Jen Diaz/Hot 97

Lauryn Hill.

Hot 97 Summer Jam: Nicki Minaj, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross, J. Cole, Wale, Meek Mill, DJ Khaled, Waka Flocka, Trey Songz, Maino, Big Sean, 2 Chainz, French Montana, Mavado, Tyga, Slaughterhouse (and Nas and Lauryn Hill)
MetLife Stadium
Sunday, June 3

Better than: Seeing a Nicki Minaj concert.

In an era of increasing separation and ever-tinier attention spans, it's almost quaint to celebrate a tradition like Hot 97's Summer Jam with 60,000 of your closest friends.

Each year, Summer Jam means a sunny early afternoon heading over to the Meadowlands, the constant threat of rain during the afternoon hours, a few rap songs here and there with rappers featuring other rappers, walking into a chilly night leaving the show, and general ratchetness in the parking lot before, during, and after the concert.

Oh, and drama! Plenty of drama—which, in the years since Jay-Z vs. Nas evaporated, has turned into yawn vs. shrug.

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Last month, Maino bounded into a recording studio in Midtown Manhattan during a playback session for his new album. Dressed in a flappy hat, goggle glasses, and with pants sagging precariously low, he slid the volume on the mixing console up to an ear-quavering level and bopped around the room as songs from The Day After Tomorrow boomed out of the speakers. He seemed in happy spirits, and between tracks he joked about how the rap gossip world thought that he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend from way back, Lil Kim, after the DJ and producer Green Lantern had leaked a song titled "I Still Love You." He took the spread of mis-information well—tittle-tattle, of course, helps fuel any album's promotional push, and these days Maino is firmly ensconced in the rap industry. But it didn't used to be that way.

For the early part of his career, the Bedford-Stuyvesant-born Maino was better known as another New York City rapper with a nefarious background (he saw out a ten year jail bid for attempted kidnap) who traded in block-corner crime rhymes to the extent that he was as much someone in the street who also happened to rap as anyone approaching an artist. As he puts it today, "People thought I was more about making trouble than making music." Slowly though, he shifted himself into the industry, and on the way he scored a platinum-certified hit with 2009's T-Pain-assisted "All Of The Above." It's not a bad career arc for a rapper whose music in the main sticks to a quite unfashionable east coast template—but it's a template and heritage Maino is proud of, as he tells us here before clearing up those pesky Lil Kim rumors.

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The official remix of journeyman Brooklyn rapper Maino's post-T.I. summer-anthem-in-the-making "All the Above," still featuring T-Pain on the hook and now sporting a value-added new verse from Young Jeezy, is out. Maino takes the opportunity to update the song with a still-timely swine flu reference; Jeezy, whose "Put On" is a distant but equally prideful cousin to "Above," brags about going to the moon, which gives you a roughly accurate idea as to the extent to which he's going in here. None of it's particularly revelatory, but we certainly won't be mad at the tremendous burn this song's about to get at every radio station and moving vehicle inside New York city limits. [You Heard That New]