A few drinks into my conversation with Mike and El-P about their new collaboration R.A.P. Music (Williams Street), the tone shifted, as it tends to under the influence of multiple makeshift White Russians. EL-P's drink-ordering became relentlessly efficient. Things became a little more candid. The conversation veered on-and off-record, and, by the time the night was over, they ended up "covering" almost everything. From the fate of HBO's Luck to the future of Earl to what El-P originally thought of Jay-Z, here are the (publishable) highlights of The Drunken Reel.

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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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One of the most respected turntable artists in the independent hip-hop world, Brad Forste's fierce, punk-like approach to scratching always pushed each set he DJed right up to the line of pandemonium. On more than one occasion I have seen Forste, apparently unsatisfied with the crowd's energy, cut up something like Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name" and then run through the mosh-pit to ensure the audience's enthusiasm level meet his high standards. Working under the name Mr. Dibbs, Forste toured with indie-rap kings Atmospere and El-P, collaborated with artists such as Peanut Butter Wolf, cLOUDHEAD and Murs and released several influential breakbeat albums.

For the past month Forste has been in the hospital for cirrhosis of the liver. Because he didn't have any health insurance, he has already racked up more than half a million dollars in medical bills. Dibbs' close friend Jamie Meline, better known as El-P, recently released a song to help Dibbs with his bills; "Rush Over BKLYN" merges his recent "Drones Over BKLYN" with Rush's classic-rock staple "Tom Sawyer." (The mashup was made using Legitmix, a piece of software that allows producers to create mixes using copyrighted material that they have legally acquired.)

When we got him on the phone Meline was reluctant to talk too much about Dibbs' current health or state of mind, but he did want to spread the word about the collection Forste and his wife are taking to help with the medical expenses. "He's my friend and he's in trouble, so hopefully 'BKLYN' will bring a little awareness," he said. "They're in a situation where they don't know what to do. They've gone public with it and they've asked people to help, which sometimes is all anyone can do. Sort of the last avenue sometimes."

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The clattering "Drones Over BKLYN" is the first taste of the third album from NYC hip-hop iconoclast El-P. It's a tangled jigsaw of old-school signifiers future-shocked into a violent pointillism, where Kool G Rap pianos and Rubin-style guitar stabs wage war with spasmodic Just Blaze double-drummer anarchy. And that's just until the track collapses under its own weight and emerges with a gorgeous acid-rock coda, swirling organs and spiraling guitars making delicious cosmic slop. El says this maddening, multi-layered blusterfuck matches the energy of his upcoming record, tentatively titled Cancer For Cure (Fat Possum). This fall, you can catch him reuniting with the mighty Company Flow at this years All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Asbury Park, N.J., at the behest of curators and superfans Portishead.

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Image via Darrell Bell

Hip-hop is the world's most brazenly capitalist genre of music. If Jay-Z's not talking about playing Monopoly with real cash, then Kanye West's tweeting about the cherub-motifed Persian rugs and golden goblets he's just scored at Fishs Eddy. But while certain rotund rap types would have you believe they were running extensive criminal enterprises before they decided to pursue a career in rhymed verse, the truth is more mundane. Most rappers suffer the rite of working demoralizing dead-end jobs while attempting to jump-start their careers and clock up music industry cash, whether it's the Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man greeting tourists at the Statue of Liberty, Biggie bagging groceries at a Met Foods supermarket, or Kanye's mush-mouthed rapping friend Consequence ringing up monochromatic sweater vests at GAP. So when Fat Joe--who just so happens to have released a new album last week--opened his heart to us about sweating it out as a security guard one summer at a sneaker store, we decided to round up a whole batch of New York City's hardest-working rappers--including Prince Paul, El-P, Joell Ortiz, and Tanya Morgan's Von Pea and Donwill--and ask them to talk about their old temp-job blues. Their wretched stories are below.

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King of Hearts, the long-awaited posthumous solo debut from Def Jux rapper-producer Camu Tao (who died of cancer in 2008), is finally coming out August 17. To whet your appetite, the label's offering a free download of a 2005 EP called Forever Frozen in Television Time, credited to Central Services, a/k/a Camu and label boss El-P. Cam sounds more like Mike Patton or Cody ChestnuTT or any other avant-garde enigma you'd care to name than, you know, a plain old rapper; his favorite phrase is "Fuck me." He says it, like, a lot. "What Would God Do?" sounds more like deranged psych-garage than anything else. "Submarine" digresses into a grisly rewrite of Kelis' "Milkshake." The last two songs are "I Need a New Drug" and "Oxycontin." It's not at all soothing. It's not supposed to be.

So here is something that exists: underground NYC hip-hop doomsayer El-P remixing Mr. Pop Icon 2010, with an assist from Paul McCartney. Is it a coincidence that footage of Justin Bieber crying emerged today? No it is not a coincidence.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

Since the release of his critically acclaimed second record, 2007's I'll Sleep When Your Dead, all eyes have been on producer El-P, the tornado-culling Brooklyn naysayer whose creative displays of prismatic scuzz, army of devoted followers, and dramatic lulls in activity have pretty much cemented his role as the hip-hop Trent Reznor. In the three years since his last LP, we've gotten promises of a new album, harrowing Twitter tales of false starts and hard drive failures, a stepping down from his role as artistic director of indie hip-hop game-changer Definitive Jux, and the announcement that he is deading Jux as a traditional record label that sells physical objects. But from this tumultuous climate has emerged a surprisingly cohesive record. As stopgaps go, the instrumental mix album Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 (August 3rd, Gold Dust) is fully rewarding, a mix of Morodor synth brooding and hard-as-hell mid-'80s beatstomp 'n' bellrock. It basically sounds like Colors merged with Blade Runner, a clatter of distorted sirens, scratches, and cosmic slop. Second track "Whores: The Movie" has the double-time paranoia of I'll Sleep When Your Dead's best tracks, melted with a double dose of ungodly fuzz (El-P was listening to a lot of his ATP buddies the Melvins), laser-squelch, and retrofuture prickle.

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Def Jux boss El-P has posted an open letter in response to widespread reports that the venerable underground hip-hop label was poised to shut down, announcing that that's not exactly what's happening. What is happening: El-P personally is "stepping away from my duties as artistic director for the label to concentrate on what I love most: being a producer and an artist full time." Def Jux will be put "on hiatus. We are not closing, but we are changing." What it's changing into is left pretty vague, other than the hoopty-into-a-hovercraft thing. Read the whole thing (a lotta wistful thank-yous ahoy) here.

Consider Def Jux, the brash NYC label founded by EL-P at the onset of this decade and immediately conjuring up murky, enigmatic, gorgeously menacing hip-hop records like El's own Fantastic Damage, RJD2's Deadringer, and Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein. Following those up has proven difficult: RJ's stuff got increasingly bizarre and he soon left the label, El-P took five years to craft a (pretty great) follow-up, and Cannibal Ox? Well, the duo of Vast Aire and Vordul hasn't managed a Cold Vein sequel at all, and most likely won't, or at least not on Def Jux, as evinced by the fact that Vast and EL-P are now sniping at each other on MySpace.

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