​​Sound of the City's search for the quintessential New York City musician enters Round Two this week, with battles in the Round of 32 daily. Keep up with all the action here.

Being that he's a card-carrying member of the Illuminati and all, you might want to suggest Jay-Z used his influence to buy his way through the first round of SOTC's search for the quintessential New York musician. But you can only beat what's placed in front of you, and Jay did his duty in waltzing through to the next round against the recently defunct ensemble Parts & Labor. Now, the man from Marcy Projects is faced with a showdown against one of Queens' finest rap ensembles—the No. 8 seed A Tribe Called Quest, who saw off the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the opening bout. Sit back and enjoy what's sure to be a feisty cross-generational hip-hop matchup.

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​Off the top of my head, I can come up with more "controversial" stances Katy Perry has taken than I can count on one hand: "Ur So Gay" being mean, homophobic, and seemingly aimed at Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz; "I Kissed a Girl" being shock-Sapphic and heteronormative; "You / PMS / Like a bitch / I would know" in "Hot N Cold"; the Sesame Street debacle; the unparalleled mastery of the Maxim mien to optimize titillation; the use of "Last Friday Night" to hop on Rebecca Black's comet and put on nerd drag; the use of "Firework" to hop on the It Gets Better wave; the uncomfortably xenophobic "E.T.," and specifically a remix in which one of the most famous black rappers of the moment was turned into a lascivious, rape-y beast; the microwaved breakup "rage" of "Part of Me" getting timed to a) the end of a very public relationship, b) the re-release of an album, and c) the Grammys in which Adele's heartfelt kiss-offs were venerated. Her debut album was named One of the Boys; her "California Gurls" had a Snoop Dogg verse because casual misogyny and watered-down Golden State triumphalism fit, and "Gurls" because she decided to make it the least convincing Big Star tribute ever.

So why is Katy Perry not going all the way when covering "Niggas in Paris," and instead doing Karmin-style genre tourism? C'mon, Katy: We know what you're saying when you say "ninja," just like Reggie "Combat Jack" Osse did when he took the Voice's Tom Breihan to task for using "ninja" as a substitute for "nigga" in 2006. And you even admit in the opening seconds of your BBC performance that things are going to get embarrassing!

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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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​​The Round of 64 for Sound of the City's own version of March Madness—in which you, the Sound of the City voting public, help determine the quintessential New York musician—continues, and you get to vote on who makes it to Round Two. We'll have some first-round results later today, but for now, Brooklyn's top seed Jay-Z takes on the recently disbanded electro-skronk outfit Parts & Labor. Check out the arguments in favor of each contender, and vote at our Facebook page.

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Andre Woolery

Andre Woolery, Kanye West "Tacks On Tacks On Tacks"

​A hip-hop Lichtenstein with a Staples "Easy" button, contemporary artist Andre Woolery used thumbtacks to create the mosaics that make up his first solo exhibit, "Bruised Thumbs," which opened at the Frontrunner Gallery in Tribeca last night. Woolery's vibrant tribute to black music includes ornate portraits of icons such as Erykah Badu, Jimi Hendrix, Kanye West and Jay-Z, and the tacks embody the artist's penchant for manipulating light and color with simple elements.

Take "The Tackover," where Woolery drew inspiration from the Brooklyn marvel who transformed from ruthless hustler on his debut Reasonable Doubt to a mogul-slash-family man with street cred. "Jay-Z broke the mold and changed the way people perceived him. He allows young black kids who come from a similar environment to recognize their potential," Woolery told SOTC at last night's opening.

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​The video for Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Paris" has finally come out, and it's probably not surprising that the setting is one of the giddy live performances of the track that closed the Watch The Throne Tour last year. This is no straight-up "check us out live" video interspersed with shots of the two dudes chilling on the tour bus and horsing around, though; the super-high-quality footage of Jay, Kanye, and the crowd is, instead, looped and kaleidoscoped and laid on top of itself in such a way that each frame could be its own Rorschach test. In honor of that, I've put down my first-impulse reactions to six frames from this video—feel free to psychoanalyze them in the comments! Or pick your own, because there are really a lot to choose from.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

ALSO: See more photos from Jay-Z's show at Carnegie Hall

​Jay-Z
Carnegie Hall
Monday, February 6

Better than: Slacking off.

The age-old question about how one might get to Carnegie Hall rattled in my brain as I headed uptown last night, en route to Jay-Z's first of two performances at the hallowed Midtown space. "Practice" is the cheeky answer that people give, but as Jay showed last night with his benefit for the United Way of New York City and the Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation—Carnegie Hall's first concert where a hip-hop artist topped the bill—ambition is just as key.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. This is from Nick Minichino, who voted specifically for Funkmaster Flex's premiere of Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Otis" this summer.

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That was the driving force of it—to create that moment of unwrapping the CD and listening to it for the first time. It was a very old-school way for things to happen. People really were anticipating an album on a certain day and everyone got to experience it simultaneously.

—anonymous Roc Nation executive about Watch The Throne's tight leak policy

Before Watch the Throne, music-industry talk about the "album experience" always felt like code for BUY THE ALBUM and especially DON'T STEAL THE ALBUM, especially since, in practice, no one really seemed all that interested in preventing leaks. The external-hard-drives-in-locked-briefcases mystique of Steven J. Horowitz's Billboard story (from which the above quote is sourced) merely revealed that, prior to this album, basic data protection was a skill music-biz folks had yet to learn.

And yet. Despite disheartening leaks Jay-Z and Kanye West had experienced in the past (the article cites My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy tracks, but there are plenty of other examples at least as far back as The Black Album in 2003) the "old-school" motivation rings true, thanks to plenty of other elements of the album's release. Of course, having actually exerted control over who will hear one's album before its release enabled quite a bit of the hoopla, and allowed the artists to make an event—complete with pop-up shop—out of the release. Having the money and power to ensure a release date before the release of a single allowed them to use the single's hype to goose album excitement (and vice versa)—a ploy only a handful of other rappers would be able to replicate. And the "listening party" allowed them, however briefly, to re-inscribe critics as gatekeepers.

That said, the crucial element of the old-school presentation was the premiere of "Otis." There was enormous incentive to determine the best possible venue and timing to release the first "real" single, especially after "H.A.M." debuted and sank. Jay-Z and Kanye West could have put the song anywhere online at any time, held it for the video and had an MTV premiere (which they got anyway), or made it an event in any number of other ways. Instead they premiered the song, relatively unannounced, on a Wednesday evening over terrestrial radio in New York City.

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Aaliyah.

​Not very many hours after Beyoncé gave birth to their daughter Blue Ivy Carter, Jay-Z commemorated the occasion in song. "Glory" sounds humbled and relieved, and soft enough to bear some marks; at certain points, Jay's voice almost seems to quaver. He goes from revealing a past miscarriage to sharing the precise date of conception, as if still ambling through the ward in elated exhaustion. Next time he leaves condoms on a baby seat, it'll feel like a sitcom joke, not potential diss material.

The kid herself makes an appearance, wailing all over the track. Blue Ivy must be the first infant to receive a feature credit for their sampled gurgles—canny as ever, dad—but she's only the youngest entry in pop's tiny, adorable line of incidental newborns. Given that the subtlety of the effect in question falls somewhere between siren noises and neighing, it tends to be used sparingly yet memorably. Pace Kelis, here are six other songs of the baby.

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​It's been about 36 hours since Beyoncé gave birth to Blue Ivy Carter, her first child with Jay-Z, so why shouldn't he release a song dedicated to his new offspring? And so, here's "Glory," credited to Jay-Z and "B.I.C.," who apparently is an up-and-coming young star responsible for the coos and gurgling that floats in and out of the song. (But what could the acronym mean???) It's happy and humbled just like all those shots of new dads in movies; you can almost smell the cigars being lit as Jay tosses off his first (but probably not last) dedication to his daughter, which has as its best line "You're the child of a child from Destiny's Child." Listen below.

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