A look at the week's hottest pop clips, including the frolicsome ribaldry of Robin Thicke, the mansion malaise of 50 Cent and the insufferable wackness of Somethingorother Yacht Idiots.

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Here's a round-up of music stories we're reading this week, clever girl.

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Last week, 50 Cent took to Twitter to tackle an issue few rappers have dared address: the sin of masturbation. He even went so far as to offer a handy four-step guide to avoiding the temptation to debase yourself:

Step 1: To avoid the urge to masturbate stop going to porn sites.

Step 2: Make a conscious decision not to turn your head after people walk by you.

Step 3: Do not go to strip clubs.

Step 4: Do not look at lust filled magazines.

We appreciate 50's commitment to defeating the scourge of onanism, but there's one thing lacking from his advice: Not all of us are in strip clubs or surfing porn sites when we're visited by the ungodly urge. A lot of us are just simple 50 Cent fans, driven over and over to the sin of self-abuse by none other than Curtis himself.

For your spiritual benefit, we'll share our own four-step plan to stop masturbating to 50 Cent.

See Also:
- 50 Cent Enjoys Eating Pu**y
- The Fall Of Curtis: How September 11, 2007 Changed Everything For 50 Cent
- 50 Cent Is Done With The Album-Releasing Game

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Let me indulge in a little bit of Jay-Z/Kanye fan fiction in the least 50 Shades of Grey way possible:

Def Jam President and retired rapper Jay-Z was fed up.

50 Cent had been sending subliminal barbs Jay's way for eight years, starting with a shot Mr. Carter's way on "How To Rob" when they were both climbing their respective hip-hop ladders. In 2007, with both at the peak of their careers, Fiddy was back at it, baiting Jay-Z with braggadocio lyrics and interviews about his then-fiancé, his money, and how he'd sold out.

Jay didn't know what to do, although he was well aware that a nasty feud with the Queens-born MC in the middle of his own corporate ascension would be PR suicide.

Enter Kanye West, who had been working on the follow-up to his mega-successful Late Registration and who was looking at a fourth-quarter release date.

"What if I dropped my album on the same day at 50 Cent's?" Kanye asked. "Yeah, I'll put my album out on the same day as 50's, start a sales battle."

A solution! And one that would take Jay out of the fray. After oodles of hoopla, September 11, 2007, rolled around, and Graduation and Curtis both hit shelves. A week later, the dust cleared, and 50 Cent was defeated—without Jay having to lift a finger.

While it's unclear how Kanye (and Jay) came to the decision to release Graduation exactly five years ago today, it's pretty easy to speculate that 50 and Jay's cold war was a prime motivator behind the biggest rap marketing circus this side of pretending Detox will ever come out.

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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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