Oh, Manchester, So Much To Answer For

Thank you, Matthew, for the download of Dirt McGirt's "Pop Shit." Now, this is more like it. Taken from the sure-to-spin-off-umpteen-smashes The Neptunes Present Clones comp, this is Pharrell and Hugo giving The Artist Formerly Known as Ol' Dirty Bastard a marvelous, bouncing track to flip his crazy shit all over. And he is most definitely flipping some crazy shit, complete with his own muttering in the background to add to the mentally imbalanced feel of the single. In a right and just world, this'd be #1 for about three months. And as if that weren't enough, there's Busta Rhymes's "Light Your Ass On Fire," easily the best thing Busta's cut in years. The track sounds like hot jungle drums and Atari 64 rhythms, which is what Busta needs. Pharrell featuring Jay-Z's "Frontin'," of course, you already know to be the perfect falsetto summer R&B jam that it is. Clones is increasingly sounding like it might be rather, oh, definitive: the sound of '03?

In completely unrelated news, get ready for a 5-disc box of recordings Cash and Rubin have done which we haven't yet heard. Who knew, back in the early days of Def Jam, that Rick Rubin would be doing some of his finest work some 20 years later with a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame? I'm still rooting heartily for an upset of huge proportions at months' end: for Cash to take home Video of the Year at the 2003 VMAs. I mean, c'mon - "Hurt" clearly is the best video of the past year (and likely the entire decade thus far). Would it kill MTV to give proper props?