A few drinks into my conversation with Mike and El-P about their new collaboration R.A.P. Music (Williams Street), the tone shifted, as it tends to under the influence of multiple makeshift White Russians. EL-P's drink-ordering became relentlessly efficient. Things became a little more candid. The conversation veered on-and off-record, and, by the time the night was over, they ended up "covering" almost everything. From the fate of HBO's Luck to the future of Earl to what El-P originally thought of Jay-Z, here are the (publishable) highlights of The Drunken Reel.

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Kurt Wagner, ringleader of Lambchop, stops to chat with me for a few minutes outside his tour van. He's in White Plains, on his way to Philly, and he has about a cigarette break's worth of time. Thankfully, he's as verbose and animated in conversation as he is muttering, inscrutable, and downright prickly on-record. Lambchop's 2012 record, Mr. M, saw the Nashville band stumble back into a brief moment of spotlight-glare as they continued along their fearlessly ornery path: a Pitchfork BNM, a fresh round of critical adoration for a band already beloved by those who think about their music too long and too hard. The band, who have known each other since high school, have settled into the kind of old-chair band dynamic that becomes its own sort of character on record; Mr. M glows with it. Wager is dry and bemused when questions grow overly theoretical, prompting a nicoteine-drenched laugh. But he is unfailingly polite, funny, and accomodating, at one point pulling out a sampler from his back pocket to play through his phone.

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Lambchop are weirdos. Which means that theoretically, they should be flourishing right now: indie-rock is in the midst of a brief, fervent patch of weirdo adoration. But the long-running Nashville institution, which releases its 11th album Mr. M this week, handily demonstrates the profound gap separating the brightly colored weirdness that draws delighted, flocking crowds (tUnE-YarDs, Dirty Projectors) from the kind that clears rooms. The band, which has been making records since William Jefferson Clinton's first term, has never once cracked open the door to the outside world any wider than allows for the peering of one bloodshot eye, and ringleader Kurt Wagner has expressed only marginal awareness of whatever is going on around them. They are proudly impervious to popularity.

Which, of course, is a precious commodity anywhere in the world you find it. And Lambchop is just that: the kind of vanishingly rare band allowed to exist over several geologic eras of pop-culture time, pursuing a singular, demented muse. Lambchop is an island, removed from the squalor of everyday world, so terrifically inscrutable that you even start looking for significance in their name: not pork chop, but lamb chop. Surely that must mean something?

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When will Rick Ross stop improving? All bets are currently off, because right now—as in right this very moment, in the immediate aftermath of Rich Forever—Rick Ross is the best rapper alive. Not too long ago, he was arguably the worst. Lots of other rappers have made The Leap from distinctly unpromising beginnings, but it's hard to think of many who have traveled as far from as lowly an origin point.

Ross is all about big gestures, though. Rich Forever, his latest absurdly generous slab of Maybach Music, is twenty tracks long, runs well over an hour, and boasts features from Diddy, Nas, John Legend, Kelly Rowland, Pharrell, and more. It's produced entirely by MMG's production team—Beat Billionaire, The Inkredibles, Justice League—which means that it sounds bigger and more expensive than anything you can remember. And Ross has given it away for free. If he had released it commercially, it would have certainly have gone gold. But Ross insists this heaping platter is just an "appetizer" for the main course, which will be his delayed fifth studio album God Forgives, I Don't. As far as appetizers go, it's like being served a T-bone steak for two before the chef wheels out an entire pan of lasagna.

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Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

Every year, ambitious young bands find new ways—fascinating, puerile, ingenious—to play the Internet, and in 2011, one of the most captivating, effective ways to do so involved near-silence. A cluster of breakthrough bands, WU LYF and Unknown Mortal Orchestra among them, caused a huge publicity ripple online by pointedly refusing to exist there—or deciding to have an online presence so cryptic as to frustrate any desire for even the most basic information. In this scenario, a band's lack of Google hits are a direct measure of its tantalizing mysteriousness. If the Internet is a musical instrument, this was its version of John Cage's "4:33."

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The Game's R.E.D. Album arrives, limping and bloodied, in stores this week. The culmination of three years of development, innumerable push-backs, and a humiliating trail of failed first singles, the occasion of its release feels less a victory lap than a death spasm; Interscope Records has finally given up and decided to cut its losses. The remaining crowd of message-board lurkers can now click "download" on the .rar file and move on with their lives. And Game now owes his record label an unimaginable amount of money: the "R.E.D." in the album's title might stand for deficit-column ink.

Indeed, The R.E.D. Album might go down in history as the costliest losing battle a rapper has ever waged against his own irrelevance. Game's albums have always been community affairs, and The R.E.D. Album is no exception: the guest roster this time is the most crowded ever. But no amount of shared pushing can get the doomed project off the ground, and hearing a murderer's row of collaborators—including Drake, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Big Boi, Young Jeezy, Beanie Sigel, Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, The Creator and even Dr. Dre—step up and pitch their talents into the void over the album's interminable 21-track expanse is one of the year's most dispiriting experiences.

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This list began as a joke, but the longer I contemplated it, the more depressing its basic concept became. Consider: not only could I easily string together ten of Game's fruitless attempts to force label executives to release The R.E.D. Album, his followup to 2008's LAX; I had to make decisions about which ten to include. If you can think of a more damning condemnation of both commercial gangsta-rapper woes and major-label wastefulness, I'm all ears.

For mid-level major-label rappers like Game, keeping your fans satisfied while they wait impatiently for a product you keep desperately promising is right around the corner has become a melancholy fact of life. Unless you currently have at least two Top Ten hits currently floating in the radio-playlist soup, your album is a theoretical construct, no more "around the corner" than universal health care.

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DJ Quik is feeling jovial. He's in New York for a pair of shows at the Knitting Factory and an appearance on Jimmy Fallon, all on the back of his masterful 2011 record The Book Of David. David isn't just the rap record of the year; it's one of the most accomplished albums in his far-too-long overlooked catalog, and he beams with the knowledge. "It's one of the only albums in my catalog I can listen to without fast-forwarding, which is the first time that's happened since my first album," he says matter-of-factly.

Quik has played the role of Unsung West Coast Rap Hero for a long time. There are ups and downs to being a rap-nerd secret handshake; he's universally respected, but he's also done unpaid work on the kind of records that are supposed to fund your great-grandkids' college tuition. And that's to say nothing of the troubling family issues that have dogged him over the past ten years—issues he addresses with unsettling frankness on The Book Of David.

But none of that seems to be bothering him at the moment. Over the course of a giddy hour, we touch on his love of Harold Ramis ("him and John Landis? That shit is brilliant"), his intermittent asthma ("I think I cured that shit myself, just by making myself perform live") and his allergy to repeating himself. "You know, the brain detects loops, and you'll be off some shit in a minute if it's repetitive. I didn't want two soundalike records on this record at all. Repetition is my enemy. Even though that's an oxymoron, because my career is based on loops. So you see, I live in a fuckin' paradox; I try not to drive myself crazy."

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At this point, Fabolous's spot in hip-hop is carved in stone. He's the Welterweight Champion of Punchlines, the master jabber who has fruitlessly chased the knockout blow for so long the pursuit defines him. His chronic, career-long inability to say "no" to A&R men has resulted in some of the most treacle-drowned, nothing-for-everyone studio albums this side of Lupe Fiasco's Lasers. But get him in the booth with some recycled instrumentals and zero commercial expectations, and he will giddily, slyly, and consistently drop jaws. In terms of modest-but-dependable NY pleasures, he's up there with a good slice.

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Here's what's on the table with Gunz N' Butta, the new mixtape from Cam'ron and Vado: Cam'ron, six years removed from his last best shot at stardom, smirking and plucking the lowest hanging lyrical fruit available. His latest protégé, a scrawny, slightly bummy-looking dude with an unfortunate fondness for denim suits, barking himself hoarse. (His name, by the way, is apparently an acronym for "Violence and Drugs Only"-an admirably principled stand.) And beats by Araabmusik, a Harlem producer whose signature technique involves making his MPC explode over and over again until things resemble a Michael Bay movie. It doesn't get much deeper than that, so at this point, you've probably decided whether to back slowly away or rejoice like it's Rap Nerd Christmas.

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