagation of Cahill's videos on a scale of 1-10? And why in the world does 50 Cent show up halfway through this one? The answer to at least one of those questions is "Chelsea Handler."

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Here he is with the flight attendant who allegedly had a lot to say about Puffy's bathroom regimen

​50 Cent's Twitter page is going to get someone arrested. Possibly him. Possibly you. It's no surprise, of course, in this age of the Twitter-obsessed rapper, that 50 would take to the format with such aplomb, given his history of profoundly uncouth Internet-based hijinx. We have noted his skill with Twitter before. But what he's been up to in the last week or so has taken it to a new level. Whether this level is farther up or further down is open to debate, of course. Here, just so you know what to expect, are some of his most recent antics.

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Though 50 Cent has had his own verified account on Twitter for a while now, it's safe to say that yesterday was the rapper's official debut on the social media site. How do we know this? Because about 24 hours ago the robotic, self-promotional, ghost-written stream of updates occasionally posted to 50's account gave way, suddenly, to a torrent of hilarious vitriol. (His ghostwriter was as shocked as the rest of us.) Many rappers play villains but are quite nice when it comes to the real world and its online proxies. 50 Cent, however, is in fact a villain, whether on record, YouTube, Shyne-conference-call, or elsewhere. If you didn't think so before, we'd argue that he kind of proved it yesterday. Behold: a veritable mountain of contempt for failed Haitian presidential candidate Wyclef Jean, G-Unit compatriot Tony Yayo, Gawker, Michelle Obama, his own manager, and yup, grandma. Yikes, 50:

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