Editor's Note: Tomorrow night, Lil B is speaking at NYU; yesterday afternoon, he released a mixtape that he said was required listening for the students attending his lecture. We had Brad Nelson, the Lil B scholar who will cover tomorrow's lecture and Lil B's Thursday night performance at the New Museum, chronicle his first reactions to the tape.

At the start of The Basedprint II, the new mixtape by Lil B, he advises us that there's "no need for volume one." On the cover he is hastily photoshopped over Jay-Z, edges widely lassoed, triangles of background newly part of the face. He employed a similar deconstruction of classic hip-hop album art on White Flame, with his smiling absorption of Soulja Slim's Give it 2 'Em Raw. On the cover of Silent President he launched a rendered, golden profile of himself into the ornate and regal teeth of Watch the Throne.

Lil B usually deals in interpolation, from hip-hop and other forms, but the signal-to-noise ratio is always slightly off, misshapen. I'm Gay, his 2011 album, is a tonally straightforward backpack rap album—soul samples, choking strings, rapping as slow darts of consciousness—that, for a song called "I Hate Myself," lands on a gravitationally slowed sample of "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls.

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When Last Train To Paris, the sole album by the hip-hop/R&B trio Diddy-Dirty Money, landed in stores 16 months ago, it would've been fair to assume it was the end of something, not the beginning. The mogul formerly known as the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy had been more of a professional celebrity than anything resembling a rap star for over a decade, and he had been listlessly threatening to release a concept album by his genre-bending group for a couple years. Even though Sean Combs had been the primary architect behind fusing hip hop with R&B in the '90s, pushing the Notorious B.I.G. and Mary J. Blige toward each other's respective genres, something about this latest project had the stench of riding the coattails of 808s & Heartbreak and T-Pain, who Diddy said would receive album royalties from Last Train To Paris simply for its use of AutoTune. Even Diddy's most aggressive promotion of the album came during promotional junkets for his supporting role in Get Him To The Greek.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Paris: the album turned out to be a masterpiece, not so much adventurous as deliriously generous in its cornucopia of off-the-wall synth and percussion textures, and ruminations on heartache so intense they almost circled back around to celebratory. And while Diddy and his rotating cast of superstar guests soaked up most of the attention, the actual sound and mood was driven largely by the two women who served as his Greek chorus of love and loss: Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper. Richard first entered the Bad Boy fold via the third cycle of MTV's Making The Band, in which she was chosen as a member of the girl group that was eventually named Danity Kane. After two successful albums, Danity Kane was unceremoniously disbanded by Diddy. But he kept Richard on the label, ultimately teaming with her and Harper (a songwriter for Christina Aguilera and Ciara, among others) to create Last Train To Paris.

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​"I find myself walking to work and I can see the sun rise right over Queens Boulevard, and I say to myself, why hasn't Queens gotten a trophy in a very long time? I mean, I feel like we deserve to shine right now, don't we? We got a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful team and I can see us parading down Roosevelt Avenue right now..."

So goes the spoken opening to "'86 Mets," a song from Queens rap trio Children of the Night's new freebie mixtape, Queens... Revisited. It's a worthy motivational plea, but it's one that might not be needed for long, with the city beginning to feel an invigorating wave of hip-hop releases. Hometown artists like the Flatbush Zombies, 17-year-old Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew, and Das Racist's Greedhead army are garnering attention with resolutely east coast-styled music, while the scene's most charismatic, Action Bronson, deserves to follow Crown Heights' unruliest, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, into the major-label leagues.

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​Diddy's new Bad Boy movement is beginning to resemble a hall of mirrors. The label's rejuvenation has been spear-headed by fresh faces—Cleveland's Machine Gun Kelly, Bronx-based French Montana, and Baltimore's Los—but there are striking parallels and warped similarities with Bad Boy's glory years. French Montana has coined an early anthem with his Lords Of The Underground-sampling "Shot Caller"—and just like its '90s equivalent, Craig Mack's off-kilter "Flava In Ya Ear," it's been upgraded into an all-star remix, this time with Rick Ross and Diddy rapping instead of Biggie and Busta. "Shot Caller" is Bad Boy's calling card right now, but it's unlikely Montana has the chops to sustain interest for an entire album. Which leaves Machine Gun Kelly as Diddy's hope for a new Biggie.

White, gangly, and tatted with the insignia of a midwestern upbringing, Kelly is Biggie's image opposite—but for Bad Boy to carve out a second spell of rap dominance, Diddy is counting on the XXL Freshman to follow in Big's hallowed footsteps. Kelly's Half Naked and Almost Famous EP, out today, is the first marker on his Bad Boy journey—and it underscores the potential the rapper possesses without signaling his arrival as the label's next figurehead.

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​You don't expect a legacy artist to still be able to surprise you, to put out music 40 years later that is genuinely interesting and expansive and making a good honest attempt at being relevant. Not in the "Mick Jagger getting his young minions to curate the hottest young live music acts for the Stones opening slots" kind of relevant, but in the way of giving you a record you want to listen to over and over again because it's great, not out of obligation or so that you know all the songs for when you go to see them live.

Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball is surprising, innovative, and vital in a way that is both a blessing and a relief. The record is far from perfect—the production suffers in spots, which hurts a few tracks—but it's strong, with a few older songs that get remade in remarkable fashion. It's easy to pigeonhole the record as being some kind of bold new step for Springsteen when in reality all of the themes and elements brought to the forefront on Wrecking Ball have been around for years, if not decades.

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​Mixed Emotions, the second album from Brooklyn /social media shining lights Tanlines, is due out March 20, and to pump up the Leap Day crowds, the duo has released a new track from the record. "All Of Me" marries synthpop bounce with a gloriously anthemic chorus, creating a thrill ride of a song that has reflexively induced more than a little bit of February-29-appropriate jumping in at least one music editor's home office. (Cough cough.) Link below.

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​Last week, as projections of blinking eyeballs danced across the wall of Soho's W.i.P. during the album preview of WZRD (Wicked Awesome/HeadBanga Muzik/Universal Republic), one couldn't help but draw parallels between the distressed protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's The Eye, Smurov, and Kid Cudi, who makes up one half of the record's titular duo. The perception and nebulousness of identity is at the heart of Nabokov's novel, and WZRD will inevitably inspire people to scratch their heads (and, in some cases, jeer) at the idea of who, exactly, Kid Cudi is. At last week's session, the man who helped make skinny jeans and backpacks fashionable in certain hip-hop circles was a sight to behold, wearing a fantastic bedazzled Prada shirt (it shimmered under the dim pink lights), Balmain jeans and Converse. His short 'fro was traded in for a smooth, pressed look somewhat reminiscent of soul singers of yore. "He's rock 'n' roll now," noted a confused onlooker.

WZRD isn't the next chapter in Cudi's Man on the Moon trifecta, nor is it really a hip-hop album at all. alt-rock stalwarts like Nirvana and The Pixies, it's a confusing and depressing—but, like Cudi himself, ultimately engaging—record.

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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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​What do you do when you are the Cute Beatle approaching 70? Age—and those decades of inhaling herb—is finally catching up to those pipes, yet vanity or stubbornness prevents you from simply clipping on that capo to sing your classics in a lower key. Oh, and your name is Sir Paul and you're the only survivor of pop's most valuable (in every sense) conglomerate who is not Ringo.

There are some obvious choices. A reality show? Been there, done that. A Rick Rubin-produced warts and all expose? You would find that Paulie's gritty is everyone else's pretty. As the son of a dance hall bandleader, James Paul McCartney always deferred to the Great American Songbook's greatness. Moving from the stadiums (where, for a $500 ticket, he will do his damndest to hit a younger bloke's high notes) to LA's Capitol studios, where he crooned into Nat Cole's old mic, he is not only aging with dignity but with a subtle beauty young Paul may have missed a few decades ago, when the temptation to show off his octaves (and Little Richard-inspired holler) would be too great.

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​In other "M.I.A. in a video" news, this morning also marked the premiere of the clip for "Bad Girls," a fleshed-out-by-Danja version of a track from her ViCKi LEEKZ mixtape. In the clip, Maya struts her stuff through a post-apocalyptic tableau where the highways are so empty, drivers can (and do) engage in the parking-lot practice of "doing donuts," while the more skilled among them tip their vehicles over to one side so ladies can lounge as they're riding. Clip below.

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