​The leak earlier this week of Kanye West's "Mama's Boy" (known first to the Internet as "Mama's Boyfriend") has, as you might expect, greatly displeased the moody MC and those people with interests in the business of his music. Last night Kanye's label Island Def Jam released a statement saying that he was "deeply disappointed":

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​Last night--just after your trusty SOTC blogger left the office, as a matter of fact--Lady Gaga's Born This Way leaked, thrilling impatient pop listeners and giving the Web Sheriff an entirely new headache. A cursory listen so far reveals a lot of homages, unsurprisingly, to pop's darker sides during the late '80s/early '90s--heavy dance beats that sound like they were scraped off a dumpster, the occasional German accent, stinging guitars, and, of course, drop-the-façade ballads that evoke the most garment-rending heights of Desmond Child and Diane Warren (And while the lyrics could use a bit of editing here and there, "I want your whisky mouth/ all over my blonde south," from the surprisingly downtempo "Heavy Metal Lover," is pretty wonderfully risqué.) More to come as the day goes on--especially given that Gaga herself has yet to weigh in--but for now, feel free to share your first impressions here.

​It exists. You have spent months (years?) worrying about Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday, fearing that the pleasingly psychotic Queens rapper's debut full-length wouldn't be pleasingly psychotic enough. Time to find out. It's out Monday officially but floated into the Internet ether late last night -- leaking later than Kanye, which is impressive, actually. Brace yourself. If you're not ready yet, feel free to go track-by-track: The big whoop this morning is "Blazin'," a Breakfast Club-evoking boast reuniting her with Kanye, the dude who's about to obliterate her on the Billboard charts, but hey, no hard feelings. Hear that below, and good luck, to you and to her.

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Although one of the year's most highly anticipated rap records leaked two weeks early, there's another notable 2010 hip-hop record that's still a veritable mystery. Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday is out November 22, and though some have questions about its ultimate quality, its overall sound has been hard to suss out. Low on leaks, today's seven-minute album sampler (above) provides a few clues. Tracklist after the jump.

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​The day was bound to come. On Tuesday, November 9, 2010, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Family hit the internet in its entirety, albeit in a clean version, disruptively edited. It arrives 13 days early, while in the interest of some perspective, West's last album, 808s and Heartbreak, appeared online 12 days before its release date. When an artist takes to the internet to complain about an album leak, they tend to not address what they have to lose financially; it's typically a plea along the lines of, We spent so long making this art and it must be heard how and when we intended. To be sure, an edited Kanye West record is not the prettiest thing. Once known for his tantrums, but now seemingly more settled, will West react publicly at all? Will he cancel GOOD Fridays? Scrap the album and start again? (Kidding.) Or will he just type so fucking hard he might break his fucking Mac book Air? There are five possible versions of Kanye West we're likely to see...

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And it seems we have at last the self-lacerating, clear-eyed therapy record Eminem's been promising since putting his career on hold back in 2005 in order to head off to rehab. On "Talkin 2 Myself," the rapper paints a portrait of a struggling Eminem in the booth, popping pills and contemplating dissing Lil Wayne, or Kanye, mostly out of sheer desperation--"Thank god that I didn't do it/I'd have had my ass handed to me," he raps. A bunch of songs later, he and Wayne team up instead over a sample of Haddaway's "What Is Love"--a happier outcome, to say the least, and more so for the fact that the song is fire.

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​And like that, the most heavily anticipated 2010 rap album (short of Kanye West's Good Ass Job, anyway) spreads its breathy, emotional tendrils all across the internet. Thank Me Later is officially scheduled to drop June 15th, so Drake had a good pre-release run, by the way things are reckoned these days. (Sleigh Bells' Treats is pretty much the single high profile 2010 record we can think of not to leak well in advance of its release date.) Plus it all tends to work out if you have a good album on your hands, and at first listen, Drake's album is very, very good. The snare-drum sound on the Jay-Z collabo "Light Up"; the weird personal disclosures on "Karaoke" ("Isn't it ironic that the girl I want to marry is a wedding planner?") and "The Resistance" ("My mother was a florist"); the extended, soft-focus slow jam of "Shut It Down"--it all seems a lot like the emo-rap paradigm-shifter Drake was supposed to make. Your move, Kanye.

​Because PlayMPE--"one of a handful of technologies that record labels use to distribute advance, watermarked albums, to blogs, magazines, and a variety of other publications," reports AbsolutePunk.net--was hacked last week. PlayMPE is the preferred industry vehicle these days as far getting records to critics ahead of the official release date. But all it took was one clever teenager to get himself on the company's distribution list, and the rest was RapidShare history. The kid was caught after bragging about his exploits online, which just goes to show that internet fluency is not even remotely equivalent to internet IQ.

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​As we mentioned the other day, the The New York Times is now streaming the National's newest record in full. There are certainly worse ways to try and get ADD, print-averse music fans to read a long New York Times Magazine feature on an indie-rock band. [NYT]

​Last week, a leak from an ash-hole (Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano) forced the Crystal Castles to cancel and reschedule a London live date. Today, NME is reporting, a leak from an asshole has compelled the duo to rush-release their self-titled new album, originally slated for June but now spreading like a cloud plume all over the Internet, and thus now officially available digitally this Friday. Sometimes horrible puns write themselves, folks. Be sure to tip your waitresses.