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Over the past decade, hip-hop and R&B have become the musical equivalent of peanut butter and jelly. When R&B was looking for direction in the '90s, it turned to hip-hop's thundering bombast, and when hip-hop began falling from grace this decade, it adopted R&B’s sexy swoon. And though genre purists from both sides have cried foul, this cross-pollination has resulted in some great music. In honor of this week’s release of the T.I./Mary J. Blige single "Remember Me," Rhapsody has picked the 10 greatest R&B/hip-hop duets of the past decade.

The sound of L.A. group Sa-Ra Creative Partners is hard to pin down. Their brand of psych urban music straddles the line between funk, soul and hip-hop. It references Funkadelic, Prince, Sly & the Family Stone and J Dilla, but ultimately the music manages to sound like nothing you've ever heard. It's jerky electro, ethereal hip-hop and secular gospel. It's beautiful music that is, at times, difficult to listen to. Consisting of (from left, in photo at left) Om'Mas Keith, Taz Arnold, and Shafiq Husayn, the group became darlings of the underground in 2005 with a series of 12-inches and remixes. They released their debut album, The Hollywood Recordings, in 2007, and followed up this year with Nuclear Evolution: The Age of Love. In that time, an entire echo-system of psychedelic soul acts sprang up, but Sa-Ra remain at the forefront. Even if you haven't heard of the group, it's likely that your favorite artist has. The trio has worked with Erykah Badu, Kanye West, Dr. Dre and John Legend, among many others. In fact, Keith is currently serving as Diddy's musical director.

We recently caught up with Om'Mas Keith. By chance, we spoke with him on the afternoon of June 25, just when the news of Michael Jackson's death was reported. We discussed Jackson's influence on the group, as well as a wide range of subjects including Thelonious Monk's funeral, Keith's father, the group's future, and the influence of Sly and the Family Stone.

From left: Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Drake

Hip-hop tours are always a bit of a crap-shoot. For every beyond-belief blockbuster like last year's Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige tour, you have a debacle like the '97 Wu-Tang Clan/Rage Against the Machine rampage, where our favorite Shaolin warriors seemed more interested in visiting local jail cells than in performing music for sold-out crowds. More recently, Lil Wayne's  traveling adventures have included arrests for everything from cocaine possession to weapons charges. But, lord willing and cops permitting, this summer looks like a monster for hip-hop live shows. We have the Rock the Bells Tour featuring Nas, Talib Kweli, Wu Tang and Slaughterhouse among others, as well as the Jay-Z/Ciara tour that is already well under way. But perhaps the elephant in the room is Weezy's monster America’s Most Wanted AKA Young Money tour featuring Weezy F., Drake, Young Jeezy and Soulja Boy. Over 21 days, Weezy and crew will scour the continent, playing everywhere from Scranton, Penn., to Edmonton, Canada (you can check complete dates here). And though it’s an open question whether these guys can stay out of trouble (Drake should be safe), we already have a pretty good indication of what kind of live show they put on. Below you’ll find our exclusive and all-inclusive tour guide.

Jordin Sparks is, in many ways, the epitome of the American Idol dream. In the two short years since winning, she's released a successful debut that spawned two Top 10 hits (including "No Air," her smash duet with Chris Brown), toured with big-name acts like Alicia Keys and the Jonas Brothers (with whom she's currently on the road) and even performed for two presidents! Now she's releasing her sophomore album, Battlefield, which premiered on Rhapsody last Tuesday and drops everywhere else next week. When she recently sat down with us to talk about how far she's come, we discovered that, despite her success, Sparks is still very much the sweet Arizona girl she was before she became a household name.

There’s something irresistible about two middle-age, over-the-hill pop superstars quibbling about a nearly decade-old affair. The feud began in 2001 when the two had a short-lived affair, the extent of which remains a point of disagreement to this day. Regardless of whether it was a fleeting kiss (as Mariah has posited) or a torrid affair (as Eminem insists), it soon took on a life of its own when Eminem made the affair public in a Rolling Stone interview, stating that though Mariah was a “beautiful woman,” she “didn’t have it all together.” Mariah retaliated later that year with the thinly veiled diss track “Clown.” During an appearance on Larry King: “I hung out with him, I spoke to him on the phone. I think I was probably with him a total of four times. And I don’t consider that dating somebody.” Eminem then got his revenge at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards when he took a swipe at Mariah’s ill-fated movie Glitter. After that incident, the dispute remained relatively quiet for a couple of years until 2005 when Eminem aired what was supposedly voice mails from Mariah Carey asking Em to leave his wife for her. Mariah denied that it was her, and even threatened defamation charges.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that DJ Quik is underrated. Ask any hip-hop head who are the best producers off the West Coast, and Quik usually occupies the second slot (behind the good Doctor, of course). But the Compton producer had the misfortune of emerging before the era of the superstar producer, and thus he’s not exactly a household name outside hip-hop circles, though he's not without his commercial accomplishments. He produced for Pac, Snoop, Dre and Jay-Z. And his own '91 debut, Quik Is the Name, is a seminal G-funk album and went platinum.

Forget baseball, politics, apple pie or a vague disdain for the corporate aristocracy, the element that binds American society together in an increasingly atomized post-millennial milieu is the Summer Jam. Think Jay-Z, Rihanna, Outkast or Beyonce. Think the moon landing, except with more sex, better hooks and less Nixon. It's the alpha and omega of pop music -- bigger than big and blasting out of ever car stereo, club speaker, poolside radio and computer headphone. Who’s going to put the bump in your trunk this year? Here are our picks for the contenders.

In the last Blunted on the Blog entry, I talked about the new generation of multicultural beat CDs that have grown in popularity in the second half of this decade and have, for the most part, overtaken the sprawling hip-hop epics (think Endtroducing ..... and all its successors) that have traditionally defined the instrumental hip-hop genre. Specifically, I focused on French producer Onra and his 2008 release, Chinoiseries. But, looking back on it, I probably got a bit ahead of myself and should retrace the history of how these type of beat tapes became en vogue.

As with most trends in underground hip-hop for the past five or so years, the phenomenon began indirectly with J Dilla and his 2006 release, Donuts. Dilla has always been one of the most stylistically adventurous producers in hip-hop, flipping between the warm, jazzy boom bap of his earlier years to the colder, more forceful electro of his middle period. But Donuts -- in its fractured, ADD glory -- presented the producer at his most naked. Culled from a series of beat CDs that had been circulating for some time, most of the songs on Donuts are little more than sketches. No song touches the two-minute mark, and a few barely even progress beyond simple loops. Though fragments, they collectively offer an intensely personal meditation on the soul music that dominated Dilla’s childhood in Detroit.

When I interviewed Dilla's mother, Ma Dukes, for a 2006 feature we did on the life of her son, she told me that as a child, he rarely slept. At night, the only way a young Dilla would go under was if his father hummed basslines to popular soul songs. I know that this is projecting my own narrative, but I can’t help but feel that Donuts, which was literally recorded on Dilla’s deathbed, added a certain symmetry to his life.

But really, I digress. I didn’t want to talk about Dilla as much as his influence: Donuts shifted the direction of instrumental hip-hop. It demonstrated that a beat tape can be a proper release; after Donuts, the new generation of instrumental hip-hop CDs seemed more naturalistic and less affected. His influence not only can be felt in the music of Onra, but it also allowed his Stones Throw labelmates Madlib and Oh No to pursue their own visions. You can especially hear his influence in Flying Lotus, whose 2008 CD Los Angeles was -- structurally at least -- a throwback to the more tightly structured instrumental hip-hop CDs.

Next time we'll try to get around to some of Oh No's releases.

Peep out all the Blunted on the Blog entries.



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Asher Roth, Asleep in the Bread Aisle

Breakout single "I Love College" celebrates a middle class, chemically induced naivete, as if contentment and maybe even transcendence can be chugged, blazed or shagged. And, who knows, maybe Roth is onto something. The song is an undoubtedly catchy, sublimely inspired bit of pot-cult ephemera (and probably the soundtrack to your next keg-stand), but Roth does seem a bit silly (or cynical) when he expresses his desire to "go to college for the rest of my life." Still, Roth is more than a novelty -- but just barely. He has a flat whine for a flow, but he puns and juggles his syllables adeptly, even if his stabs at pathos ("His Dream") are laughable. He's best when he's rapping with a smirk, even if you kinda want to knock it off his face.

(Hip-Hop's 100 Non-Essential Tracks is a regular feature highlighting the genre's greatest overlooked and/or forgotten tracks. Click here for all entries.)

The toilet. In Duchamp’s hands, it transformed the art world, forever muddling the relationship between sign and signifier. The King of Rock 'n' Roll found it a suitable final resting place, a gateway between Graceland and the pearly gates. But for perpetually stoned H-Town rapper Devin the Dude, the bathroom represents a small, smelly fortress of solitude, an escape from the daily drudgery of life: the expectations of chatter-happy baby mamas, the high volume of straining masculinity and the half-baked plots of felonious friends. As Devin’s sluggish flow relaxes over the slow, spidery Southern soul like a cat in sunlight, he informs a too-cluttered world, “When you finish crowing, or whatever the f*ck it is you’re doing, holla at me, I’ll be in the bathroom -- boo boo'n.”

Play "Boo Boo'n'"

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More so than other types of music, hip-hop is a genre of debuts. At its best, the music moves quickly, and fans are constantly awaiting the next game-changer, the latest and greatest emcee or producer to create (and erase) history. We’ve compiled our picks for the 30 best hip-hop debuts. A quick ground rule: the debuts listed served as the artists’ introduction to a larger public audience, so we’re not listing albums by emcees who were members of popular hip-hop groups (e.g. no Scarface, Ice Cube, Dre, GZA, etc…). Other than that, have fun with this and don’t get too cross-eyed about it. Feel free to leave your comments and let us know what we missed. Click here to see the list.
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Old Dirty Bastard upon his release from prison in 2003.

(Hip-Hop's 100 Non-Essential Tracks is a regular feature highlighting the genre's greatest overlooked and/or forgotten tracks. Click here for all entries. )

Have you ever found yourself in a public place, say a supermarket, and suddenly you're struck with the urge to shriek out something completely, unforgivably repulsive, but rather than blurt some non sequitur about midgets and water balloons you take a deep breath, put the carrots in the cart and keep it moving? For most ordinary people, ignoring these urges is essential. But Ol' Dirty Bastard isn't ordinary. The Wu Tang Clan emcee made a career out of channeling his inner-crazy, and listening to the Wu-Tang's finest is like playing a game of Russian roulette: you never know when he's going to pop off and lose it. This is true of almost any of his songs, but "I Can't Wait" is perhaps the point where the signal-to-crazy ratio really tips the scales. In the first 30 seconds, he christens himself "Big Baby Jesus" and threatens to bring on Armageddon while mysteriously alluding to the "ThighMaster." Later, he chides fellow emcees for using the word "napkin," launches into a screed about healthcare and asks an unidentified female to take off her shoes. He ends the song with an extended shout out to, among others, the "Eskimos," the "munchkins," Suge Knight and "the army, air force, navy and marines/ know what I'm saying?" Not really, Dirt, but we'll always love you.

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Dylan, Charlton Heston and Bill Clinton discuss duplicitous women, old testament liquor, the imminent apocalypse and single-payer health care.

With its jazzbo shuffle, trumpet shots and grinding gypsy accordion (courtesy of Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo), “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” is dirty - the kind of hardboiled border blues that marries the Chi-Town fixation of Dylan’s recent output with his 70s Southwest fixation. The sound is so compelling, and the atmosphere so thick, that Dylan’s love-struck tale of “broken cars” amid the “mountains of the past” seems like little more than a gritty, desolate garnish.

For a limited time only (like, today, Monday, March 30, 2009) you can download this song for free right here.

With its apocalyptic overtures and hints of 3 A.M., dead-drunk dread, “Dinosauria, We” (the spoken-word bit that opens up MF DOOM’s “Cellz”) is prototypical Charles Bukowski. “Radiated robot men” roam the streets where the “sun is masked.” “Mrs. Death laughs” and “the chosen watch from space platforms.” Rivers vanish. Bodies rot. The rain stops. And, somewhere, the poet’s lines dissolve into spurts of syllables: “Castrated/ Debauched/ Disinherited/ Because of this/ Fooled by this/ Used by this/ Pissed on by this/ Made crazy and sick by this/ Made violent/ Made inhuman.”

It’s prophecy mired in hallucinogenic pop-culture references -- dime-store, sci-fi nihilism doubled over by bare-knuckle linguistic stunts. It’s pure Bukowski, but it's also pure DOOM. “Revelations in Braille” reveal realms of “smelly gel fume.” Nations fail, and blazing swords praise the lord as our masked supervillain can be found “Sittin' in the kitchen/ Pissin'/ Twitchin'/ Kissin' steel lead.” DOOM has always positioned his low-cult kitsch as dramatic divination, despite his hemorrhage of stray images that warps meaning for sound. But somehow, a message emerges: DOOM is back. Hide the women and children. 

Play "Cellz"

Over the past two years, Flo Rida rose from obscurity and quickly established himself as one of hip-hop's most commercially viable artists. If you've been to a club in the past 16 months, you've probably danced to one of his songs. Mr. Rida has owned the digital music realm as well. "Low," his hit collaboration with T-Pain, sold upwards of 500,000 MP3s in a single week, more than any song in the history of pop music. Earlier this year, he broke his own record when "Right Round" was downloaded 636,000 times. His success is a testament to his talent. With an ever-pliable flow, the Florida emcee traverses his tracks' ever-shifting rhythms, while using his knack for melody to ensure a primal, immediate dancefloor decadence. It's both sinister and sexy, and it makes for irresistible pop music. In celebration of Rhapsody's premiere of his sophomore album, R.O.O.T.S., we're offering a one-stop Flo Rida guide. Listen to his new songs, check out a photo gallery featuring some of hip-hop's most muscular leading men, and read about his thoughts in an exclusive interview.

LISTEN: Hear Flo Rida's new album, R.O.O.T.S., exclusively on Rhapsody.

BROWSE: Check out our exclusive Q&A with Flo Rida. .

EXPLORE: Check out Rhapsody's Essential Florida Hip-Hop Albums.

ROCK THE RADIO: Hear Flo Rida and other anthems on our station of hits, In Da Club.

LOOK: Check out Flo and other hulking heartthrobs our Muscle Men of Hip Hop gallery.

LISTEN: Turn it up and play the definitive playlist of Top 100 Hip-Hop Club Tracks.