2 Chainz, Asher Roth, Ace Hood, Vado, and Gunplay
Gramercy Theatre
Tuesday, February 21

Better than: Clicking through the 50 best hip-hop jumpsuits.

Is a show still a success if the audience has a great time, but never quite figures what's being promoted? Last night at the Gramercy Theatre, a website called Best of Both Offices brought a handful of rappers from along the east coast to help them re-launch their website and announce a new partnership with Complex Media. Yet the next morning I'm still not exactly sure what that website is. The company refers to itself as a "fully equipped lifestyle and artist development brand designed to creatively develop, market, promote and establish brand new upstart or prominent artists or brands into the marketplace," but that doesn't help much, and Complex claims that it has "successfully marketed, developed and digitally promoted artists including... Jay-Z," which I have trouble believing.

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Hot 97 Summer Jam
New Meadowlands Stadium
Sunday, June 5

Better than: Sitting at home and moping like 50 Cent.

Rick Ross closed out Summer Jam.

Just so there's no revisionist history here, let's remember how incredible that statement is. Three years ago, Ross was the punching bag of hip-hop, the laughingstock of the streets. After recording countless verses that fetishized Tony Montana fantasies, someone pinched him—Ross' cartoonish thought bubble vanished into thin air, and he was rudely snapped back to reality. He wasn't a druglord superhero; he was William Roberts, a grown man playing dress-up, a former correctional officer who wanted to be a rapper so badly that he rewrote his personal history. Two years ago, he wasn't being played on New York radio.

And here, onstage at Giants Stadium, was Rick Ross—his chest puffed out, his black-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt open wide but still somehow stretching tight—cheered on by fifty thousand strong. They welcomed his street anthem, "B.M.F.," chanting a chorus and cadence that, in various incarnations, has blasted out of car windows on 125th ever since it came out last summer: "I think I'm Big Meech, Larry Hoover." Rick Ross can make up a lot of things, but even he couldn't make this up.

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It's been almost 5 months, or 141 days, or 3384 hours, or 203,040 minutes since Lil Wayne got out of jail. And in that time, by our count, he's made 26 new musical appearances. A few of these might have been recorded before he went to jail (pre-probation-Wayne's maniacally hoarse voice generally being the tip-off), and many are remixes or features. But it still seems like a lot, and even if most aren't yet the monstrous sort of hits that he dominated the radio with pre-jail, they probably soon could be. Which is to say, it turns out post-jail Wayne is pretty much as good as pre-jail Wayne. To prove it, we've counted down our top ten, and rounded up the rest for your enjoyment.

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