February 27th will join February 5th-- "The Day The Music Died"-- as a day that will forever live in rock and roll infamy. This Wednesday, critical darlings and multi-platinum superstars Stone Temple Pilots shocked the world and devastated fans by announcing the termination of founding vocalist Scott Weiland.

The brevity of the band's statement, released by their publicist via email, belied the magnitude of the announcement: "Stone Temple Pilots have announced they have officially terminated Scott Weiland."

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After a year in which her rep as a legitimate rap artist has been dented by an album that split its time between dense rhymes and enormous, danceable beats, America has suddenly decided to take Nicki Minaj seriously. And all it took was her bigging up rich white dude Mitt Romney on a verse over G.O.O.D. Music's "Mercy."

"I'm a Republican, votin' for Mitt Romney/ You lazy bitches is fuckin' up the econ'my," she raps near the end of the verse, which appears on Lil Wayne's Dedication 4 mixtape. The Internet, whose geniuses often struggle with understanding rap lyrics, took her at her word: Google News has blown up with stories about the mention, with Twitter/Reddit/4chan distillery BuzzFeed among many outlets to publish a post to the effect of "Nicki Minaj is voting for Mitt Romney!" without engaging the context of the song.

That bloggers, reporters, and Twitter users would do this is unsurprising—engaging with the context of rap can be difficult!—but taking rappers at their literal word is almost always a no-no, especially when the lines take to the absurd.

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The R&B singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash 11 years ago this month; last week Drake announced that he'd be executive producing a posthumous album for her, and the first taste of that album, "Enough Said," arrived online yesterday. Lest you think that the song would be a chance for people to remember her legacy, think about how singular her voice was, and reflect on how she'd be pushing R&B forward today, it is instead a testament to Drake's ego; it starts with an "uh" from the former Degrassi star, who then, in response to her letting loose a particularly lovely "yeah yeah yeah," offers up a "yo, whassup" that is annoying-guy-at-a-bar-level cringeworthy, and made even moreso when it's repeated. I actually had to shut the song off before my first listen hit the 30-second mark, so irritated was I by Drake's attempts to act not just as its executive producer, but as Guy Steering The Ship And Don't You Forget It, Okay.

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This week, teen-idol-of-the-moment Justin Bieber released his second proper full-length, Believe, a record studded with cameos by the likes of Drake and Nicki Minaj and stuffed with different styles of music—from R&B to simply sung acoustic-guitar balladry to something that's either arena rock or moombahton, or maybe a hybrid of both. (The song in question was produced by Diplo, so the latter might very well be true.) In the wake of this monumental pop event, the Voice's Maura Johnston and Nick Murray got on the horn (or, rather, Gchat) to discuss the album.

Maura Johnston: So the official narrative goes that Justin Bieber's Believe is his "growth" album, the one where he gets rid of the floppy hair and lets his changed voice lead the proceedings. His... justification of himself as an artist, if you will. And I guess the last track on the album, "Maria," is the exclamation point on that statement—it's a broadside against the woman who famously accused him of fathering her child last year.

Nick Murray: Yeah totally, and it's a bit unexpected to hear something so specific and so autobiographical at the end of an album whose lyrics are almost unanimously generic. I don't mean that in a bad way, of course, just that when Bieber tells us(?), someone(?), Selena(?), whoever, that he could just die in our arms, he's not revealing much about himself. That being said, I think the albums last few tracks are particularly smart. "Maria" is the broadside, but it's a sympathetic one, particularly following "She Don't Like the Lights," which uses camera flashes as percussion (the teenpop equivalent to the gun sounds in Waka's "Bustin' at Em?" and tells the opposite story, of a girl who avoids fame rather than seeks it.

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It would be easy to dismiss Kitty Pryde—scarlet-haired 19-year-old white women from Daytona Beach, Florida, would not fit anyone's profile of "the next to blow," and rap-singing songs about Justin Bieber ("Justin Bieber") and an object of her affection ("Okay Cupid") isn't the most direct path to street cred—and it would also be wrong. Kitty doesn't have sharp claws; her "hardest" bar, for my money, is from an obscure YouTube freestyle: "I'm Princess Fiona, I'm an ogre at night." But she does have a sharp eye for detail—she's earned her self-proclaimed "rap game Taylor Swift" title with precise lines about the imprecision of young love—as well as an ear for hazy, suspended-in-air beats, and a curlicue flow that approximates the ennui of being smart and young and living in Florida and is equal parts Tyler, The Creator and Lil B.

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Today the perpetually troubled R&B brat Chris Brown released the video for "Till I Die," a collaboration with Wiz Khalifa and Big Sean that waxes semi-poetic about the joys of getting fucked up and eating shrimp-laden pasta. (Is that a sex metaphor? Please say no.) The song itself sounds like a reverse-engineered version of the Karmin cover of Brown's hit "Look At Me Now," only with lyrics to prove that he's still a badass, y'all; the video has a lengthy section that brings to mind the Go-Gos' iconic clip for "Our Lips Are Sealed," only with some Disney-flick-like CGI that dances around the three principals' heads in an effort to represent just how fucked up the substances of which they sing have made them. There is also a dedication to Adam "MCA" Yauch, the recently deceased Beastie Boy slash activist slash all around great guy. Which is a nice gesture! Except when you look at it in the context of not just this video, but Brown's very recent behavior.

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This week the outspoken (or, if you will, "Tweet-happy") Harlem MC Azealia Banks released her EP 1991, with the title serving as a reference to the year she was born and a hint as far as the predominant aesthetic of the title track. If you remember that year's housier hits—"Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)," "Strike It Up," and so on—you might get a bit of a deja-vu vibe while listening to this track, which has wobbly keyboards, thumping bass, and Banks taking on a slightly more menacing tone than she did on last year's bonkers "212." Will it come out of car windows all over the city? Listen below.

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YouTube

Loreen performs "Euphoria."

Three years ago, a single song decimated my belief that I understood pop music. Kejsi Tola, an Albanian sixteen year-old with a throaty alto, performed "Carry Me In Your Dreams" in the 2009 Eurovision semifinals, and for the first time in my history of pop adoration, I had tuned in. A Eurovision neophyte, I had no frame of reference for what I saw: Kejsi, in music-box couture, was writhed upon by a man in a sequined green bodysuit; two four-foot men in identical mime facepaint breakdanced on either side; she herself maintained clamp-tight focus while her compatriots tumbled and rolled around her, eventually forming themselves into a human staircase for her to ascend and be lifted down from.

But the song itself ensorcelled me, even as I had to listen past my own culture shock to hear it; Tola's voice ascended through the chorus, clear-eyed and brave, even as she plead to be sublimated by a suitor's desire, and the acrobatics she performed mid-verse caused the notes to slip and bend as they escaped her mouth, lending an accidental emotional verisimilitude to the performance. And, while I lay sprawled in naive disbelief that songs so universal and arresting could exist in so separate a musical ecosystem, I at last got a taste of the true moon's pull of Eurovision: "Carry Me In Your Dreams" not only did not win, but it placed seventeenth, drawing the fewest points an Albanian song has ever received in the Eurovision finals.

Welcome to the greatest song competition on the planet.

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via The LupEND Blog

It was all good for Lupe Fiasco just two albums ago. By 2008, the Chicago MC, co-signed by Jay-Z and brought on the Glow In The Dark Tour by Kanye West, had released two critically acclaimed albums, Food & Liquor and The Cool, and built on a reputation as a nimble lyricist with a political bent forged by a series of excellent mixtapes by demonstrating that he could write more traditionally radio-friendly singles ("Kick, Push," "Superstar") without forsaking his essence.

But those albums were only moderate commercial successes, leading Atlantic Records and Fiasco to squabble endlessly over what would eventually become 2011's Lasers. The struggle seemed to sap Fiasco's talents (Lasers is a mess of awkward collaborations and half-hearted you-can-do-it anthems that seemed like an ungainly swing at pop, despite Fiasco passing on what would become label mate B.o.B's "Nothin' on You"; Fiasco's last widely praised project was a 22-minute mixtape, Enemy of the State, released in November 2009) and embolden him politically (Fiasco, an avowed non-voter, called President Obama "the biggest terrorist" in 2011, has allied himself with Occupy Wall Street to the point of rapping "New gang alert, hashtag Occupy," and became one of the first rappers ever to look like an idiot in a dispute with Bill O'Reilly).

But Atlantic got what it wanted in Lasers, an album Fiasco confessed to hating: a hit. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard, spawned two top-40 singles ("The Show Goes On" and "Out of My Head"), and re-established Fiasco as a source of lucre for the label while giving him a forum for his Alex Jones-caliber conspiracy theorizing—"All Black Everything" imagines a counter-factual world in which the African slave trade did not exist but rap still somehow evolved in the same way, while "Words I Never Said" allowed Lupe to indulge his 9/11 truther fantasies ("9/11, Building 7, did they really pull it?") and self-mythologize ("I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful") over leaden Alex da Kid production. With "Around My Way (Freedom Ain't Free)," released Monday night, Fiasco proved that he and Atlantic understand the template for his future commercial success—rap on pop tracks and continue to vomit incoherent political screeds—but have completely lost the plot when it comes to critical respect.

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Azealia Banks, the LaGuardia alum who's made a name for herself in the hip-hop world thanks to her storming debut single "212" and her tendency to engage in real talk on Twitter (sparring partners have included Lil Kim, T.I., and Iggy Azalea), released a new single, "Jumanji," today, in advance of her EP 1991. Produced by Hudson Mohawke and Nick Hook, it's a horn-spangled, steel-drum-tinged boast, with Banks' voice taking on a harder edge that meshes well with the almost dreamlike sonics. Listen below.

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