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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Usher's Looking 4 Myself, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and Chris Brown's wingdinged-out Fortune.

Here are a few recent data points from chart bible Billboard and data provider Nielsen Soundscan as we move into the second half of 2012:

• In its midyear music-industry report card, Soundscan reports a return to the dismal album sales climate; year-to-date disc sales are off 3.2% from the same period in 2011. Last year saw the first annual rise in sales in nearly a decade, with albums eking out a 1.4% gain in 2011 over 2010. In the first six months of 2012, only one album sold more than a million copies, and it didn't come out this year: Adele's 21. Among the Top Five best-sellers for the year so far are a pair of stalwart acts from the 1980s: Lionel Richie, who on Tuskegee reupholstered his old hits as country songs and wound up with the year's second-best seller to date (912,000 copies); and Whitney Houston, who passed away in February, fueling sales for her 2000 disc The Greatest Hits which is now the year's fourth-best seller (818,000 copies).

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She's no longer an Internet phenomenon, but the moody singer Lana Del Rey has turned into something of an infatuation for rappers, who are more than eager to collaborate and canoodle with her. In honor of her headlining a series of shows at Irving Plaza this week, here's a short list of her notable hip-hop connections.

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If you've listened to much urban radio lately, or even a little, you may have noticed that Lil Wayne and his Young Money Entertainment labelmates, particularly Drake and Nicki MInaj, are quite popular. You may have also noticed the same thing in 2011. And in 2010. And 2009. But perhaps nothing underscores the staggering extent of their domination of the airwaves quite like their presence on the top 100 songs of Billboard's 2011 year-end R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. No fewer than 25 songs, a full quarter of the list, feature at least one of those three Young Money stars. Wayne has the most, with 13, with Drake coming in with 11, and Minaj boasts 5. Add labelmate Tyga's appearance on Chris Brown's 2010 holdover "Deuces," and you've got 26. (I'm also counting Ace Hood's supposed solo hit "Hustle Hard," which was only ever played on the radio in the form of its remix that features Wayne, in those figures.)

The 25% Young Money market share on urban radio in 2011 is only a slight uptick from 2010, when the label held strong with 20%. And with Drake rising to prominence in early 2009 and Minaj following soon after, we've now had three consecutive years of Young Money domination, which had already been preceded by Lil Wayne's decade-long climb to becoming arguably the biggest star in hip-hop. In a way, the Young Money triad's success is nothing new; hip-hop has long thrived on crews and labels in which several popular acts stand shoulder to shoulder, from the Juice Crew to the Native Tongues. And in the modern era of corporate-minded rap, every star has his own label imprint with a roster full of loyal friends and collaborators. Mainstream hip-hop can almost be divided into eras defined by the biggest labels of the moment, the '90s cycling from Death Row to Bad Boy to No Limit. By the end of the decade, Lil Wayne had gotten his first taste of fame as part of the Cash Money Records hit factory, from which of course he later spun off Young Money as his star rose.

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Superstar pals and Young Money labelmates Lil Wayne and Drake released two of the biggest albums of 2011—Tha Carter IV and Take Care—and both are still spinning off hits well into 2012. But a look at the singles charts reveals something odd: the biggest current hits off both albums aren't available on every copy of the album, but are instead bonus tracks from their deluxe editions. Drake's "The Motto," which features Wayne, currently tops the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and is at No. 19 on the Hot 100 after peaking at No. 16. And Wayne's own "Mirror," featuring Bruno Mars, is Weezy's highest current solo entry on the Hot 100, at No. 68 (it also peaked at No. 16). If you go into one of the few stores still selling CDs today, though, odds are that the versions of Tha Carter IV and Take Care in the racks won't include those current hits.

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Drake and the Weeknd... enjoying themselves?

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Fellow roundtablers,

As we turn down the home stretch, I have to say this has all been awesome, and I'm a little sad that we'll soon have to wrap this up. That being said, I'm going to take advantage of that fact that neither Maura, Katherine, nor Tom will be able to respond to anything I say and talk a little about the Weeknd. In the words of Abel Tesfaye, you'll wanna be high for this.

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Shhh... He's thinking.

Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Look, it's what I've been dreading talking about all year! Anyway. For the past hour, Maura, I've tried to think of one—only one—perfect antidote track, or line even, by a woman to the pickup whines by Drake and those who'd love to be him. I haven't even come close. Nicki Minaj has little interest in this, which is absolutely her right but rules out the most obvious candidate. A few Rihanna shame-changers, like "Watch 'N' Learn"'s "don't ask me if you were the first to sleep here/ 'cause if he did, you wouldn't even be here," might work, but they're lost amid album filler, raunch and career churn. Laura Marling's "Sophia" would work if it had any genre relation whatsoever and if the point of the song wasn't "how and with whom I've moved on is none of your business"—the only safe response when being candid as a female writer almost automatically means people call you oversharing (imagine if Drake was a woman), but no good for countering. And more plausible answer songs like "212" have reaches, as Eric said, currently confined to music blogs and whatever came of Banks' day out with Kanye. JoJo's "Marvin's Room" remake doesn't even pinprick Drake's original hit if you go by audience—even discounting the implications of wanting a white pop singer like JoJo to dethrone a black R&B singer like Drake, which shouldn't be discounted.

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Kanye West at Occupy Wall Street; confused woman.

Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Hello all, and thanks! I'm honored to be here. Let's talk about the collapse of the global economy.

Or rather, let's not; as tempting as it is to link early 2011's glut of apocalyptic dance or late 2011's druggy numbness to financial panic or cultural malaise, you'd have to glibly ignore 99% of both music and the cultural moment. Even the arguments that almost worked didn't, like the reductive meme that Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was just about being rich, not about the experience of being black and having become rich. And speaking of the 99%, it's far too soon to anoint any Occupy Wall Street anthem. (Sorry, Jonah, Miley's track is just a fanvid.) There's been music on the ground, of course, and there's an album coming out, but it's telling (of my now-bastardized Google Reader feed, if nothing else) that my main associations between music and Occupy are three things: the Radiohead non-concert that turned out to be a new-media bro's prank, the musicians whose Zuccotti cameos were probably out of good intent but in practice indistinguishable from photo ops, and the albums in Occupy's library, which was seized after the NYPD raids—alas, the cloud couldn't save it.

Nor can megastars—they're too busy mythologizing themselves to survive in lieu of those megasales. There are exceptions; candor in interviews and mega-megasales aside, you can't really call Adele a "celebrity," at least not using that term. (Contrary to rockist belief, this is not a selling point.) But take Rihanna, who's wearing herself out being better at this sort of thing than anyone else. Icky news stories? Out-ick them on Twitter! Gossip cackling about Chris Brown? Tease it in the "We Found Love" video! Moral guardians carping about being too sexy? Send racks of raunch down the Talk That Talk assembly line!

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"That was back in the days, Acura days," Drake raps at the end of both verses of "Under Ground Kings." It's half of one of the most revealing couplets of Take Care, his masterful second album, and it's a callback to his come-up, a transition in roles from Degrassi's Jimmy Brooks to a promising rookie rapper from Toronto.

You can see some of that in a segment from the MTV Cribs-style Degrassi Unscripted from 2004, which features a skinny, then-18-year-old Aubrey Graham tooling around in an Acura ("It's a nice first car, for, like, a teenager, I guess"), sneaking forbidden chocolate to his grandmother, and putting his massive music collection, his many dog-eared rhyme books, and his nascent rap talents on display for the world to see. It's goofy, sure, but it's one of the formative documents of Drake's stardom: He may seem like a silver spoon-fed product of entertainment industry nepotism, but he dreamed of rap stardom, and worked to be good enough to deserve it.

Take Care is more than proof that he is; it's as good a rap album as 2011 has had.

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Courtesy Young Money Entertainment

When I spoke with Drake last Friday, it turned out I was just missing the chance to fully discuss his album Take Care, which leaked over the weekend. But this left lots of time to dig into other topics, from his Canadian perspective on racial identity to his relationships with Stevie Wonder and A$AP Rocky.

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