As a long-time B-list critic and junketeer, my conscience has long been inured to the petty scams of the Golden Globes voter shoving another complimentary cream puff into his craw. Peace is easily made with the sense of entitlement encouraged through the free drinks, chicken fingers and eBay booty necessary to afford a life of leisure with a freelancer's salary.

But, of course, I am merely a margin against which the marginal lean, as I found out when I sublet my apartment to the front for a crime ring-illegally sublet, of course.

Tired of comfortable drudgery, and armed with an E.U. passport granted me out of Jew-exterminating guilt (yet another scam for both sides), I moved to Berlin, installing friends in my rent-stabilized apartment with enough of a profit to cover my flat overseas. But eventually the couple moved to Brooklyn, as couples do. I went on Craig's List. The market was soft. There was one positive respondent:

The Con Artist.

He claimed he was up from Atlantic City to start a croupier school. Some advice: When searching for a subletter, don't go for the one with novelistic color. I was online when he stopped payment on the check. I called his cell phone. "I'm having some trouble between my accounts," he said. "I'm at the bank right now."

I know you're at the bank , I thought … stopping my check . He promised to give the money to my friend the next day. But when he met my intermediary, it was with half the amount. He wouldn't let her in the building, and matter-of-factly informed her that we had a new deal. I phoned him and told him he would have to leave. He began shrieking, "What?!? I just spent two days cleaning the place! It was disgusting!! I have a sinus infection!!! You'll have to call the cops to get rid of me!!!" Then he apologized, claiming that the stress of recent events-his school, his poor, sick mother-had gotten to him. He would leave, he said, at the end of January, which he'd pre-pay as an act of good faith.

His plan was to hold onto the apartment for a month, after which he could claim squatter's rights-an ill-defined New York housing law oft-abused by the shifty, which allows legal tenancy to anyone who stays in an apartment for 30 days without a contract, regardless of circumstance.

So when I phoned my apartment in January, only to find a sleepy-voiced young man who denied all knowledge of the Con Artist, and when I reached the Con Artist on his cell phone, only to have him refuse to leave (as one might expect), claiming a newly dead mother and that, as he wailed, "I got no place to go!", it was actually I who had nowhere to turn.

A stealth trip into town revealed that not only had the furniture been stolen, but someone had magneted to the refrigerator an amateurish "Guest Agreement" with a security deposit twice the amount of my lease. The Con Artist was listed as the "leasing agent." The lessee was none other than Eileen Ford. The fridge was coated in rotting macrobiotic foods. Eighties-style sweater shirts filled my closet. The remaining bookshelf appeared to hold clown apparel. The Con Artist was renting my apartment to a model. And her juggler boyfriend.

In all fairness, the Model appeared to juggle as well. I contacted a night locksmith. The Con Artist had the locks drilled. He still refused to admit that he wasn't living there-though he was willing to "move out" for a payoff. "I don't appreciate the tone of your voice," he'd tell me, Richard Widmark style.

Legally, there wasn't much I could do. It was a civil matter. The theft of my furniture? A civil matter.

The couple was insufferably immature, but they were my only barrier between the Con Artist and my possessions. Through a Mexican Web site, I found that the Model was a current "It" girl who had grossed $300,000 in the last few months. The Juggler was passive-aggressive and manipulative, and he appeared to view the Con Artist as a Rain Man –esque, Runyonesque role model. As Eileen Ford had somehow found them responsible enough to secure their own lodging, the Juggler assumed that her lawyers were only a finger-snap away, repeatedly threatening me with his girlfriend's employer's attorneys (when he wasn't promising to lie to the police).

At a time like this, the world clarifies. Everyone is a tick, pincers extended: the locksmiths who raised their prices upon arrival; the airlines whose discount fares promptly disappeared; the attorney who showed himself iffy, then petulant when he couldn't squeeze a few more drops out of me; the apartment scammers themselves, of course. And me, too-my own attempts, at 37, to continue extending my adolescence off the apartment's rent.

Lawyers could offer me no affordable recourse. The police became sick of my repeated requests for investigation. The Fox 5 Problem Solvers seemed interested for a while, then dumped me. Eventually, Eileen's Infants did move out. The Con Artist phoned the next day to let me know that, having exhausted his revenue stream, he would be kind enough to relinquish my home "early." I demanded my furniture. He retorted, "You're a real dick!" and hung up. I returned home to change the locks.

But this was only a setup. He showed up a few days later, bracketed by a couple of police officers, canceled checks in hand, then stayed downstairs while they parroted his claims. I was thieving a man-with a dead mother!-of his residence. The police explained that I had two options: copy my new keys for him, or go to jail. Could I take my belongings with me? Just what I could carry on my back. I took my camera. As I hit sunlight, I began photographing the Con Artist's triumphant mug. He didn't much like it. Turning to the police, he launched his arm back, jaw clenched, and said, "I'm gonna hit him in the face." Then he fled, without the keys. The police reprimanded me for provoking him.

Technically, he could arrive with the police at any time and attempt to evict me, a Groundhog Day of perpetual terror. I've asked a police detective what to do if he comes back. The response: "Be brave." I've spent my entire adult life hiding from confrontation, from challenge, and there appears little honor among thieves.

When I went to court to answer a summons for illegal entry into my own apartment, a guard-gaunt as a desiccated Charlie Callas-asked me what I did for a living.

"I'm a journalist," I replied, mostly believing it.

"Oh, you couldn't find work in New York?"

When I asked if I might push up the date of the trial, his face darkened. "That's the problem with you journalists: You think there's a solution for everything. But there's nothing that can be done. You may not like it, but you know what I don't like? People who sublet their apartments and then move away from this country. Time to grow up, kid."

And then he turned away.

This side of Mr. DiMucci doesn't show up until the second disc of this chronologically compiled boxed set. Those who listen to King of the New York Streets in its intended order will first find a disc named The Wanderer , which features Mr. DiMucci's well-known doo-wop and rock 'n' roll work from the late 50's to the mid-60's, including "I Wonder Why," "A Teenager in Love," "Runaround Sue," "(I Was) Born to Cry," "Little Diane," "Ruby Baby" and the title song.

Listen closely and the roots of Mr. DiMucci's peace-and-love era can be heard in his early hits. It's not such a large step from playing the Bronx tough with a squishy heart to putting that heart on your sleeve (particularly when you're nursing a drug habit).

Dion and the Belmonts weren't the first rock 'n' rollers to mine James Dean-style vulnerability–think of bisexual madman Johnny Ray, or Mr. DiMucci's contemporaries the Everly Brothers and Gene Pitney. Or Elvis. But with his transcendent, flexible tenor, and with honest, often confessional lyrics that would give Jim Carroll chills (from "The Wanderer": "I'm happy as a clown / with my two fists of iron / But I'm going nowhere"), Mr. DiMucci showed there was a Cassavetes-like brain throbbing beneath his Fabian-style pompadour. His work was some of the most emotionally conflicted of the era.

His early hits, such as "The Wanderer," "Lonely Teenager" and "Runaround Sue," adapted Sinatra's streetlight existentialism for the sock-hop crowd. But Mr. DiMucci also had a well-developed taste for the poetry of the dark. As he wails above the sensual sax-fest of "(I Was) Born to Cry" : "I thought I had a friend once, but he kicked out my teeth."

So, naturally, Mr. DiMucci pretty much threw away his success Last Exit to Brooklyn -style, with the junk and the booze–that aforementioned line from "The Wanderer" was originally written as "With my two fists of iron / and my bottle of beer." The British Invasion didn't help matters, and there also was the indignity of turning 25, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone planning a career in show business.

By the time, in 1968, that Mr. DiMucci kicked his habit and re-emerged on the Top 40 chart one last time as a folk-rock artist with the ghoulish "Abraham, Martin & John," he had given up the mean streets for Greenwich Village and the influence of the brilliant, indulgent folk-junkies Fred Neil and Tim Hardin (author of "If I Were a Carpenter").

This is where King of the New York Streets is a revelation. By the late 60's, folk music was on the cusp of its soft-rock transformation. The evolution that began with Woody Guthrie would end with Seals & Crofts, and at that moment, the transitional music that was coming out of the Village was a mixture of middle-of-the-road strings, singer-songwriter introspection, Brill Building pop sense and acoustic "honesty" that was so jarring it was avant-garde. The results were records such as Phil Ochs' Pleasures of the Harbor (1967), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (1968) and Tim Buckley's Lorca (1970).

The first half of Disc 2, titled Abraham, Martin & John , finds Mr. DiMucci mining the same vein. He really lets his freak flag fly, and I suspect that there is an entire generation of Palace Brothers and Jeff Buckley fans just waiting to lap this stuff up. "Abraham, Martin & John" could easily appeal to the Simon & Garfunkel-Vote McCarthy crowd, but Mr. DiMucci's florid acoustic take on Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" is totally nuts. Complete with flute, string section, druggy-sounding scatting and, of course, bongos, it would fit in perfectly on an album by either Japanese psych-folk mystics Ghost or Terry Callier.

"Daddy Rollin'" is the sort of darkly insistent driving blues that is only a couple of steps removed from communal acid-krauts Amon Düül. The bone-chilling "whooo!" Mr. DiMucci lets out near the start of the self-eviscerating "Your Own Backyard," a loosely rendered but more cohesive piece from 1970 about his various addictions, speaks of a life lived large and none too well. The song is delivered from the perspective of a man who has allegedly kicked his habits, and at the end Mr. DiMucci proclaims: "I can do anything I wanna do / I do it straight / I do it better, too."

Maybe not. This period of Mr. DiMucci's career, which spanned seven albums but is only represented by roughly nine songs here, is ripe for rediscovery. The same cannot be said for the disc and a half that follows. Mr. DiMucci's voice–perhaps from lack of roadwork–remains an ageless wonder, but he has long since slipped into conventional 70's soft-rock and then into Noo Yawk tough-guy nostalgia, encouraged by worshipful superstars such as Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen (covered twice on Disc 3, Brooklyn Dodger ).

Contemporizing rarely helps, and listeners who get up to Mr. DiMucci's 1990 remake of the 1959 Frankie Ford classic "Sea Cruise," the Don Was-marshaled track from The Adventures of Ford Fairlane , must be die-hard Dion boosters and should get a day in their honor from Mayor Giuliani. Hippie folk doesn't sustain a career, but singing songs by Mr. Springsteen or Mr. Joel is always a last gasp for early-60's rockers. And getting produced by Don Was is a last gasp for anyone.

Like Brian Wilson, Mr. DiMucci is probably unaware of his shadow constituency, the growing number of young eggheads enamored of the Incredible String Band and their ilk. They've resurrected John Fahey's career, and they could certainly do the same for Mr. DiMucci's. I can only hope they'll find each other. Multifarious artists are usually punished in their old age by being forced to relive their early 20's in perpetuity. But Mr. DiMucci–whose late 60's and early 70's work is bound to be revisited–should never have to dance for nickels from the remember-when crowd.

For the trio De La Soul, griping was not always the order of the day. For its Prince Paul-co-produced first album, 1989's 3 Feet High and Rising (Tommy Boy), De La Soul adopted a blissed-out hip-hop hippie persona that it spent the last 10 years abnegating. 3 Feet is, quite arguably, the most influential full-length album in the history of rap–partly because it led to a lawsuit that pretty much killed off creative sampling–but it didn't go platinum until this April, and De La Soul has spent much of its subsequent work attacking the rap world's materialism, even as it wondered when the gravy train would arrive.

On the other hand, Mr. Thornton–late of both the Ultramagnetic MC's and the Dr. Octagon project–has never enjoyed more than artistic success, and one suspects his disposition would remain unchanged if he were to luck into a hit. It would have to be luck, as Mr. Thornton is known for his obsessive control, unwillingness to compromise and erratic behavior. He is also, quite arguably, hip-hop's greatest M.C., someone who had mastered the art of the internal rhyme back when Eminem was discovering Meister Brau. None of Mr. Thornton's albums have ever gone gold, despite an indulgent critical class that tries mightily to tease another masterpiece out of him.

If they do, it will be one of contempt. On the new Matthew (Funky Ass Records/Threshold Recordings), Kool Keith doesn't have a kind word for anyone.

He even hates you, his legion. On "Back Stage Passes," Mr. Thornton brushes off a groupie with "I'm totally attracted to you / But you turn me off as a fan / Approaching me backstage with a guy that's not your friend / Lying to get a laminate / Is that your man? / Some weird guy staring at me like Peter Pan." "I Don't Believe You" starts off with "Yo, you're lying. He's lying. And she's lying. My man over there, he's lying," etc.

Mr. Thornton makes a lot of lists, just like Richard Nixon, and is obsessed with the idea of having to work at 7-Eleven. And then there are the hidden tracks, one of which, titled "Test Press," details his falling out with Sony Music, which dumped his Black Elvis/Lost in Space album into the marketplace last year like a teenage mother giving birth at her prom. Mr. Thornton is not an easy man to work with, but when I was getting my review together for Black Elvis , the label's flack all but begged me not to review it.

If you accidentally skip the track, don't worry, as most of the album seems concerned with this period of his life. I'm assuming the rapper referenced in the track "Operation Extortion," who goes around "trying to be like Bob Marley and Lenny Kravitz," is Sony recording artist Wyclef Jean. Also on Mr. Thornton's enemies' list is Mr. Jean's Sony-blessed protégé, singer-producer John Forte, whose college-boy image withered when he was arrested earlier this month at Newark International Airport for allegedly conspiring to distribute almost 31 pounds of cocaine.

Mr. Thornton has a tendency to depend on dark but static sound loops, which, coupled with his constant complaining, can make his work sound monotonous. It's one of the reasons early reviewers have been cool to Matthew , but the album confirms Mr. Thornton's status as hip-hop's Lenny Bruce–its greatest ranter. For better or worse, Matthew shows real integrity from someone too prickly to ever be on the inside. But as long as Mr. Thornton keeps bashing his head against the safety glass partition, who can forget that he's out there?

There's been no lack of veneration or respect for De La Soul, which has created a weird phantom currency for the group. Now in their 30's, the current headliners of the overboard, underground Spitkicker tour are not content to settle in as elder statesmen, and this means that every few years they sand an edge here, rope in a guest star there, put out the record and hope for a hit. Prince Paul was jettisoned mid-decade for a bumpier sound, and they have three albums planned for the next year under the rubric Art Official Intelligence .

The first of that trilogy, Mosaic Thump , is the bumpiest yet. There are cooing background singers, lots of cameos from the Beastie Boys, Busta Rhymes and Redman, among others, and hit-of-the-moment guest producers, particularly Jay Dee.

With this cast of thousands, De La Soul risks playing second banana on its own album, but Mosaic Thump is pretty good. Musically, it's streamlined, with the beats up front, but there's a lot of detail underneath. And, thankfully, the trio's lyrics remain as inscrutable as the Wu-Tang Clan's. Between the puns, all you can make out is the bitterness.

Once the group jettisoned the Daisy-age trappings of 3 Feet, it never adopted another personality. So now in order to know what De La Soul is for, you have to look at what it's against. As the group repeatedly (and defensively) complains in "My Writes": "What you know about my writes? / Yo, what you know about what's weak and what's tight?"

So while a good portion of the album is taken up by angry-silly gangsta parodies such as "U Don't Wanna B.D.S." (as in "Bust Dat Shit") that have increasingly crept onto De La Soul's albums, these songs are evidence of the trio's clearly mixed feelings about their exclusion from the mainstream (likewise a recurring skit on Mosaic Thump that attacks ghostwritten lyrics and a free-style rap dismissing "fake jiggy niggas").

Sometimes peer respect isn't enough: Man doesn't live on reputation and Rahsaan Roland Kirk samples alone. Both De La Soul and Mr. Thornton maintain the old-school impression that originality and creativity should be rewarded. Silly rappers. There's no faster ticket to an ulcer. And if one of those guys gets one, we'll be hearing about it.

- D. Strauss

Dungeons & Dirtbags: Iron Maiden in N.Y.C.

The soundtrack for the film Loser contains a song called "Teenage Dirtbag" by a band named Wheatus. The tune is dull, but I like its conceit: The teenage dirtbag of the title is smitten with a pretty girl, who ignores him at first, but then asks him to go to an Iron Maiden concert.

If you know anything about Iron Maiden, the resolutely unfashionable, 24-year-old London heavy metal institution, you'll know how improbable it is that a woman would fancy the band. As practitioners of a musical genre that has always catered to the lost-boy crowd, Maiden (true classic metal fans identify their bands strictly by the second half of their monikers–e.g., Priest, Sabbath, Zeppelin) attracts a demographic that, hormonally, is as close to pure testosterone as they come. Who else but alienated, sullen males would be enthralled by multi-part, historically themed musical epics about bloodshed and horror?

On Aug. 5 at Madison Square Garden, Iron Maiden culled a sold-out audience of aging dirtbags–men in their 30's and 40's who, at one time, equated heavy metal with feverish nights playing Dungeons and Dragons . Their more current counterparts, the teenage dirtbags who listen to the rap-metal of Limp Bizkit and Korn, were in short supply. So were women, although a smattering of perplexed-looking girlfriends and wives could be seen in the crowd.

Ex-Judas Priest singer Rob Halford and his modern-sounding metal band opened the show. Metal audiences aren't among the most tolerant subsets of music fans, so I expected to see the openly gay Mr. Halford bear the brunt of some anti-homosexual sentiment. But Mr. Halford's founder-of-metal status appeared to trump any misgivings that the audience may have had about his sexuality.

Instead, every piercing shriek or full-bodied roar that Mr. Halford unleashed during his set was met by massive cheers from the metropolitan-area metalheads. His decision to reprise such Priest fare as "Hellion," "Electric Eye," "Breaking the Law" and "Tyrant" also prompted exuberant response.

Next up was Seattle's Queensryche. Not even one ungainly fan's paroxysmic dancing could convince me that the band's performance was anything but a bore.

Fortunately, it wasn't long before the members of Maiden bounded onto the stage to the screamed hosannas of their mustache, denim- and leather-clad constituency. Whereas the previous acts had to work with limited stage space, Maiden's guitar-wielders swaggered, posed and tromped around an enormous set for two hours, and were eventually joined by a giant puppet of the band's Crypt Keeper-like mascot, Eddie.

At last year's show at the Hammerstein Ballroom, Maiden's set focused almost exclusively on the band's greatest hits. On Aug. 5, the group chose instead to showcase its spotty current album , Brave New World (Portrait/Columbia), which marked the return of vocalist (and world-class fencer) Bruce Dickinson after a six-year absence.

Another band's fans might be annoyed at such a choice, but Maiden fans are a dedicated lot, and the throng shouted every lyric of "The Wicker Man," "Ghost of the Navigator," "Blood Brothers" and "Brave New World" back at Dickinson.

But the place really went bats when Maiden pulled out the likes of "2 Minutes to Midnight" and "The Trooper." As much as aging Maiden lovers clearly savor the band's fleet-fingered solos, galloping, martial rhythms, bewildering tempo changes and Mr. Dickinson's air-raid-siren vocals, I like to think that the fans are really responding to the humanistic subtext of the band's songs, which decry war, suffering and man's inhumanity to man. Despite the creepy mascot and the ominous song titles, Maiden has never celebrated evil in the way that, say, Ronnie James Dio has.

The show proper ended with the anthem "Iron Maiden." Dickinson bellowed the song from the belly of an enormous replica of the namesake medieval torture device while being groped by five women. Then, after a brief pause, Maiden returned with "The Number of the Beast." An arena full of men cheered a song depicting the horror of satanic human sacrifice. Then they went home .

– Rob Kemp

If the Kinks' Ray Davies sired a son with a dusky Mexican sorceress and raised him in a house filled with Day of the Dead icons and Ennio Morricone soundtracks, that boy would probably sound a lot like Matt Suggs does on his fine debut solo album, Golden Days Before They End (Merge).

In reality, Mr. Suggs is a guy from Visalia, Calif., who, with Debby Vander Wall, comprised the lo-fi pop duo Butterglory, a band name that I hope was inspired by Last Tango in Paris .

Mr. Suggs' solo album sounds so different from the two Butterglory albums I've heard, Crumble and Are You Building a Temple in Heaven? , that the only pertinent comparison to make is that solo-dom becomes Mr. Suggs.

Golden Days , which takes its title from the lyrics of a Roy Orbison song, is a sinewy, cinematic album that takes a good number of listens to uncloak all of its pleasures. Mr. Suggs and his band make visceral music that incorporates honky-tonk piano with elements of spaghetti-western scores: taut, twangy electric guitars, mandolins, snare drums, castanets and the mournful howl of Mr. Suggs' lap steel guitar that makes "The Ramble vs. The Vulture/Devils Dance" one of the more memorable songs on the album.

Adding to the melancholy is Mr. Suggs' voice, which calls to mind the cadence and crooning of the Kinks' Mr. Davies (think "Celluloid Heroes"), and which softens somewhat the themes of anger and disillusionment that run through the word-puzzle lyrics of Golden Days .

Mr. Suggs populates his songs with skeletons, vultures, devils, hearses and other spectral representations of death, but here he seems to be preoccupied not with mortality, but with the demise of love and trust. "On Monday I was widowed / I left a flower where she laid / By Friday it had withered / For she had risen from her grave," Mr. Suggs sings over a ghostly guitar and organ on "Western Zephyr." "I left the front door open / On the mantle a candle burned / Like a fool I was only hoping / For I knew she would not return." By the way, the name of the Orbison song from which Golden Days gets its name: "It's Over."

If the golden days have ended for Mr. Suggs, I suspect it may have something to do with the breakup of Butterglory. Mr. Suggs and Ms. Vander Wall were a couple as well as a band, and when their relationship went kerblooey approximately three years ago, so did Butterglory. Although it's unclear how much of Golden Days is inspired by that breakup, Mr. Suggs certainly seems to be addressing Ms. Vander Wall, who played drums in Butterglory, on "She Kept Time to the Teardrops." The subject of the song is a woman drummer, and after referring to "the flicker and the fork of her tongue" in the first verse, Mr. Suggs sings in the second: "As the drum fills played softly she muttered out loud / I've been building a temple for you and it's under the ground." It's a deft bit of writing, in which Mr. Suggs takes part of the title of the Butterglory album Are You Building a Temple in Heaven? and turns it into a mausoleum for himself.

Golden Days is full of pungent songs like that: songs that capture that weird window of pain-induced clarity that inevitably follows a relationship meltdown. You can hear it in Ranjit Arab's fierce, surging piano playing in "Soon the Moon Will Glow" and in the Judgment Day undertones of the album's penultimate track, "Walk with Him." In the chorus, Mr. Suggs wonders: "When he offers his hand / Will you push through the damned? / And walk with him." With Golden Days Before They End , Mr. Suggs has pushed through.

–Frank DiGiacomo

Eminem, Dre, Snoop Inhale That Teen Spirit

The Up in Smoke tour lived up to its name when it rolled into the Nassau Coliseum on July 19. Not even Bill Clinton could have avoided inhaling ambrosial clouds of secondhand marijuana smoke–what one of the tour's performers, Snoop Dogg, calls "the sticky-ickey-ickey" –that had been expelled from pink young lungs.

Make no mistake, few in this racially mixed crowd of glowstick-waving teenagers seemed old enough to vote. Some were younger. And, in my section at least, they all seemed high.

Riding the Long Island Railroad to the show, I made a point of asking the twenty-somethings on board if they were also off to see this latest in the line of rap super-package tours, featuring Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, among others. The answers were resoundingly negative, except for one guy who wanted to know if I was going to see Cypress Hill.

As it turned out, I spent the evening with their blunt-loving kid sisters. The reason for this was Eminem (né Marshall Mathers), the peroxide-domed Detroit rapper whose sophomore CD, The Marshall Mathers LP , has sold 5 million units and counting.

Eminem derides teenpop, but he's a Total Request Live perennial–the Rosie Grier head on host Carson Daly's Ray Milland body. And why not? At 27, he's younger than most of the Backstreet Boys.

Of course, TRL isn't the only television program to concern itself with Eminem of late. The cable news channels are filled with baby boomer spokespeople who have appointed themselves to drone on about the homophobic and misogynistic elements of Eminem's work, which doesn't seem to be much of a controversy once you turn off the TV. Adults don't seem to get this Eminem thing at all, but still they blather on, their concern admirable but clueless.

Fortunately, most of the bad vibes emanating from the Nassau Coliseum show were of the Grand Guignol variety. Despite being the main attraction, Eminem was relegated to a short early set, though he came out later to perform the raps he contributed to Dr. Dre's 2001 album. During his set, he was flanked by two giant inflatable middle fingers, which pretty much said it all. Vocally, he wasn't always on the beat, and the twisting precision of his raps lost focus in a live situation. At one point he brought onstage some additional inflatables–a couple of sex dolls. He told the crowd the dolls represented the rap group Insane Clown Posse, and then he held one of them to his crotch in a simulation of fellatio. Earlier in the tour, the dolls had represented his estranged wife, Kim, who recently attempted suicide. Perhaps because of that, Eminem didn't seem to approach the gag with much enthusiasm.

For the Ice Cube portion of the evening, the rapper emerged from a coffin that descended onto a stage set straight out of a Dentyne Ice commercial. His backup crew, the Wessidas–which I believe included his demoted former N.W.A. mate M.C. Ren–were dressed right out of the Ice Capades, in matching white sweat suits and headbands. They had even worked out some choreography: swooping "I'm-a-Little-Teapot" arm motions that they repeated throughout the set. I doubt Eminem was hanging with them after the show. Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre's stageset, which cost $2 million according to MTV, consisted of a giant skull suspended from the ceiling, a wall covered with graffiti, two giant illuminated marijuana leaves (which during certain numbers were increased to four) and a liquor-store facade. It was all artifice–the West Coast hip-hop equivalent of the Rent set.

When Dr. Dre made his grand entrance by emerging from a bouncing lowrider to the strains of "Let Me Ride," it was in the grand tradition of Judas Priest taking the stage on motorcycles or Prince lolling about on a giant bed. When he swigged half a bottle of Hennessey onstage, he was almost certainly drinking prop iced tea or some other caramel-colored beverage.

And when Snoop's pixilated face blew clouds of smoke at the crowd via the giant video screens that hung above the stage, it was no doubt of the legal variety–as opposed to the stuff that the audience was blowing back at him. At one point, the skull descended to request some marijuana as well.

One could nitpick at the calculation of this ghoulish joie de vivre . But the audience knew exactly what it was getting, and this is where those boomer types opposed to gangsta rap on moral grounds lose their bearings. The boomers' molten sensibilities hardened at a time in the 60's and early 70's when pop music–be it Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin or Chicago–simulated righteousness and honesty, and that is the prism through which they have filtered all subsequent Billboard -charting trends. When glam and Alice Cooper-style shock rock sprung up in the early 70's, they could accept that deviation from their reality baseline because it was based on Roger Corman-style horror-film theatrics. Nobody kept a loaded guillotine in the house.

But pass gangsta rap through the boomer frame of reference and the warning sensors go off. The references have changed, and it's the boomers, not the teenagers, who lack the yardstick to gauge what is real and what is not. They know the words but don't speak the language. Teen art today is mostly about ultra-heightened reality. It is silly and broad and outrageous, just like the neon pot leaves and the love dolls that were in evidence at the Nassau Coliseum on July 19.

If anything, the teens at the Nassau Coliseum seemed to be able to discern between the phony and authentic moments of the evening. The perfunctory, show-closing N.W.A. "reunion" performance, in which Snoop Dogg filled in for the late Eazy-E, was much discussed by ticket holders as they flowed out the doors. When Snoop Dogg brought the original human beatbox, Doug E. Fresh, onstage so that he could cover Slick Rick's rap on "La-Di-Da-Di," the teenage audience warmly recognized him, even if he was before their time.

The man who grabbed the most stage time of all the Up in Smoke performers was a comedian and actor named Alex Thomas, whose job it was to keep the audience from sagging between acts. Mr. Thomas did this mostly by repeatedly plugging The Players Club , a 1998 movie in which he appeared with Ice Cube, by noting the differences between enthusiastic black (fill in the blank) and pinch-nosed white (fill in the blank) and by dividing the crowd into competing cheer sections: "Roll That Shit" vs. "Light That Shit" vs. "Smoke That Shit." Mr. Thomas also periodically asked the crowd to appraise various hip-hop heroes via applause.

When Mr. Thomas said, "How many of you like the Wu-Tang Clan?" or "How many of you listen to Jay-Z?" cheering followed. But when he asked, "How you all like Puffy Combs?" he was showered with a torrent of boos.

"You don't like Puffy?" Mr. Thomas said, sounding nonplused. "Uh, what do you all think about Dr. Dre?" The cheers resumed.

See, the little girls understand–at least enough of them. And their fondness for the sticky-ickey-ickey? Well, that's one thing they have in common with their parents.

– D. Strauss

The Bottom Line was maybe half full when Peter Case walked onstage for the late show on April 29. Just as things got under way around 11 p.m., a guy yelled out a request. Everybody could hear him. Mr. Case, who has played steadily for 25 years, first on street corners, then in dives and on stages, told the guy sure, he'd play the request. In fact, he said, he'd give the guy a private performance "in the alley, after the show."

People in the audience laughed a bit nervously. Mr. Case,asinger-songwriter based in Santa Monica, Calif., may carry an acoustic guitar and he may have a few songs dealing with love and family life, but this wasn't no James Taylor concert.

Mr. Case played 13 songs during the late show, six of them from his new album, Flying Saucer Blues (Vanguard Records), and three from his 1998 folk-rock masterpiece Full Service No Waiting (Vanguard). He didn't play anything from his days as the lead singer of the Plimsouls, an early-'80's power pop band (skinny ties, big guitars) based in California.

Great things were predicted for Mr. Case and the Plimsouls. Despite the amazing catchiness of the 1983 album Everywhere at Once (Geffen), stardom never came. While the Go-Gos and the Knack hit the Top 40, the Plimsouls got a cameo appearance in the teen movie Valley Girl … and that was about it.

When Mr. Case released his first solo album, Peter Case (Geffen), in 1986, influential New York Times critic Robert Palmer named it one of the 10 best records of the year. His second album, released in 1989, also got great notices. It seemed that if Mr. Case wasn't going to have teenage girls chasing him in the streets, at least he'd always have the love of the geeks in the music press. But even critics' darlings need momentum, and Mr. Case lost his when he waited three years before releasing his next album. Lo and behold, when the Mitchell Froom-produced Six-Pack of Love (Geffen) finally arrived in 1992, it was a stinker. Mr. Case then waited three more years before getting back on track with his next album of new material, the somber Torn Again (Vanguard). It was a great album, but by then the music-press geeks had other singer-songwriters to slobber over.

So there he was, alternately bitter, sincere and amused before that half-empty room on a Saturday night in New York. Five songs into the show, he unveiled "Blue Distance," a truly major ballad from the new album. This was the high point of the show. It's a killer song and Mr. Case gave himself over to it fully. It's about always being on the verge of bliss with someone you love–and never quite getting there.

Flying Saucer Blues is solid, with four or five great songs and no clinkers. Aside from "Blue Distance," the song "Black Dirt & Clay" is also amazing. It's about playing with your first set of childhood friends, digging in the dirt and clay with them. By now, Mr. Case notes in a late verse, some of his childhood friends must be under the black dirt and clay. He doesn't dwell on this observation or wring any cheap melodrama out of it. He is tough, and the song keeps moving along. "Black Dirt & Clay"–which he didn't play during the Bottom Line show–is nostalgic and happy and dark all at once.

In concert, Mr. Case's guitar-playing was sharp as always. With his odd tunings and Mississippi John Hurt-style finger-pickings, he makes a good racket. On songs like the new "Coulda Shoulda Woulda," a funny rave-up about Mr. Case's screw-ups and regrets, or "A Little Wind (Could Blow Me Away)," a wild one from a few years ago, he let it all out, putting his rock-and-roll training to good use. Accompanying him was David Perales, a lightning-fast fiddle player who also happens to have a smooth tenor singing voice. This duo really made a band.

Although you got your $20 worth, I've seen Mr. Case cast a spell on audiences. He didn't quite pull this off at the Bottom Line. He seemed almost embarrassed to give himself over to the demands of his songs at times. It's hard work, getting up on a stage and immersing yourself in the not-so-pretty stuff that bubbles up from your subconscious for the amusement of a half-empty house, and Mr. Case wasn't always up to the task. He rushed his closing number, "Hidden Love," a deep ballad from 1989. When he left the stage at around 12:30 a.m., he looked relieved to be out of there. Unlike a lot of performers, Mr. Case is not a whore for applause. He has to be in the mood.

–Jim Windolf

The Big Playback : Rap Nuggets

With 25 years of evolution under its baggy-panted ass, hip-hop's midlife malaise seems to be occurring right on schedule. Although rap has yet to mimic rock's decline as a cultural force, its once-thrilling Dionysian pedant grandeur–the outlaw fantasies, Joycean wordplay, and pot-

fueled chop-socky fever dreams–has grown increasingly predictable, at least among those acts that have some influence upon the culture.

Success has robbed this narrative art of import. Rapping about riches and bitches doesn't exactly resonate when the narrator is a platinum-selling multimillionaire who has no trouble getting some. As well, many of the "underground" rappers who have been bubbling under for the last half-decade are really sheep in wolves' clothing; Armani armies cloaked in FUBU waiting for a chance to strike. Musically, sampling laws have caused producers to settle on static loops or lazily fall back upon live instrumentation. And then there's the ubiquitous Sean (Puffy) Combs, a surly Huey Lewis who won't fade away.

Which is why The Big Playback (Rawkus) couldn't have been released at a better time. Rappers prefer to do their bragging themselves, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest that this single-CD compilation by the knowledgeable smart-asses at the defunct hip-hop 'zine Ego Trip may come to be held in the same esteem as Lenny Kaye's epochal Nuggets double-record set did when it was first released in the early '70's.

Nuggets was a collection of obscure garage-rock singles from the '60's–mean, crude and forgotten–released in the over-produced era of Grand Funk Railroad and Yes. It was a shiv in the back of the then-current slickee-boy value system and served, for better or worse, as a catalyst for the punk rock sensibility that was lurking beneath the culture's surface.

The Big Playback, which has been released as a companion CD to the recently published Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists , serves a similar purpose, shaming the playa-hata haters, and 20 years into hip-hop, it's time. James Taylor had to face Lester Bangs; Master P must suffer his Ego Trip .

It's not acknowledged enough that hip-hop isn't a monolith. Just as an Elvis Presley fan wouldn't necessarily have been an Emerson Lake & Palmer head, there's no reason to expect Public Enemy's listeners to embrace Juvenile, or for Juvenile's defenders to enjoy Dilated Peoples.

With that in mind, The Big Playback shouldn't be heard as a criticism, but rather as a corrective. In an age where the Cash Money and Ruff Ryder crews are celebrated for an utterly formalized idea of danger, it may be hard for those who weren't there to believe just how simultaneously silly and rough-edged hip-hop was during its adolescence less than a decade-and-a-half ago. It's like hearing "Bye Bye Love" after first hearing the Everly Brothers covering Mark Knopfler tunes.

As on Nuggets , a few of the artists featured on The Big Playback have done all right for themselves in recent years, though they have all seen better days. Producer Marley Marl of "Marley Marl Scratch" is a well-acknowledged legend, as is, to a lesser extent, the vocalist on the track, MC Shan. (Shan gets curiously dissed by the otherwise obscure MC Mitchski on "Brooklyn Blew Up the Bridge.") Positive K of "Step Up Front" would later hit with "I Got a Man." And Craig Mack, of the once ubiquitous "Flava in Ya Ear" (Boop. Beep.) is sublime under the alias MC EZ on "Get Retarded," which features a repeating "zoom-zoom" worthy of Esquivel and name-checks Alvin Ailey. Some of the greasers on Nuggets thought they were Dylan, too.

That's not the artiest the compilation gets. The disc's 10-minute finale "Beat Bop" by Rammelzee vs. K-Rob, carries a "produced and arranged by Jean-Michel Basquiat" credit, although, the liner notes explain that, according to Rammelzee, the late artist merely put up the dough to finish the record. A freestyle in the vein of Spoonie Gee's "Spoonie's Rap," "Beat Bop" conjures a time when the discussion of high-low was more likely to involve ideas than apartment ceilings. And it's a reminder of how slowly the fastest rappers rapped just 10 years ago.

One doesn't expect music to move backward. Current attempts at old-school ambiance often sound didactic–Jurassic 5 being a prime example. But if these aesthetic values–the casual rawness and silliness, the ingeniously clashing samples, the aversion to pomposity or the emptily epic–could find their way back into hip-hop … well, don't count on it. Divine Force may rap, "I stop crime/like Robocop" in "My Mic is on Fire," but don't forget that for as much time as RoboCop spent on the streets, ultimately he was defending corporate interests. And the boardroom is more crowded than the recording studio these days.

– D. Strauss

Ween's Smart Asses Halve Their Cheek

The guys of Ween chose well when they picked their band's name. With a single word, they evoked the smirky contempt that colored a decade's worth of their albums from 1990's GodWeenSatan: The Oneness through 1997's The Mollusk .

Puerility is not necessarily a problem in my book, but the fact that Ween never explored any other emotional contours in its music had gotten awfully tedious.

Until now. On the band's latest release, White Pepper , guitarist Mickey (Dean Ween) Melchiondo and chubby-cheeked vocalist Aaron (Gene Ween) Freeman reveal, for the first time, that Ween has heart. I can't discern any sneering on at least half of the tracks on this album.

Three songs on the CD–"Exactly Where I'm At", the sitar-driven "Flutes of Chi" and "She's Your Baby"–burst with epic late-60's references. Summoning the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix so baldly could have been a liability for the irony-loving duo from New Hope, Pa., but not here. These are lush, well-thought-out songs. If there's any internal winking or nudging going on in them, I can't tell. And for once, Mr. Freeman doesn't go for the cheap laugh by talking shit all over a nice melody.

"Even If You Don't" adds some nice crunch to a Kinks-like descending chord sequence (a la "Dead End Street"). And somebody like Christopher Cross could knock "Stay Forever" out of the ballpark.

The notion that Ween has produced an emotionally generous tune that anybody can sing might cause some anxiety among the more reflexive malcontents who can't get enough of the band's lo-fi antics. But there's something for them on White Pepper too. South Park -style wackiness drives "Bananas and Blow", which marries a watered-down, steel-drum-driven calypso groove to a song concerning being "stuck in my cabana, living on bananas and blow." "Pandy Fackler" could be a bowler-and-white-suspenders homage to Noel Coward, but its appeal is sabotaged by patented Ween tomfoolery.

Snideness also runs through the remorseless riffage of "Stroker Ace," and "The Grobe," which recalls the vibe of Ween's classic "Poopship Destroyer." But these two cuts rock as well as they razz.

Clearly, Ween still likes to have a laugh, and that's okay. But it wrote some fine songs for White Pepper ; songs that aren't sacrificed for sake of irony, which comes pretty cheap these days.

–Rob Kemp

There are several moments on The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone (spinART) that pay such slavish homage to Mr. Wilson and his contemporaries that you'll want to change the sign on Mr. Schneider's studio door to Teacher's Pet Sounds.

But if Moone reflects the California sun a bit too brightly, it also shines with musical qualities long missing from the popular landscape.

It's increasingly difficult to hold onto the threads of five years ago, let alone 35 years ago, at a time when the digital revolution recognizes nothing but its illusion of the future. Music critics inevitably hold the opinion that the youth of today are due for a history lesson, but never has that notion seemed quainter. Yet look at the current landscape. Pop and popular music are long split. The catchiest melody in a good while can be found in Pepsi's "Joy of Cola" commercial, and bands such as Oasis are attempting Beatle-esque mimicry without any understanding of the music they're trying to imitate. Little wonder the brothers Gallagher have been unable to conjure a single memorable hook. They can't even get the glasses and haircuts right.

Power pop of this sort has become pretty much a sucker's game these days. As vanguard bands such as Loud Family, Negro Problem and Matthew Sweet have discovered, "songcraft" and "professionalism" have somehow become code words for painful dullness. The kids, we are assured, do not wish to hear of such qualities.

Apples in Stereo (as well as the other members of Elephant 6 Recording Company, the loosely neu -hippie collective of member-sharing bands that includes Olivia Tremor Control) have so far avoided this fate. The collective's output has garnered a youthful, if geeky, base of enthusiasts, although I suspect that it's only a matter of time before the crowd wanes to a mumble. I mean, if Big Star's Alex Chilton, 25 years down the road from his muse, finds himself singing "Lipstick Traces," as he does on his new CD of covers, Set (Bar-None), what hope does the new breed have?

For now, the Apples, more than the other Elephant 6 bands, hold the title of amiable and melodic indie eccentrics recently abdicated by sell-outs Guided by Voices.

Mr. Schneider has a smart ear, and he knows what to crib: George Harrison's fingers, Ray Davies' yearning, Mr. Wilson's arrangements, Roger McGuinn's nasal vocals.

Despite the fantastical title, Moone mostly deals with girl-boy stuff, in a contrary, though vaguely cheerful, manner. I suspect this has less to do with any disrupted romantic reverie (Mr. Schneider's long-term squeeze, Hilarie Sidney, plays Stevie Nicks to his Lindsey Buckingham in the band), other than that it gives Mr. Schneider the chance to communicate his negativity by multi-tracking catchy "neah-neah-neah" backing vocals, as he does on "The Rainbow." "Stay Gold," on the other hand, sticks to the "bah-bah-bah-bah" of the Pepsi commercial. Now that's professionalism.

Trainspotters such as myself might titter over the horn track on "Go" that sounds lifted from the Byrds' "Artificial Energy," but we would just as easily curse the current mainstream for ignoring it. The Apples may suffer from Simon Says syndrome, but Simon so rarely opens his mouth these days.

Bands stick together for three reasons: money, friendship and art. Two out of three and you have something, otherwise what's the point? Pavement has made a career out of swimming between the three, embracing digression, turning the bridges of obscure punk-rock tunes into ballad melodies as if they were beboppers jamming at Minton's. Without "resorting" to technology, they've cut-and-pasted organically, paralleling the ever-growing baggy pants of the deejay. By sucking the marrow out, these bricolage fanatics have been able to keep the skeleton of innovation in rock-and-roll alive a little longer than anyone would have expected. Which gets back to money, friendship and art, and Pavement's new release Terror Twilight (Matador).

No. 1: Money. The band's brief popularity in the early 1990's seems to have been something of a fluke; they were really too smarty-pants to ever catch on with the masses. The kids crave wistfulness, but if you step over the line, you're stuck in cultsville, which is why Nirvana broke big and Sonic Youth has yet to ship 200,000. Pavement'sbreakthrough-ishsingle, 1992's "Summer Babe," contained a melody appropriated from the English Beat which worked its subliminal 80's magic on the unconcerned listener. Ah, youth! As Oscar Wilde put it, "The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."

The thing is, leader-vocalist Stephen Malkmus' emotional (and sometimes anti-emotional) palette has been considerably more ambitious than a melancholic downward glance, which he also indulges to this day. By 1995's Wowee Zowee , a wide-ranging and underappreciated masterpiece that manages to sum up 30 years of pop music in 70 minutes, the audience and the critics had split for less complicated pleasures, desiring more songs about buildings and food. It must be frustrating: You go out of your way to make your sound specific and unique, and these are precisely the qualities that drive your fans away from you. This has forced the band down a neurotic path of ruin (and may also explain why they all chipped in to buy a racehorse named Speedy Service). But more on that later.

No. 2: Friendship. Another rumor to consider is that Mr. Malkmus recorded Terror Twilight himself with little more than the input of producer Nigel (Radiohead's OK Computer , Beck's Mutations ) Godrich-the Hugh (Sting's The Soul Cages , Phil Collins' No Jacket Required ) Padgham of an aging Generation X. This would make the album Pavement's equivalent to All Shook Down , the Replacements' haphazard final LP, which was, by all accounts, a Paul Westerberg solo project Replacement-ized for financial necessity. It's apt. Pavement's paradigm briefly replaced the Replacements' as the American Indie Rock Fight Plan-thinking man's music without seeming so.

Again, this rumor has been denied-plausibly, in fact, since the entire band did fly off to England to record it together. But it would do much to explain the album's sound. Here was a band that had been able to maintain a cohesive group identity while living in five different states. Yet on Terror Twilight , the sound is less sprawling, more compact, dull, and autumnal, in the manner of All Shook Down . It would not surprise me if Mr. Godrich is partially to blame, but where are Scott (Spiral Stairs) Kannberg's spiraling stairs? On a tight leash, it would seem; this is the first Pavement album not to feature any songs by the guitarist.

Likewise, Pavement has suffered behind the drum kit since middle-aged own-worst-enemy Gary Young was shown the door between Slanted and Enchanted (1992) and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994). They replaced him with Steve West-with Bob Nastanovich continuing to do the stand-up snare-floor tom-Moog work (call him the indie Tito Puente)-but the two percussionists still can't approximate Mr. Young's crazed inspiration. The skinwork this time is weirdly straightforward and plodding, making it all the more melancholy. As a final blast, Terror Twilight 's sound makes a poignant sense. As a midcareer move, it's desultory.

Which brings us to No. 3: Art. Of course, by art I must mean career. For the band-and everyone else in indie rock-is really in a difficult space right now. After playing for 11 years, what artist wants to live off the meager earnings of his racehorse? (Don't answer that.) Even at its most popular, Pavement was a difficult band in a declining genre. And even then, most critics didn't really "get" all of the musical quotation and Joycean wordplay. ("Mandrake/ This is the snake/ I got it on the camera for posterity/ But my stolen wild orchids got cut/ See those sherpas sherpin' from the autobus," sings Stephen on "Platform Blues.")

Most musicians of their ilk have found themselves slipping into the salvation of irrelevancy, or worse, cutting the edges off-brightening the corners, to invoke the band's last LP, which signaled the beginning of their decline. Some might call this "growing up," but maturity doesn't need that sort of public acceptance. One can look to Pavement's primary early inspiration, the Fall, as a band that chose to weird out rather than compromise after its cultural moment had passed. Rest assured, Mark E. Smith has never grown up (he still sucks at the bottle), but the Fall's last couple of albums, 1997's Levitate and the recent The Marshall Suite , stack up with their finest, even if no one is listening. But that's not the point.

This sort of compromise is an impulse forgivable in humans, but not in art. Your audience moves on and so you attempt an esthetic negotiation without selling out. You play to what you feel are your strengths-your authorship. You simplify and hope that it's the song, not the singer. But songs are little more than the accumulation of little bits of meaning, a guitar lick here, the backing vocals there. Terror Twilight is intelligent, as always, and even thematically cohesive in its filching of British pop nuance, from Ray Davies' cadences ("Spit on a Stranger," "Folk Jam") to Black Sabbath and Status Quo melodies ("The Hexx" and "Cream of Gold," respectively). Mr. Malkmus understands where prog rock and punk overlap, obviously treasures his Hatfield and the North LP's and knows that metal is a songwriters' medium.

But he also thinks himself a writer. (Indeed, check out his paean to the girls of Bennington College in a recent issue of the lit journal Open City .) And what he doesn't understand, either by choice or necessity, is that it's not enough to give us the song without the detail, even on a singer-songwriter album. Carole King may be a songwriter, but people also listen to Tapestry for the dry sound of her fingers hitting the piano keys, or to Cat Stevens for the closeness of his breath on the mike on Tea for the Tillerman . Remove those gradations and you're left with little more than a blueprint, just someone attempting to placate the listener.

Mr. Malkmus may have been pleased as punch listening to himself on the control room cans; directness can create the illusion of clarity for the artist. "You're a hungry matron and you are just what I need, I was tired of the best years of my life," he sings in "Billie." (He's talking to us, right?) But what does that mean to the stalwart listener who embraced Pavement for its obfuscation in the first place? Probably little, as they've moved on, too, to Ryoji Ikeda and Godspeed You Black Emperor.

As Ween might put it, that's the snake, dude: Don't tell your tale if you're no longer you. Otherwise, it might just be best to get on that horse and gallop off.

But apocalyptics like me can always use a cool, bubbly slap in the face, and the first half of this year has brought a series of solid hip-hop releases, a few of them better than that. Full-lengths from Defari, Prince Paul, the Roots (who would have thought?), Peanut Butter Wolf, Roots Manuva (limeys!) and many others have done much to remove the ocher taste of the bizarrely praised and massively popular works of such acts as Outkast, Lauryn Hill and the 5,000 cousins of Master P.

To single out the glitterati may be unfair–they apply a different set of values than the underground, and you don't scream at Joey McIntyre for not being Iggy Pop. Yet one expects the supporters of teen witch Brandy and turntablist Q-Bert to sup from the same presweetened iced tea.

Quite the opposite. Hip-hop's recent diversification has brought about an indie rock-style subculture that has allowed artists to embrace weirdness, screwed-upness and obscurity for its own sake. (Not that the hash hasn't helped.) Record companies and entrepreneurs may have almost killed the art form by not fighting in the courts for the right to sample. But Kid Koala can still get his Scratchcratchratchatch –a masterpiece of innumerable, unclearable samples anchored around the spiritual transfiguration of Charlie Brown's dolorous "I got a rock" into the elevating "I gotta rock!"–out on endlessly bootlegged cassette, and become a living (and employable) legend. And Kool Keith can get signed to more than one major label, despite the fact that he is, quite possibly, totally insane. Which in art, as opposed to on Wall Street, or at Bad Boy Productions, can be a plus. Though not always.

Like Daniel Johnston and Antonin Artaud before him, Kool Keith–a.k.a. Keith Thornton, a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, a.k.a. Dr. Dooom, a.k.a. Black Elvis–has thrived in a sympathetic artistic company that he often rejects in the name of an unreachable purity. Despite being twice as old as much of his audience, he's become the figurehead for a newish rap underground that looks to hip-hop's uncategorizable hiccups for inspiration–things like Keith's 1980's group, the Ultramagnetic MCs, the Jungle Brothers' 1993 nose-thumbing album J. Beez Wit the Remedy (sonic inspiration for Brooklyn's avant-mumble Wordsound label), Divine Styler's 1991 Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light , and all the other glorious financial failures that hip-hop created before it figured out how to produce hits with gliding, banal effortlessness.

This newish rap underground is generally represented MC-wise by New York's retro-looking Rawkus Records (their new Soundbombing, Vol. 2 compilation is a good intro) and northern California producer Peanut Butter Wolf's label Stone's Throw, and musically by Bay Area spliff-dadaists the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and San Francisco's Bomb Hip-Hop Records (which put out both seminal Return of the DJ compilations). These are the "Playa Hatas," oft castigated by those who value solidarity over beauty. It's no wonder Keith identifies in his lyrics with rats and insects.

Keith's interest in matters sexual and otherwise have often kept him busier than his musical pursuits. But when he teamed up with Bay Area producer Dan the Automator on the Dr. Octagon project in 1996, the air lock clicked in tight. Dr. Octagonecologyst , originally released on the tiny Bulk label, quickly became the Naked Lunch for B-boys, with Keith's Benway-esque Dr. Octagon persona preparing listeners for "A Visit to the Gynecologist" and explicating about "Halfsharkalligatorhalfman" over the Automator's claustrophobic yet lush rhythmic backgrounds. Dr. Octagonecologyst is the most important hip-hop release this side of the Wu-Tang Clan in the last half-decade, although Dreamworks (which now distributes the album) has Soundscanned under 55,000 copies.

The album's evidence is everywhere. Disregarding Keith's adoption by the Prodigy, his nasal, rapid-fire, almost robotic free associations about anal sex revelry, alien mutilation, record company woes and his breakfast menu made the uncanny respectable. It also underlined how much of the "reality" in the finest hip-hop, from the Geto Boys' legendarily violent debut album to Chuck D's jailbreak "phantasies," is the result of a creative imagination that often goes unacknowledged in African-American artists. Jean Genet can write about sucking Nazi dick all he wants, but when N.W.A. recorded "Fuck tha Police," all hell was supposed to break loose. (It did, but you can blame the Los Angeles police for that.)

Keith's deal with Dreamworks fell apart when he split with the Automator and allegedly spent his entire advance on pornography. He released the movingly lewd Sex Style on DJ Kutmasta Kurt's Funky Ass records, and seems to guest on every third release out there, hip-hop and otherwise. Now Keith delivers two new albums. Under the guise of Dr. Dooom, there's First Come, First Served , a collaboration with DJ Kutmasta Kurt on Funky Ass. And come July, Sony-Ruffhouse releases the much delayed and still incomplete Black Elvis/Lost in Space , which, minus cameos by Brand Nubian's Sadat X and the late Roger Troutman of Zapp, is pretty much a one-man show.

The micromanager in Keith's brain often gets in the way of a good tune. We pay to hear a schizophrenic and instead get an obsessive-compulsive. On parts of Black Elvis , Keith seems concerned with just getting the thing out. (Repeated refrain from the opening track: "I need a release date.") The clipped precision of Keith's delivery can be piquantly unsettling, even when he's delivering lines like "Supergalactic lover coming from the projects on the hill in my monkey green ragtop Seville." But the rhythms–a lot of similar, if slightly off-kilter, bass patterns–don't change much through the pieces. The Automator would have remedied this. More often than not, it's Keith's voice that provides the hook. In many ways, it's highly competent business as usual–funny but not completely thought out (typical title, "I'm Seein' Robots"). Though "The Girls Don't Like the Job" is pretty catchy.

The more cohesive Dr. Dooom project seems to confront Keith's resentment toward his newfound semi-fame, not an uncommon theme for someone who took 15 years to become an overnight success. He kills off Dr. Octagon in the first track then spends the rest of the CD as a goofy, rat-eating evil mastermind, the sort of Dr. Mabuse-like captain of industry that Tom Wolfe should take the time to write about. As on Black Elvis , Keith has a knack for spinning the primal and commonplace into sci-fi. Check out "Welfare Love," which is built around a riff from the Moments' "Sexy Mama"; Keith melds inner-city romance and nostalgic recall, twisting each physical and behavioral description so that it's the reality of the situation that seems strange. His lyrics run roughshod over the rhythm track, imagining a time when he read Black Tail in the incubator while staring at his nurse's ass crack and watching girls eat onion rings.

There's enough incremental detail on First Come, First Served to convince the listener of a real universe, both inside and out. It's certainly no less believable than a world of bumping jeeps that don't overturn, expensive champagne that doesn't destroy your liver, and cell phones and breast implants that don't give you cancer. Which is to say, a sick society could use a sick doctor.

Both have new "product" out–Sleater-Kinney's The Hot Rock (Kill Rock Stars) and Built to Spill's Keep It Like a Secret (Warner Brothers)–that has been praised with language usually reserved for beloved but dying monarchies. It's been about a half-decade since the Kids of America traded in their guitars for a blank prescription pad, and this has constituted a crisis for a critical class, schooled in minutiae, that posits that there are unbroachable sonic and ideological differences between the Who and R.E.M. or, more to the point, between the Volcano Suns and Dumptruck. Every couple of years, the pop scribes give in to a neurotic need to elevate a band or two as rock's (read: the white man's) next (read: last) great hope. Why? To coax back the sugar rush of youth, as if their job were less to figure out what's going on in front of their faces than to construct a Cleveland of the heart.

One can't help but feel sympathy for these writers. (I, for one, pity myself.) It takes a dedicated pedantry to fill your head with the endless crap necessary to possess a tenuous grip on a morphing popular culture you suspect is slipping away from you. Take Sleater-Kinney and Built to Spill, for example. Members of both bands have a lengthy indie-rock pedigree trailing back into the Green River era. They come from a geographical area cherished for its now-dead promises of innocent, righteous hedonism. (Call it a Seattle of the mind.) But they, out of an endless selection of likable, kind of edgy, kind of sad peers, have been anointed.

Is the music of Sleater-Kinney and Built to Spill worth our time? It depends on what your definition of "is" is. For the Anointed, "is" represents "was," a period of 15 or so years ago. Today's critics, who came of age during the thrift store-clothed "Amer-Indie" onslaught of the 80's, haven't quite come to grips with the fact that the success of that movement is represented by its annihilation. Speaking for myself, when I listen to Rykodisc's recent Meat Puppets reissues–a band I was never particularly fond of–I find myself tearing up, pining for a kinder, gentler old ignorance. But I was not a better man then than I am now, and much of my and others' critical embrace of a forced slack-jawedness smacked of the flawed pedagogy of album-oriented radio. Most of us (white, middle-class) mid-80's types were only vaguely aware of work by the likes of, say, George Clinton, Ornette Coleman and Liquid Liquid, which in some cases had been created only a half-decade before. Or less. Instead, it is this generation's little bit o' hell to find positive and Pavlovian mimetic associations in the work of Journey, Pat Benatar and Loverboy, or a weaker echo in their stepchildren Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. SST has long gone the way of that old, reliable horse in George Orwell's Animal Farm , and Sony will be around long after we're dead. Who you gonna call, Ghostbusters?

Ridiculous, you say. We have paged through our latest issue of Request , and have broken bread in our college cafeterias. The matters of Rock still matter. Look at the Offspring. Better than Ezra. Australia's sun-dappled Silverchair! To which I answer: Behold Andy Williams! Glance upon the Adonis that was John Davidson in his prime! Now decipher the Roman numerals on the back of their album covers. These artists reached their commercial peak in the late 60's . They ate well during the psychedelic era. History is gracious before the fall. Bow before Ozymandias!

So bands such as Sleater-Kinney or Built to Spill are a necessary amniotic fluid, protecting us from the crassness of our nostalgic longings for pure stink. By definition they can't push the envelope into new territory lest we merely enjoy them for their own sake, and then turn to the Devil (or at least Ozzy). Which is to say, enjoying Sleater-Kinney and Built to Spill is an admission of a kind of failing of human nature: that we cannot escape ourselves. As Montaigne wrote, concerning suicide (not the band), "There is greater constancy in wearing out our chains than in breaking them."

Then again, Guy Fawkes told us that "a desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy." That said, The Hot Rock has much in it to recommend, Keep It Like a Secret , less. The double vocals on some of the strongly No-Wave-influenced Hot Rock is a neat trick, though I wish that it represented more of a conflicted consciousness. It is certainly superior to Doug Martsch's guitar solos on Keep It Like a Secret , a singular weapon of aggressive boredom. Woody Guthrie's wonderful and inaccurate statement "This machine kills fascists," painted on his acoustic six-string, has been updated through Mr. Martsch's insistent fingertips to conclude "… and then some." You don't merely oppose his guitar solos to make a statement against Rock-ism. In fact, the guitar may very well have a future in the traditional sense. Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, for one, continues to evoke unencumbered, off-centered joy whenever he sets himself up for a little wank. But Built to Spill could improve its work immensely by cutting each ditty of sad-eyed optimism in half. If the fade-out is good enough for Neil Young, it's good enough for Doug Martsch.

The faux-naïveté of Sleater-Kinney's professionalism contains considerably more appeal. Janet Weiss, also of Quasi, is a fine rock drummer, and producer Roger Mountenot gives her some great snare sounds. Many of the guitar riffs, courtesy of Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, are intertwining and insistent, with dulled-down strings. The riffs remind me of other obscure records, especially on "Don't Talk Like," though I'm embarrassed to admit I can't quite place them. This gives some of the record an accidental Pavement-like feel of inspired appropriation and theft.

Mr. Martsch has also been tagged as something of a naïf for the way his music evokes his Idaho background. There is, as has been noted, a "sprawl" to it, of a prosaic sort. Oh, I'm too harsh. It's fine for what it is. However, this stuff sort of reminds me of Socialist Realism, with the modern-day concession of emotion replacing politics: a plod through our day-to-day minor tribulations. The ecstasy is someone else's and, as in Raymond Carver's work, the suffering was noted long ago, and in wiser terms.

Sleater-Kinney seems to acknowledge this, in certain ways. Many of their lyrics obsess on perceived substitution and are directed at subjects whose minds the protagonists may well not know. "I'm not the one you wanted/ not the thing you keep," sings Carrie Brownstein on the title track. No, what I wanted passed by long ago. Should I just take what's here?

Maybe Jim O'Rourke is our Phil Spector. Like the reclusive 60's phenom, he remains a nonentity once you set your sights above the microtonal melee that is the indie-experimental scene today. But Mr. O'Rourke would seem to value that anonymity, creating albums that exist without any self-reference, burying himself in other people's manifestos and taking over Steve Albini's role as the guy from Chicago willing to produce anybody. The last few years have seen him give up his livelihood as an improvisatory (and noisy) guitarist to bearhug pop craft. He's produced everyone from John Fahey to Stereolab to Red Krayola. But while Mr. Albini's reputation inflates in proportion to how often he self-loathingly questions whether he actually does anything, Mr. O'Rourke seems to be everywhere without appearing anywhere.

Take Smog's latest album, Knock Knock (Drag City), which may well prove the premiere "rock" release in this first fiscal quarter. Smog is, essentially, the extremely erratic singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, another in Drag City's endless array of lampshade-wearing sourpusses whose finest attribute is his willingness to beg a certain humiliation to go along with a sometimes self-aggrandizing introspection. Though a sharp fellow, Mr. Callahan lacks the drunken, educated kind-of-madness of his fellow labelmate David Berman, he of Silver Jews. Mr. Callahan is usually only as good as the company he keeps, and has recorded a lot of average-and-below stuff supported by a gaggle of friends who create the illusion that there's more there than meets the ear. Although you won't see Mr. O'Rourke's name (or any name save Mr. Callahan's) on Knock Knock , this is a full-blown O'Rourke production that manages to meld Mr. Callahan's country-tinged melancholy ("A goat and a monkey/ A mule and a flea/ Let's move to the country/ Just you and me") to a perversely rich background that forges the connection between the faceless boogie rock of the 70's and the Velvet Underground. There are also a few avant-gardists rocking out for good measure, like guitarist Loren Mazzacane-Connors, and on a couple of tracks a post-ironic children's choir.

Why isn't this hateful, in the manner of, say, Momus? Perhaps because these disparate elements, often signposts of a lip-curling kitschiness, are combined to produce genuine feeling. This is Mr. O'Rourke's genius, much like it was Mr. Spector's: incubating a heightened phoniness, mining the operatic intensity of extravagance by any means necessary, while delivering an honest emotional kick that often comes across as modest.

The classically trained Mr. O'Rourke does not draw attention to his misfit status, but its tumble is there for us to hear. His admitted models–blues historian-turned-refugee John Fahey, Brian Wilson-collaborator Van Dyke Parks, first-wave minimalist Tony Conrad, Jacques Brel manqué Scott Walker–managed to represent various old-school experimentalist obsessions with "Americana" and court embarrassment while maintaining the composure of the quirky scientist. Indeed, with 1968's Song Cycle , Mr. Parks created the ultimate white hipster-geek totem–a long out-of-print prelapsarian suite, sometimes dubiously referred to as the first art-rock album, which values Stephen Foster over Chuck Berry. It is proudly–symphonically–unlistenable.

Much of the work Mr. O'Rourke hijacks for his ear candy is audaciously awful–but pointed. It is the sort of awfulness that necessitates a focused and convincing narrative intelligence. To wit: His favorite film is Ken Russell's Lisztomania . On his aptly titled upcoming album, Eureka (Drag City), due out in April, "Through the Night Softly" digs into the non-stoner potential of the sax section of Dark Side of the Moon (adding steel drums) while "Something Big" is simultaneously the most perverse and spot-on Burt Bacharach-Hal David mimicry set to record.

Is it parody? Homage? An extra-credit assignment? Mr. O'Rourke understands that that which is embarrassing in art is often what is most moving–and that we often institutionalize such artists, deadening their sting, in order to deal with this. If this leads to him producing a couple of truly horrendous works, such as Bobby Conn's Rise Up! (Truckstop/Atavistic), an out-and-out Christian prog-rock game show led by a self-promoting fake crazy man, or Stephen Prina's Push Comes to Love (Drag City, co-produced with David Grubbs), an unbearably coy and prissy work, Mr. O'Rourke's experimental background allows him the leisure of accepting the weaknesses as part of the project. After all, it's not really him, it's the work.

And the songs on Eureka that don't come off as intellectual exercises, such as the opening track "Prelude to 110 or 220/ Women of the World," seem to effortlessly combine 100 years of American musical cultures and subcultures and in-jokes while wearing a straight face and working above all as music, not commentary. Eureka manages to merge Jack Nitzsche with Sandy Bull and Terry Riley, while tying the whole mishmash into a folk tradition.

Even a record on which Mr. O'Rourke downplays his musical presence, such as Sam Prekop's new eponymous solo album (Thrill Jockey), reflects his knowledge in the details. Mr. Prekop is a member of the Sea and Cake, a band that shares several members with Tortoise, including the drummer and producer John McEntire. (If Mr. O'Rourke is our Phil Spector, then Mr. McEntire is our Jerry Wexler.) The Sea and Cake spent its first few albums merging a likably shambling indie-rock take on Curtis Mayfield with a ricky-ticky improv feel centered around Mr. Prekop's winded delivery. But rock being dead, their last album was heavily produced and bleepy in the manner of the post-rock crowd over which Tortoise reigns. The organic feel of Mr. Prekop's solo album would seem to be a reaction to that bleepiness.

Sam Prekop sounds like a singer-songwriter album, but it's Mr. O'Rourke's production touches (i.e., strings, jazz ringer and great drummer Chad Taylor, a subtle samba sadness) that turn Mr. Prekop into Joni Mitchell. In fact, Mr. O'Rourke's "Please Patronize Our Sponsors," on Eureka , wouldn't sound at all out of place there; consider the title Mr. O'Rourke's philosophy. When the project asks for it, Mr. O'Rourke disappears into the history books–and if his work over the last few years is any indication, he might end up in them. Thankfully, Ken Russell will be dead by then, so he won't be available for the movie.