Cookin' With Coolio.

​Today, excitable Long Island-raised rap firebrand Flavor Flav will open his House Of Flavor restaurant in Las Vegas. The restaurant—which will have fried chicken and something called a "red velvet waffle" on the menu—is Flav's second attempt to break into the food world, following the disastrous Flav's Fried Chicken experiment in Iowa. (In brief: It bombed, lasting for just four months, and also stoked the ire of his Public Enemy partner Chuck D.) But Flav's far from alone in deciding that sometimes the rap game reminds him that he's, well, just very very hungry. Here's a guide to the new rap food movement.

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Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

​For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

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​If someone had told Action Bronson that he'd be traveling the world rapping for a living when he was a chef, he would've told them to stop talking shit and pass the blunt. But that's how things worked out. After working as a professional chef for the New York Mets, Bronson cooked up some pretty dope music on his debut Dr. Lecter, seasoning his rap lines with references to exotic foods and weed. As a result he's been compared to Ghostface—and though that comparison is irksome to Bronson, he's using it as motivation to further set himself apart from the rest of the pack. Peep what he had to say about his recent popularity, his new album and his Queens origins.

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​New York City rappers have been cast as something of the rap world's whipping boys for more than a few years now. Not only is it fashionable to paint the city's scene as still stuck in the '90s—that's, er, despite the man who effectively runs rap, old man Jay-Z, being pretty proud to hail from Brooklyn—even sympathetic profiles of the city's up-and-comers feel the need to ponder whether the MCs in question can break some sort of curse of the five boroughs. But this way of thinking is bunkum at best, and a cliché at worst.

But those people who've even casually cocked their ears toward the underground know that NYC rap has been doing just fine of late; a unified scene and a common vision have been slowly forming. Radio warrior Peter Rosenberg's first installment in the What's Poppin' mixtape series might not be an outright statement of hometown health, but with over half of the tape's 23 tracks showcasing artists who call NYC home, it's a timely reminder of the scene's promise.

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Rap Yard: Danny Brown, Action Bronson, Maffew Ragazino, Delicate Steve
The Morgan
Saturday, August 20

Better than: Eating fried chicken with a prostitute.

Fresh off the release of a free mixtape through local indie label Fool's Gold, the rising Detroit MC Danny Brown headlined Saturday installment of the Rock Yard party, which was dubbed Rap Yard and co-presented by Combat Jack and Dallas Penn, JellyNYC, and LivenDirect. It might not have been Summer Jam, but teetering on the edge of the small stage, launching into sarcastically pained tirades on personal setbacks and existential examinations of oral sex, the crowd encircling him and anxiously waiting for the next punchline, Brown proved he was ready to take his career to the next level.

Up until now, Brown has been patient with his own career development. The title of his latest release, XXX, isn't actually a nod to his lasciviousness; it's a matter-of-fact salute to his being 30 years old, and traveling down a long, tumultuous road to get there. In the early naughts, Brown gained his first acclaim, being hailed as the strongest link in Detroit cult favorite Reser'vor Dogs. That group had a potential deal with Roc-A-Fella that eventually fell through, but a label A&R rep helped get Brown's solo career going. He made tracks with Nicki Minaj, befriended and collaborated with G-Unit star Tony Yayo, and recorded some eye-raising material, but lost time and got off track when a drug charge landed him a year in jail.

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Roc Marciano, leading the charge

​Last year a small, underground pocket of NYC-based hip-hop found its voice again. With Roc Marciano's unimpeachable Marcberg album as the catalyst, a crew of loosely associated artists shook off that tired cliché about our city's commercial-outsider status and, for the first time since the height of the Dipset era, reaped the dividends of pulling from their immediate environment. They dropped tracks paying tribute to graffiti culture, rattled off rhymes about various Queens neighborhoods as if reading from a street map, shot videos on the type of deli-and-produce-stand-populated blocks you walk down every day, and, fittingly for a city where everyone's an amateur chowhound, embraced a recurring culinary sub-theme: mixtapes titled after ghee, say, or raps mentioning pan-seared tilapia and heirloom vegetables.

There's no snappy, collective tag for the sound, and no sense that the whole thing's about to be co-opted by major labels and established artists. It's not led by teenagers, and there's certainly no quirky signature dance. But that all just adds to the organic charm. It's healthy hearing local artists celebrating the city around them -- consider it the aural equivalent of shopping at outer-borough mom-and-pop stores, rather than indulging the big-box invasion of Manhattan. Here, then, are the five leading rap acts chronicling the authentic sound of New York in 2011.

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