What happened over the weekend? At 8:34 on Friday night, Kanye West tweeted. He said he'd be premiering a song in a half hour and we'd have to do what he said to hear it – we'd have to go to a particular address and stand outside with other people and watch a video projected onto the side of a building. Of course, the first video of the video was up within minutes, so most people didn't have to do any such thing. "New Slaves" spread, the texting and Vineing and opining ran rampant. A few hours later even Michael Moore was Rap Genius-ing the song. The next night Kanye was the musical guest on the season finale of Saturday Night Live, where he premiered another new song, "Black Skinhead," performed "New Slaves" for the first time and stood alone while the cast hugged around him and the credits rolled.

He came for us on wavelengths old-fashioned and new, inserting into our conversations two songs that are stacks of questions without answers. Received as part of Kanye's 15-year career, they make sense – from the composition that is both heavy-handed and deft to the singsong retort of his flow and the lyrics that combine insecurity with callous certainty, that decry consumerism while refusing to give it up, that drag internal conversations in front of a mass-market, hair-trigger, blinkered audience. "New Slaves" is the "c'mon, c'mon" in the "All Falls Down" hook 10 years and millions of dollars later. He's got more on the line now — a decade of living has made him less inclined to sugarcoat.

This new song is a rotund, hollow production over which the man who made "Jesus Walks" and "Slow Jamz" and "Drive Slow" and "Runaway" and "Can't Tell Me Nothing" looks us dead in the eye and raps about the proximity of Jim Crow. He says things about the government that would have been dangerous 30 years ago. He airs out the music industry. Other rappers are doing this, but Ye also admits fault and weakness every time he mentions a Maybach. He is balling out on every level, especially emotionally. He's made so much money anticipating our desires that he now has the capital and the connections to push our buttons whenever he wants.

How does a very rich and eminently successful artist with a superstar-all-from-a-home-movie girlfriend call us out? "Black Skinhead" is somebody banging on your door in the middle of the night, hurtling out of Ye's metal-plated face, predicting reactions before it's halfway over. He rides an industrial-sounding, stadium-sized beat, calling Chicago, "Chiraq" in a grainy echo. He associated himself with Malcolm X on "Good Morning," but then it was a joke. This time he's serious. He says he's going 400 mph, which we believe – he's taken corners on two wheels on live TV before.

In the Saturday Night Live performances Ye hit all his marks. He mostly controlled his delivery of FCC-banned words – but not all the way and half the slipups felt intentional. His set design is as composed and emphatic as it has been since he started working with Es Devlin. It's invigorating and ominous. His bare-chested DJ couldn't restrain himself, and the SNL audience was in full-throated support.

That was good to hear, because Kanye isn't exactly beloved. Not everybody gets it. On record and in public, he's asymmetric and flustered just like a regular human being is, but unlike rap you'll play for your kids, rap songs about shopping at Goodwill, rappers who are safely in the past. What's popular, on the sales charts, on the radio, at the festivals and in hip-hop today is EDM. And EDM has a lot of things, but it's short on words. Kanye has words for days — words that don't agree with each other, ambiguous pronouns, homonyms, insults, "Strange Fruit" quotes. There are ideas in "New Slaves" and "Black Skinhead" that are echoed in the editorial pages of The New York Times, but Kanye's songs give them volume and heart. They are a reminder of what music can do — and the isolation artists feel when they say things we don't want to hear. People need to stop saying hip-hop is dead. There are brave people making it, and we should be proud.

Ray Manzarek, the founding keyboardist of the Los Angeles rock band The Doors, died in a clinic in Germany on Monday after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer, according to his publicist. He was 74.

Born Raymond Daniel Manczarek Jr. and raised on the south side of Chicago, he resisted piano lessons when he was young, until he heard Chicago blues and jazz on the radio. In 1965, he formed The Doors after moving to Los Angeles and meeting Jim Morrison. "We were aware of Muddy Waters. We were aware of Howlin' Wolf and John Coltrane and Miles Davis," Manzarek told WHYY's Fresh Air in 2000.

Manzarek brought the Chicago sound to L.A.'s beaches, and The Doors added beat poetry and psychedelic drugs to rock 'n' roll. "As the sun is setting into the Pacific Ocean at the end, the terminus of Western civilization, that's the end of it," Manzarek said. "Western civilization ends here in California at Venice Beach, so we stood there inventing a new world on psychedelics."

The group became well-known for Morrison's magnetism and volatility. Drummer John Densmore says Manzarek recognized Morrison's talent for words.

"He saw in Jim the magic before anyone," Densmore says. He also figured out how to add something new to the band. "We didn't have a bass player, which is really against the rock 'n' roll rules, but we found this keyboard bass. And so Ray's left hand and my drumming were ... cooking up the groove for [guitarist] Robby [Krieger] and Jim to float on top of."

Manzarek pulled double duty: Not only did he provide half of the rhythm section, but he played melodies too.

"I had a keyboard bass sitting on top of a Vox Continental organ," he told Fresh Air in 2000. "The Vox Continental organ was what I played with my right hand and the Fender keyboard bass with my left hand."

It was Manzarek's interpretation of Bach — with that right hand — that launched The Doors' first hit, "Light My Fire," in 1967.

"That was like a giant hook," Densmore says. "Schools of fish bit that. Ray's keyboard licks will go down in history as the most memorable hooks you could never forget."

His keyboard playing would drive many classic Doors songs, like "Riders on the Storm" and "Break on Through (to the Other Side)," but just four years after "Light My Fire" hit the top of the charts, Morrison was dead. Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger tried to continue, recording two albums with Manzarek singing some of the lead vocals, but eventually called it quits. Manzarek recorded several solo albums, collaborated with poets and produced for other groups, including X, another Los Angeles trailblazer.

In 1998, Putnam published Manzarek's autobiography to critical acclaim, though Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, was more about Morrison than Manzarek. He also wrote two novels. And in 2002, he reunited with Krieger to play The Doors' songs live. But he maintained that his identity was formed in Los Angeles with his three bandmates nearly a half-century ago.

"Once you open the doors of perception," he said, "the doors of perception are cleansed, they stay cleansed, they stay open, and you see life as an infinite voyage of joy and adventure and strangeness and darkness and wildness and craziness and softness and beauty."

And Ray Manzarek leaves all of that behind in his music.

The competition for your ears — and dollars — just got a little tougher. On Wednesday, Google launched a paid music subscription service that will put it in direct competition with other streaming services like Spotify and Pandora. The announcement may just be the beginning for Google.

As it gets easier to access the Internet, more fans are streaming their music — not downloading it. A recent survey by the NPD Group found that for users between the ages of 13 and 35 streaming music services are more popular than FM radio. Google wants to make sure it rides that wave.

At its developers conference on Wednesday in San Francisco, the company's Chris Yerga introduced what it's calling All Access. While listening to !!!'s "One Girl One Boy" via the service, Yerga showed how it was possible to create a station curated by Google's algorithms but controllable by the user.

"So if there's something there we don't want to hear," he says, "Swipe it away! Swipe it away!"

All Access users can listen to millions of songs and albums as part of the streaming radio service, or they can listen to a song or album on demand, as many times as they like.

Google, the biggest company to enter the streaming music market, has reached licensing agreements with the three major labels. Pandora, the Internet radio service, has 200 million users. Spotify, which also lets users pick exactly what they want to hear, has 6 million paying subscribers and about 24 million users. But Paul Sloan, the executive editor of CNET, who follows the industry, isn't sure how well Google will compete.

"It might just sort of be one of those services that never gets traction," Sloan says. "Right now Google's various music services and other various things they've done like this have not worked well." Sloan points to Google's Play store, where fans can download books, films and music. He says it doesn't come close to Amazon or iTunes.

But Google-owned YouTube is another matter. It's by far the most popular way for young people to listen to music. Sloan says Google is working on another streaming service that will be part of YouTube.

"The industry is hoping for YouTube because that has the brand recognition," he says. "That has the brand recognition, and people already use it as their digital jukebox in the sky."

The service Google launched today will cost $10 a month. That's the same price as Spotify. But both Spotify and Pandora have free versions of their services. To get Google's All Access you have to pay up.

North America's newest pop star is exiting International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield, whose truly space-age rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" has racked up more than 11 million YouTube hits since being posted Sunday. After marveling at Hadfield's lovely Canadian tenor voice, his moustache and his command of zero gravity, I noticed a familiar name in the clip's credits: Emm Gryner.

The 37-year-old singer-songwriter, who's been friendly with Hadfield since he took her album Asianblue with him on a mission in 2002 (its song "Christopher" was inspired by him), was already discussing a collaboration with him on his musical farewell to space when he said, to her delight, that he'd chosen Bowie's classic. Hadfield recorded his vocal and the video footage at the ISS; Gryner wrote and performed a piano accompaniment and enlisted producer Joe Corcoran to complete the track. Hadfield's son Evan produced the video with help from editor Andrew Tidby.

Gryner is one of those Canadian treasures who's well established north of the border but remains an underground artist in America. Her long and varied career has yielded more than a dozen studio albums and EP's, most on her own Dead Daisy label. She released a greatest hits album last year and is currently touring with the trio Trent Severn — a kind of Pistol Annies of the North, named after the waterway connecting Great Lakes Ontario and Huron. I reached Gryner via email to chat about her insights into space music and the view from north of the border.

When I watched the "Space Oddity" video (mesmerized, staring at my iPhone in my car outside a Chipotle burrito shop), I instantly realized that what made it great was not just the unique setting or Chris's gorgeous vocal, but the musical arrangement. You played a key role in that. Tell us about recording the song and incorporating sounds from space.

It started with the piano idea. I wanted something cinematic that might capture that feeling of being in orbit. But it had to be more than that so that's when I enlisted Joe Corcoran to produce it up. I liked the idea of using ambient space station noises because so many of them are so interesting sounding, and even more intriguing to use them in a recorded song as it hasn't been done very often. Or ever? Not sure.

You sang background vocals with David Bowie early in your career. You'd never sung "Space Oddity" with him, though. It's daunting to recreate a song so central to the rock canon. How did you keep Bowie in mind while working with Chris?

I can't speak for what Bowie would like but I know that from my time hanging out with him he has his finger on the pulse of what is new, modern and young, despite being a legend. I think the fact that both Joe and I love Bowie drove us to try to stay true to the original but just update a few of the sounds. I also feel like the vocal had to really be the feature, as Chris' version is so compelling and that's what the real joy of the song is all about. Oh — and the fact that's a brilliant song!

Your other recent project, the folk trio Trent Severn, is as local to Canada as "Space Oddity" is interstellar. You write and cover songs that specifically reflect your home country. Can you talk about how your view of being a "local" musician, and a Canadian one, has evolved over the course of your career?

Trent Severn is a band I see myself being in for years on end. We love our country and we love digging up stories of legends and peers and putting a banjo or fiddle to them. I've been pulled in a folk/roots/country direction for quite some time now — as a result of touring Canada, Ireland, living in rural Ontario — just seeing what kind of music really entertains people. We are also doing it for ourselves, no industry, label or manager and it's going so well operating that way!

Last year you put out a Best Of album representing your long-flourishing career in Canada. You've been an independent artist, running your own label, for years. This must give you a different perspective on the revolution in the music industry that's happened in the past decade — you were already doing what every artist must do now. Do you feel like you've gotten the last laugh?

I feel like I've learned a lot of lessons. I learned mostly that chasing stardom, or chasing labels or a big hit is a waste of energy. I also glimpsed fame by touring with Bowie and that was a real eye-opener. It challenged me to answer what it is that I love about the whole music-making thing and honestly, it's the process, it's being able to do things my own way and to have a calendar that allows me to have a life, a family and to do things like this "Space Oddity" project at the drop of a hat!

Your sound is so diverse, ranging from intimate ballads to electro-pop to the rootsy sound of Trent Severn. I know this is an impossible question for an artist, but where should a listener start if she wants to get to know Emm Gryner?

Well, you can start with The Best of... and once you're drowning in melancholy you can pick yourself up with Trent Severn, crack open a beer and have a laugh.

"Give life back to music," coo the robots on the first track of Daft Punk's new album, Random Access Memories, which showed up yesterday on iTunes after a long period of near-hysterical anticipation and advance marketing. Does the veteran Parisian dance music duo succeed in doing this on its first album in eight years? Your answer will depend on how you view music's relationship to of the central human experiences: pleasure, the tangible satisfaction of body and soul.

For purists, Random Access Memories may instantly disappoint because it abandons EDM's tried-and-true routes to body-mind fulfillment: accelerating machine beats, busy noise and that roller coaster effect, the drop. "It's confusing. There are no drops," declared a writer for the site White Raver Rafting, referring to the moments when a fast computer-generated beat suddenly breaks and shifts its rhythm. Instead of tightly focused tracks shaped through such electronic manipulations, RAM features relatively loose live jamming, pop-operatic balladry and the Bach-quoting keyboards of progressive rock.

On one level, these changes seem to serve nostalgia instead of the current dance music ideal of rapidly accelerating progress. Daft Punk's choice to sink deeply into protoplasmic mud where contemporary dance music was born will strike some as less conservative than contrarian. The most active collaborator on RAM is Nile Rodgers, the producer and guitarist whose work with his band, Chic, and many other artists built the bridge between funk/rock and disco. Also prominently featured are the blockbuster songwriter Paul Williams, best known for his baroque rock opera Phantom of the Paradise, and Giorgio Moroder, Eurodisco's Adam, who fabricated a distinctly dirty Eden with his Eve, the late great Donna Summer.

These 1970s luminaries define the sound and the substance of RAM. While plenty of younger collaborators surface — including Pharrell Williams, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and Animal Collective's Panda Bear — none makes a contribution as crucial as Williams's scenery-toppling vocal on the eight-minute long ballad, "Touch," or Rodgers's guitar riffs throughout, which run like ground wires through the album's grooves. Moroder is mostly on board as a patron saint, but his dictum to "free your mind" is important. This 74-minute excursion into a re-imagined past seeks to rewire the brains of Daft Punk fans by forcing an encounter with a central principle of 1970s popular culture: the pleasure principle. Its songs suggest that by understanding how pleasure felt then, we might better pursue pleasure now.

On the surface, songs like the florid "Touch" or the pleasantly ecstatic "Lose Yourself To Dance" seem to celebrate a 1970s defined by hedonism and self-indulgence. But that's only one layer. Disco was explicitly tied to gay and (as writers like Alice Echols have shown) women's liberation — the way bodies moved on the dance floor inspired liberation movements in the streets. Not much later, soft rockers responded by offering new versions of masculinity that were more sexually expressive and free. Funk, too, played a major role, taking cues from the civil rights movement to free the mind — and as Funkadelic famously said, the ass followed. 1970s music described and fueled this pleasure revolution.

Musically, RAM harkens back to another 1970s pleasure source — the promiscuous eclecticism of the pop scene. Though the image of disco hardened into its Top 40 version after the success of Saturday Night Fever, in reality the genre made room for everything from Florida soul to Italian synth suites to jazz fusion and futuristic take-offs on classical chestnuts. On a purely musical level, RAM defines pleasure through these oozy encounters among sounds — a prog rock keyboard line blending with some guitar boogie or a wandering New Age melody finding focus in a pulsing house beat.

The problem with exploring how pleasure worked in earlier times is that some people now just won't relate. "My dad had an incredible time dancing to this Daft Punk album at his law school prom," tweeted the writer Jeff Weiss after hearing RAM, expressing the views of many who find any version of fun that even remotely smacks of the parental not just dull, but embarrassing. (Weiss did later add that he he thinks half of RAM is great.) Yet while some within the EDM scene may reject RAM as old-fashioned, the album fits very well within the larger world of pop. After all, rock bands like Fleet Foxes, and divas like Solange have been mining the past for something that feels more personal for a while.

But what does it mean to be "personal," anyway? What is a real man? That, too, was a central question of the 1970s, and it's a central one on RAM. It's couched in science-fiction terms here, suiting the central conceit of Daft Punk — the masked identities that allow two musicians who "look not unlike a couple of guys in a rock band," as Zach Baron recently wrote in GQ, to remain both private and mysterious. Like the 1970s band KISS, Daft Punk exists through its disguise and is trapped by it. And like the sci-fi films of the 1970s that reconsidered humanity through the lens of the all-too-human robot or alien, RAM plays with the idea that machines might experience pleasure as well as pain.

There is one glaring omission from Daft Punk's foray into vintage pleasures. Where is the female voice representing those who truly defined that liberatory spirit? Donna Summer, who died last year, may not have been available, but plenty of others could have filled that role. The body and soul satisfactions RAM offers are many, but without that feminine presence, they remain incomplete.

With Nashville's first season about to wrap up — and a second one just ordered — the prime-time TV drama has found a niche audience on Wednesdays. The soundtrack has also enjoyed pop chart success.

The characters in Nashville fall into three categories: struggling unknowns looking for their big break, struggling up-and-comers and struggling superstars. And the songs — most of them previously unheard originals — are woven into the drama. They appear organically in living room songwriting sessions, late night honky-tonks or stadium dress rehearsals.

Makes sense for a town nicknamed Music City. But tracking down those songs is no easy thing. That job falls to Frankie Pine, the music supervisor for Nashville, who tells All Things Considered's Audie Cornish that when she first put out a call for unreleased music, she guessed she received "at least 50,000 songs."

I've read that you keep hundreds of songs on your computer in folders for each character. Is that true? And, if so, can you talk about what is the sound of one character versus another? Say, this Rayna Jaymes character — the main country diva — and the upstart character, Juliette Barnes.

"We started with Rayna being more of our poignant, lyrical country artist. The songs had to be saying something about some kind of matter rather than 'I don't like boys' or some kind of girly-type song. Juliette was our young pop princess, so songs that just had a lot of fun in them — it didn't really matter what the lyrics were saying at the beginning. As her character changed, we moved into a more poignant lyric that was more to the story point of what was happening in Juliette's life.

"As we sit in the writer's room and talk about where our characters are going, I just start pulling stories as I'm listening and I make a big, long playlist, so that when and if that story comes up, we've got something there for them."

And one of those songs that Juliette, the character, sings is "Hanging on a Lie."

"The writers of this are my new favorite 'little kids,' I call them. [Laughs.]"

This is a song that was written by Justin Davis and Sarah Zimmerman, people who were unknown, right?

"Yes. On my trip to Nashville, we got this last-minute call from Universal Publishing, begging me to please come to their offices. They had some young songwriters there that wanted to perform for us. We were actually on our way to the airport. So we just said, 'OK, let's just swing by. Let's see what this is all about.' I am so thankful that we stopped to see them because they were the two greatest — they probably played like four songs for us and we loved every single one of them."

This pair is also on another song on the soundtrack called "When the Right One Comes Along," which is interesting because it's also written for characters who are supposed to be unknown, young people trying to break into the business.

"That was the part of it that felt so natural to me when we heard that song. They played it that day. We just thought it was amazing for Scarlett and Gunnar, knowing that ultimately that they would find themselves in love — obviously with a struggle, of course, it wouldn't be good television without a struggle. When it finally came to fruition, this was the most poignant song that, I feel, exuded how these two people feel about each other.

"When I'm listening, I'm listening very specific to our characters. One of the things we said from the very beginning is that we only want to use great songs. To us in television, what makes a great song is how it's used in the program and how it comes across in the storytelling. I think that's the one thing that the show has done so successfully: Allowing those songs and the lyrics of those songs to be another part of the story rather than just the writers of the scripts, per se. When we're listening to music, that is the highest criteria. Obviously, finding a hit song, that's great, but what makes a hit song in television is when it's used so incredibly well. I think that's what our audience responds to in regards to the iTunes downloads and things like that."

What has it meant to these songwriters for the song to appear on the show? Has this opened up new avenues?

"I think it has. I think there has been a struggle for years for Nashville to get heard within the film and TV community. Their music is not hugely used in film and television. It was a bit of a learning curve because that's an area that they typically have within the publishing houses. They don't have film and television pitch people like we do here in L.A. And here is the perfect show to make that happen for them. I think the other thing Nashville would like to see is we're representing that music and those songwriters in the right way. And I think that our show has done that."

The online video sharing site YouTube is this generation's MTV. Artists like Gotye and PSY have found mainstream success after their videos went viral. Yet the number of cover songs — from toddlers singing The Beatles to teens tackling Led Zeppelin — eclipses original work by a long shot. Between those two extremes is an alternative universe of aspiring professional musicians who use cover songs on YouTube to build fan bases of their own. What these musicians once did for love and fame is starting to pay off in cold, hard cash.

If you search for a song called "Payphone" by Maroon 5, you'll find the original, and you'll find the Jayesslee version, the P.S. 22 version and one by Tyler Ward, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter from Denver with an all-American look and a sound that lives somewhere between indie pop and country. Ward uses YouTube to promote his music career — he posts covers trying to draw new fans.

"I started, actually, doing cover songs in the bar, trying to make ends meet every weekend," he says. "So when I figured out what YouTube was, I just figured I could put these online, see what happens."

What happened was an opening slot for the Jonas Brothers, a performance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and a headlining tour through Europe, the U.S. and Canada. But he could have made more money back at the bar singing those same songs.

"The challenge is, when an artist decides to cover a song, they don't actually have the rights to make money on that song," says George Strompolos, the CEO of Fullscreen Inc. Ward is one of his clients.

Strompolos explains that because YouTube is free in the same way that broadcast TV is free, all of the money that musicians, record labels and music publishers make right now is through advertising that runs with the videos. Until recently, cover songs were the exception. YouTube couldn't run ads on those videos. An aspiring musician like Ward could put hours of work into a video, hoping for attention, but not get a single dollar.

"The problem is," says Strompolos, "neither will the original songwriter, because, again, there are no advertisements."

The issue is the legal rights to the song. That's held by publishers or songwriters, and if anyone wants to make money on a recoding of a song, he has to make a deal. This can be tricky when talking about the thousands of people who upload covers to YouTube.

Enter Fullscreen and one of its rivals, Maker Studios. They're in the business of connecting YouTube creators with possible advertisers. These companies put talent agents, producers and ad sales all under one roof.

Earlier this year, Fullscreen and Maker struck a deal with one of the largest song rights holders: Universal Music Publishing Group. This opened up Universal's massive catalog — decades of music from Fleetwood Mac to Adele — for a revenue sharing plan. Now the musicians who work with Fullscreen and Maker can earn money on covers.

"What we've done with teaming up with Universal Music Publishing Group is allow the artists who cover those songs to have the license to run the advertisements," Strompolos says. "And that way if their cover songs on YouTube get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, it's actually worth money to that cover artist, and the original songwriter is also compensated."

None of the parties involved in the deal will disclose exactly how the money is shared, so I asked Josh Cohen, founder of online video news site Tubefilter, to give me a sense of how this all works for the YouTube musicians.

"The general revenue split for advertising on YouTube is 45 percent/55 percent. That's 55 percent to the creator, 45 percent to YouTube," he says. "There may be varying deals depending on the company that YouTube's working with, but that's pretty standard."

Ads pay content creators — that includes the creators of cover songs — based on what's called CPM, which is cost per 1,000 views.

"Content creators on the low end are making a $1 or $2 CPM from YouTube," Cohen says. "The benefits of signing up with a company like Maker Studios or Fullscreen is that those content creators can get guaranteed higher rates for their videos. So Maker Studios or Fullscreen might offer them a $2 or $3 CPM, or even higher for a period of time, which is more money than they'd be making from YouTube alone."

YouTube pays the music publisher and original songwriter, and the cover artists get a little money. They also get to make names for themselves while riding the popularity wave of hit songs. Meanwhile, businesses like Fullscreen and Maker Studios are, in a way, becoming de facto A&R departments for the music industry.

Maker recently got a $36 million injection of cash from Time Warner Investments. Courtney Holt worked with MySpace Music and is now the chief operating officer of Maker Studios. A serious music fan, he believes there are infinite possibilities to mine the back catalogs of the music publishers. The YouTube generation, after all, hasn't heard everything yet.

"I think in some ways we have a responsibility to reintroduce this generation to really great music, not just new music," he says. "Because if we have one talent who loves Justin Timberlake, maybe they haven't really discovered the Michael Jackson catalog or the Motown catalog or the Stax catalog. And you start to think about, 'What if I go back a little further? What am I going to find?' "

What musicians are finding is that cover songs can simultaneously launch their YouTube careers while helping to cover the bills. No more spending your post-college years singing in bars while living in your father's basement, like Tyler Ward did.

"He was like, 'You've got two years, son. You've got two years, and then you're going to have to get a real job,' " he says. "About a year and a half later, I started doing the cover thing and my whole world changed. I was able to move out to L.A., support myself, buy a car, buy a house — that kind of thing."

Music to any aspiring musician's ears.

Noah Nelson is a reporter for Turnstyle News, a project of Youth Radio.

You can't hear it, not exactly, but it's in almost every song on the radio. It's a 30-year-old technology that hasn't changed much over the years but is now used in ways that its creators likely never imagined. In contemporary music, there's nothing closer to a universal translator than MIDI.

Simply put, MIDI is a way for computers to understand musical instruments. Until 1983, when the technology was first demonstrated in a presentation to the National Association of Music Merchants, synthesizers were stand-alone electronic instruments, incapable of linking up with computers. But the idea for MIDI goes back to 1978, when engineer and synthesizer designer Dave Smith put out the Prophet 5, one of the earliest musical instruments to include a microprocessor.

After Smith's creation, a number of designers built similar synthesizers, all equipped with digital compatibility. This meant they could communicate digitally with one another, but it was a complicated process: There was no standard way for these instruments to connect.

"And then in the early '80s we all started realizing that it was kind of silly for all of us to have our own proprietary interfaces that couldn't talk to each other," Smith says. "We realized that if the industry was going to grow much, that we really should have a common way of doing that."

So Smith worked with a team of designers to create what was called the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a technology that unites synthesizers and computers. Most synthesizers work by pressing a key on keyboard to generate an electrical current, which becomes sound by passing through an amplifier and speakers. MIDI turns that current to something that computers could understand.

"What MIDI does is it digitizes that process," says Tom White, CEO of the MIDI Manufacturers Association. "Instead of actually creating a voltage, there's a series of numbers that are generated every time you press a key or turn a knob on the synthesizer. And the wonder of all that, the magnificent part about it is, since its all numbers, then a computer can process it. So what happens is, you can play something on a synthesizer, the computer can store it and then it's easy to play it back or edit it."

So lets say, for example, a middle C is struck on a keyboard that's hooked up to a laptop. MIDI turns all of the information about that note — its timbre, length, volume, etc. — into code that the computer can then change. That C can become a D or be stretched to twice its length. The possibilities are nearly endless. And it's not just keyboards that can plug in. With the right setup, electric guitars, violins, basses — almost anything — can be played and manipulated through MIDI. Today, much of what's heard on commercial radio was made with the technology.

The reason MIDI is everywhere has a lot to do with the intent of its creators. At the time, Smith, who is sometimes called "the father of MIDI," was with a company called Sequential Circuits. He set up a meeting with keyboard companies Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Kawai.

"The idea was, it didn't have to be perfect. We wanted something everyone could agree on and then we wanted to give it away because we wanted to make sure it became universally adopted," Smith says. "I don't even remember discussing much about the possibility of charging royalties or licensing fees. It was just assumed that we would give it away."

Today, that decision has allowed MIDI to travel far. In addition to music, MIDI is also used to control light shows and animatronics. It was used to generate ring tones in early cellphones. What was first used to link one synthesizer to another is now used to control the synchronized fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Its impact on the music industry was recognized this year when Smith and his collaborator Ikutaro Kakehashi won a technical Grammy for their work.

Electronic musician Holly Herndon uses MIDI in a couple of ways.

"I use a MIDI controller when I perform live and also when I'm writing," Herndon says. Instead of a keyboard, her controller has buttons, knobs and sliding faders that can map to sounds on her computer.

"Maybe this kind of Western piano interface isn't the best way to write music, and that's what's so interesting about MIDI," she says. "Maybe the best way to compose a new piece is to turn a knob in a certain way or to use faders. That's, I think, not to overblow it, but that's kind of revolutionized the way that we approach composition."

A revolution spawned by a desire for connection and collaboration, not dollars and cents.

What defines good singing? Technique or feeling? That argument, a perennial among music lovers, roared back into the foreground last week after Harry Connick, Jr. appeared on American Idol. The fortysomething pianist and crooner found himself trending on Twitter for the first time since his acting run on Law & Order: SVU ended in 2012 after bullying the four young finalists about their failure to grasp the basics of the American Songbook. His cruelest moment came when teenager Amber Holcomb revealed that she thought "My Funny Valentine" was about a boy who told good jokes.

Connick adopted the demeanor of a self-satisfied high school history teacher as he told to Holcomb to go do some Google research on the miserable life of lyricist Lorenz Hart. The young singer, flustered beyond repair, sang terribly and was eliminated the next night. As for Connick, his stern-professor schtick paid off: pundits all over the Web lauded his insight, and his name was soon floated as a possible Idol judge.

Connick was certainly right on one level — when it comes to the standards to which he's devoted his own career, the words do matter, and in any case, it's helpful to learn a song before performing it. But what happens when his criteria for quality singing are applied to today's most popular music? A complicated reality emerges, one that goes beyond Idol to show that there are many versions of "classic" today, and many ways to be good.

The No. 1 charting album last week was Michael Buble's To Be Loved — a well-measured leap beyond the standards for the retro-Canadian, who made his fortune following Connick's advice to the letter. He's been changing up his style lately, though, and on this new album, Buble inches even further away from his son-of-Sinatra persona. He's mentioning Frank Ocean as an influence, and is blithely discussing his use of Auto-Tune with interviewers, including NPR's Rachel Martin. Buble wants to get on pop radio; he also wouldn't mind some love from critics who've long considered him too safe. It seems to be working: Buble's received friendly write-ups in both The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe declared that he's found his "true voice." For Buble, originality currently tops craft when it comes to being a good singer.

Two ubiquitous pop ballads also show how different contexts produce different definitions of pop vocal success. Pink and Nate Ruess's "Just Give Me a Reason" is the nation's most popular song, a mid-tempo ballad that epitomizes what might be called the post-Glee take on standards-style singing. It's grounded in Broadway-inspired interpretive belting, but it also uses rock and contemporary R&B as touchpoints. Pink, one of those versatile stars whom the Idol judges would identify as being able to "sing anything," tones down both her diva runs and her rock shouts here. She honors the melody in a way that's very current. This relatively simple but emotionally charged approach taps into two distinct but related sources of the modern-day singalong: emo, the punk offshoot that stresses feelingful melody and romantic confessionalism, and theater-kid culture, where countless teenage pop fans get their own first taste of the thrill of performance. Not coincidentally, these two strains are exactly what Ruess's band, fun., has mined to become both critical and popular favorites. "Just Give Me A Reason" defines good singng as method acting — there's a theatrical quality to Pink's and Ruess's emotionalism, but it's in the service of communicating big, hard to master emotions. (In terms of standards singers, think Judy Garland here, not Billie Holiday.)

Close on that song's heels on the Top 40 is Rihanna's ballad, "Stay," a single that's been hanging around since January, and which started gaining steam after the controversial singer performed it on the Grammys in February. Rihanna is the kind of multi-platform star whose core talent as a vocalist has often been questioned; she's a mistress of arena pop, a fashion icon, and a tabloid omnipresence, but few would call her one of this century's great singers. In her recent article on the simmering tensions between Idol judges Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj, the writer Heather Havrilesky argued that Minaj's brand of identity-driven stardom has replaced the more convention-driven ideal of the "pop-star factory" that favored big voices like Carey. Rihanna's success reinforces that view. Her singing style is the opposite of pyrotechnic: it's flat and malleable, though also instantly recognizable, like a streak of iridescent green paint added to the canvases of the many dance hits it embellishes,

Yet "Stay," a song that shows no sign of fading away, is Rihanna's bid for respect as an old-fashioned vocalist. Its minimal arrangement puts her imperfect voice at the center. Her delivery is conversational, but not in the clever, carefully modulated way that Connick prefers. If anything, it's amateurish — nasal, with its breaks and strained moments left intact. The legacy Rihanna taps into with "Stay" is that of the rock balladeer: she's invoking Janis Joplin in the first verses of "Me and Bobby McGee," or Mick Jagger singing "Wild Horses." Those singers dared rawness and almost painful intimacy; good singing, in those moments, was made stronger by being a little bit bad.

In the end, no definition of good singing can suffice when it comes to popular music. The very purpose of pop — whether in the American Songbook era or now — is to absorb the energy of its time and give it back, illuminated and intensified. And that spirit always moves in many directions at once, wafting out like smoke from tiny cabarets, bursting forth in the shape of praise from churches, clanging through the walls of the rock basement, bouncing in rhyme against city pavement. Learn the song? Sure. But there's never one clear lesson plan.

American Idol at its infrequent best gives fans a framework for debating these very issues. The show's lost so much steam this season that only Connick's outright condemnations have resonated beyond its shrinking fan base. And that's too bad, because even as it Titanically sinks, Idol is shedding light on a new top talent — and she's the kind of singer that in 2013 could only gain mainstream attention from a singing competition. Candice Glover, the gospel trained striver from the South Carolina sea island of St. Helena, is neither a glitzy diva like Carey or a mistress of the current like Minaj — in fact, she's so unconcerned with (or unskilled at) projecting a marketable image that she's currently undergoing personality training to increase her odds of winning against her more easily branded competitors.

But Glover can make a song — or even the snippet of a song, which is what you get on Idol — tell a story that's compelling and complex. You can see her mind working as she diverges from a melody or employs her mighty voice on a churchy run. She's passed the Adele test by mastering that singer's take on The Cure's "Lovesong," in what instantly became the season's most talked-about performance. She's bent hits by Bruno Mars and Drake to her will and delivered on classics, too. And after Connick tried to get her to tone down her delivery, she hit him back with a version of the torch song "You've Changed" that did take liberties, but only deeply intelligent ones. Like Kelly and Carrie before her, Glover is an Idol-slayer: she opens her mouth and the show's silliness gives way to sheer beauty. That's a way to sing well, too.

In the late 1980s, no clique in New York seemed more dominant than the Juice Crew. Assembled by producer Marley Marl, the group's core included the larger-than-life spectacle that was Big Daddy Kane, the slippery tongued Masta Ace, the profanely prickly Roxanne Shante and the clown prince, Biz Markie. By 1993 though, the Crew's ascendency was on the wane, with Kane and Shante both in mid-career slumps and Ace off building a new family around him, The I.N.C. As for Biz, he was content to be surviving, especially after two years of legal hell.

His 1993 album, All Samples Cleared!, was neither his most successful nor most critically acclaimed, but its mere existence was a triumph of sorts, with Biz waggling his famous tongue in celebration. To understand all this, we need to go back a couple years, to his 1991 album I Need a Haircut, and, more specifically, the song "Alone Again."

Thematically, "Alone Again," is like other Biz songs where he sets himself up as a "lovable loser," the kind of guy whose friends ditch him to hang out with girls or who rocks a show only to have to walk home by himself after. Musically, "Alone Again," samples several bars of the familiar piano riff from Gilbert O'Sullivan's 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)" and Biz sings part of O'Sullivan's hook for his own chorus (off-key, naturally). On the surface, "Alone Again," seemed to follow a very similar template to Markie's biggest hit, 1989's "Just a Friend" which also riffed off a piano loop and song hook borrowed from Freddie Scott. Behind the scenes though, a storm began to brew.

When sampling technology and practices became hip-hop's musical blueprint in the late 1980s, the business and legal rules were a thoroughly gray area. Since the techniques created digital copies of source material, copyright holders could argue that unauthorized sampling violated their intellectual property. Those doing the sampling could argue they were repurposing fragments of recorded music to create something entirely new. Up until 1991, disputes around whose argument carried more weight tended to be settled outside of court. This is where Biz comes back in.

In 1991, O'Sullivan sued Markie over the "Alone Again" sample. This case came hot on the heels of a $1.7 million settlement between members of '60s rock group The Turtles and the rap group De La Soul all stemming from a few seconds of a Turtles' song sampled by De La. With the O'Sullivan/Markie case, one complication was that Markie and his label did initially try to clear the sample through O'Sullivan but when the singer-songwriter declined to do so, the label released the song anyway. This set up the eventual legal showdown which, unlike the previous cases, didn't get settled out-of-court but instead, ended up being decided by judge Kevin Duffy in a far-reaching decision for future sampling practices.

Duffy found Biz Markie guilty of infringing on O'Sullivan's copyright, ordered the rapper to pay $250,000 in damages, barred Markie's label (Warner Brothers) from continuing to sell either the single or album and, most astoundingly, referred the matter to criminal court, on the grounds that Markie was liable for theft. (The rapper was never charged.) Duffy's decision permanently altered the landscape for sampling, not so much curtailing it — sampling is still popular after all — but changing the creative and business practices around it.

Those changes took on any number of different forms. Major labels were forced to dedicate additional staff and resources toward scouring releases to make sure all samples had proper clearance. In fact, there's an entire shadow catalog of rap songs that went unreleased specifically because they couldn't get that clearance. Artists, especially underground producers, more frequently altered recognizable lifts or sought out obscure samples in attempts to avoid detection. Either way, the "anything goes" era of sampling had essentially come to an end.

For Biz Markie, his response to all this drama came two years later with All Samples Cleared! If the album's title wasn't tongue-in-cheek enough, the cover art finds Markie playing both judge and defendant, restaging the Duffy courtroom with a smirk. On the LP version of the album, the samples are prominently, properly included on the back cover liner notes. Yet, despite these visual gestures, Markie never explicitly addresses the lawsuit or its aftermath on the album's dozen songs. There are no sideways shots at Duffy or O'Sullivan, no referencing of the case at all. On the scale of "f—- you" albums, it doesn't quite rise to the level of Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear even though the title and art obviously nod at the O'Sullivan suit.

There is one sample-related curiosity though. Five of the songs — almost half the album — use samples based on five different versions of Allen Toussaint's "Get Out Of My Life Woman." The first track, "I'm The Biz Markie" for example, uses The Mad Lads' cover. The next song, "I'm a Ugly Nigga (So What?)" samples from Lee Dorsey's cover. And so forth.

Sonically, there's no way for a listener to miss this repeated use even if each version has its small, subtle differences (Joe Williams' cover, used on Markie's "Funk Is Back" has a unique piano trill, for example). Other albums use the same drum sounds repeatedly but this may be the only case where an artist went to such deliberate lengths to take the same base composition and then flip samples from so many different versions of it.

Was this some kind of additional riff on the lawsuit, a "watch me as I sample the same song five ways because I can" gesture? Was it a cost-saving measure, since it would have been less expensive to pay multiple clearances on the same song? Or was it merely Biz, a consummate record nerd, showing off the depth of his collection? Either way, All Samples Cleared! let the ever-comedic rapper have the last laugh.

In my line of work you hear about new bands every day. Maybe there's a cool new electronic duo coming out of Silverlake in L.A., or a lo-fi trio reinventing Motown from an illegal loft in Bushwick or an amazing heir to the Amy Winehouse throne emerging from a seaside town in England. All day, every day, the buzz is sounding. Recently, The Guardian featured a compellingly gloomy Mancunian quartet called PINS as its New Band of the Day; a publicist I trust insisted I go hear this London-based group called Savages; several good rock friends were independently obsessed with a Glaswegian synth-pop trio called Chvrches. It was only when I spent an hour in front of the TV one night watching Rectify and casually Googling these new artists that I realized: Wait, all three of these groups are led by women.

For as long as rock 'n' roll has been around, women have been in the mix, as songwriters, performers and muses. But even in the '90s, which saw the rise of Riot Grrrl culture and the mainstream prominence of powerhouse female rockers like Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani and PJ Harvey, the first thing generally mentioned about any band fronted by or entirely comprising women was that it was fronted by or entirely comprised women. Not so much this time. In fact, little effort is being made to paint these groups — who are all from the U.K. and formed within the past year and a half — as part of a cohesive scene, which is good since they're all from different cities and sound nothing alike.

My favorite photo of PINS, which released its LuvU4Lyf EP in the fall, shows the band members striding through a quaint small town street decked out in full-on CBGB-era rocker thrifted threads and holding hands. They look like a gang of secretly sentimental thugs — and that's exactly how they sound, too, like a motorcycle gang whose members spend their days defending their gritty turf then going home and dancing in their underwear to The Beach Boys. That's a party you could invite Chvrches to. The Glasgow-based group is fronted by the elfin Lauren Mayberry, a former law and journalism student, who connected with her synth-playing band mates, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, via the city's intimate music scene. Their online breakthrough came when the blog for Neon Gold — a label known for earmarking some of the best dance rock bands of the recent era, including Gotye, Ellie Goulding and Passion Pit — posted the shimmering, confident "Lies." The Recover EP capitalized on that momentum and now we're awaiting the band's debut full-length.

It's a testament to the potency of Savages that they stand out so starkly when compared with these other promising bands. To borrow a kind of sleazy term used by scouts in the music industry, Savages are very "fully formed," which is to say they have a clearly defined look (tailored androgyny), sound (ferocious post-punk) and philosophy about the world (it's damaged and in need of a violent rescuing). The combined effect is that they feel inevitable. When you first hear a new band there's a sense of you, the listener, trying them on. Do I like this? From Note 1, Savages seem to have answered this question on the listener's behalf. Their debut, Silence Yourself, is out May 7 on Matador Records.

The collective rise of PINS, Chvrches and Savages does not indicate a sudden lack of sexism in rock 'n' roll. And I'm not suggesting that the gender demographics aren't interesting. That image of PINS is powerful in part because it features four rocker women in a version of a pose typically struck by four rocker men. When I saw Savages perform at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, the entire band was wearing all black except for the blue scrunchie in drummer Fay Milton's hair and the bright red Dorothy pumps on singer Jehnny Beth's feet. All my guy friends have goofy crushes on Chvrches' Mayberry. The fact that these artists are women, in other words, is not beside the point, it's just not the only point being made. And that's a good sign.

Slayer inspires the kind of rabid fandom that causes short yet intimidating bald men to yell SLAAAAYYEEERRR while pounding cheap beer, while in lines for shows, while in line for groceries. Before we could tattoo its logo on our arms, we took Sharpies to our notebooks and lockers, pledging our unholy allegiance to Araya, Hanneman, King and Lombardo (or Bostaph, if you please). Along with Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, Slayer is one of the Big Four '80s thrash metal bands. In the decades that followed, Slayer is the only one to maintain its credibility among an extremely judgmental hoard.

Guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who died of liver failure at 49 on Thursday, was the songwriter, sometimes-lyricist and shredding fingers behind some of Slayer's most enduring songs: the impossibly fast and insane "Angel of Death," the manic "Dead Skin Mask" and "South of Heaven," which would eventually beckon me to its "never ending search for a truth never told."

I first heard "South of Heaven" somewhere around 2002 and, like most of my most significant music discoveries, it came to me via the college radio station where I volunteered, WUOG in Athens, Ga. One late-night DJ had an affinity for ridiculously over-the-top power metal like Blind Guardian and Rhapsody and willfully ignored the then-burgeoning, slow-moving post-metal scene stemming from Isis and Neurosis. But one night, the opening clarion call to "South of Heaven" rang from my dorm room, sounding like one of the Wagner records I'd listened to in a yearlong classical phase as a kid. On top of it squealed harmonics that bent like hot iron, ponderous and foreboding. I barely let the song reach the chorus before I called the station.

"WHAT. IS. THIS?"

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"It's Slayer." Click. The exasperated expletive was implied.

Perhaps it's merely sentimental, but for all of Slayer's classics (and even their solid current-day records), 1988's South of Heaven remains my favorite. It's set apart by slow-building thrash, an oxymoron for a genre built on speed, and was primarily written by Hanneman, merely by circumstance. Guitarist Kerry King had just gotten hitched and more or less left Hanneman to his own devices.

Hanneman was the punk rocker of the band, frequently citing the Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L, and Black Flag as influences. For a hardcore kid like me, that was my way in to Slayer's chaos. The band would even go on to record an underrated album of punk covers in 1996 called Undisputed Attitude, which also included a few originals. But surely, Black Flag's doomy hardcore obsession with Black Sabbath on My War had seeped into Hanneman's fingers by South of Heaven, crawling with riffs at a graven and sinister pace. He also wasn't afraid to groove, a no-no in thrash, which is perhaps why Hanneman ultimately penned Slayer's most memorable songs.

South of Heaven's slower pace was a reaction to Slayer's previous record, the instant classic Reign in Blood. For Decibel magazine's monthly "Hall of Fame" feature in issue No. 101, Hanneman said of the record, "We didn't want to beat out [Reign in Blood]. It'd be kind of ridiculous, 'cause that album's so fast. So, we all talked about it: slowing down the album a bit to freak everybody out."

In the mind of Slayer fans, we've built characterizations of the members: Kerry King hates Christianity, Tom Araya screams about the devil. Jeff Hanneman, for all of his laid-back demeanor, thought seriously about war and destruction. It got everybody in trouble; like Lemmy in Motorhead, Hanneman was morbidly fascinated by Nazi history. That caused the most grief, yet fueled some of Slayer's most damning material, like "Spill the Blood" and "Angel of Death." Like an Ingmar Bergman film, metal often works in darkness, rooting for something, anything that makes sense of this ugly human existence. Hanneman understood that and channeled it into a band that exemplifies pain.

But beyond the lyrical concepts and riffs were Hanneman's guitar solos, numbing and chaotic, intertwined with Kerry King's cleaner — but no less meaner — shred. They were two sides to a coin that split a stage, something I'd never realized until the only time I saw Slayer live, in 2007. And even though Hanneman withdrew from touring after contracting necrotizing fasciitis, a debilitating skin disorder, in early 2011, something will never be the same about Slayer now. We will wander in darkness, where hell awaits.

Erykah Badu doesn't think she's old enough to be anybody's godmother, and the first time somebody asked her to fulfill that role (Solange, because of course) she said, how dare you. Badu was onstage at the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesday night, an event that's part of the Red Bull Music Academy, a series of shows and lectures happening this month in New York City. She was talking about Twitter when that came up — her reluctance to get on there, her lateness to computers (Jay Electronica gave her a Mac in 2003) and her initial resistance to a $0.99 price point for digital songs. But being like that — intermittently shocked that so much time has passed, too respectful of the old ways to jump on any bandwagons (or allow our bad manners to fly) and indelibly female — made it feel like she is all of our godmother. I saw the Dalai Lama speak once, and the feeling in the room was similar. We gathered at the appointed hour, partly to pay our respects and partly to find out what this near-mythical figure was like in person.

We didn't really know what to do with ourselves. Badu took 16 questions from the audience and received one woman who right away admitted she didn't even have a question. This lady got on the mic to give thanks and stayed on it, drawling, cracking everybody up but refusing to bring it on home until Badu gently teased her and finally invited her to come on up and sit next to her on the couch. No one could believe her luck. We rode for this woman the whole time, five minutes that felt like an hour, terrified that Badu would snap, reveal something sharp and business-like at her center or a weakness that would allow some administrator-type to put her interlocutor in her place. But she didn't. It was majestic, the way she handled a gloriously awkward and hilariously genuine moment, the way she patted the couch as a summons, and shouted "Next caller" to resume her duties.

Badu received all the love, the gratitude, the trembling and the inanity with grace. She told us she's a doula now. Her exact words were, "I occasionally catch babies. Sit with people in hospices." And what she did Tuesday night was right in that vein. "I enjoy being the welcoming committee and the ushering committee. There's not many words that you can say. 'Cause I don't know where they came from or where they're going," she said. We, strangers, didn't press for details and she just kind of held our hands.

Her fame, her name, her style is predicated on a connection to other people. She works in groups — from the Soulquarians (which she announced is getting back together) to Frequency to Edith Funker — her children are present in our understanding of her, her language and tone is classic girl talk and she appears open and flexible and soft. She fights the good fight, and we're pretty sure she's on our side.

She takes care of herself and figures what feels good to her will feel good to us too. She was talking about what a really good DJ can do: "You can remember how something smelled when you hear certain songs. It's big therapy," she said. She's a singer, a songwriter, an artist and more. "I'm a holistic health practitioner — certified — Reiki master, a DJ. A face-melting DJ. Cold."

Much of what she said Tuesday night was expressed simply but received profoundly. She answered the questions of Chairman Mao, an eminence in the hip-hop world himself, having co-founded the influential and indefatigable Ego Trip magazine, for about an hour, and those of her audience for another 30 minutes. The crowd hooted and cosigned and mhh-hmmed. She admitted she didn't have an easy time with her 40^th birthday a couple years ago: "Not trying to front on y'all — I did wild out. I was kinda feeling a way about it. Because you're supposed to be old when you're 40. Especially with women." But she doesn't feel the way they tell us middle-aged feels. Mao asked her how she has evolved since she began her career 15 years ago. "Too soon to say. It feels like yesterday to me," she said. "I don't know anything. I'm more confused now than I've ever been in my life, but I have more faith than ever."

Badu does things that 40-year-old women don't often do — like appear naked in music videos. The story of shooting the video for "Window Seat" was the story that fully endeared her to a crowd already hanging on her every word. "I was holding my stomach in so tight [riotous laughter] that I wasn't even singing. With each step I was trying to tighten my calf [she's laughing as hard as we are]. It's amazing what we think about in this kind of moment. I'm not thinking about the police," she says. What she was thinking about was getting her clothes back on.

"The van is supposed to pull right up — and I know that cause we were in the car talking about it. And I heard the man say, specifically, 'The van's gonna be right there.' And so we finish, fade to black, and he goes, 'Done!' I'm running. This way, toward the van, naked," she says. "But the van is over there. And the sliding door for the van is not on the side that I'm running to. So I'm running around." She got up and ran around the couch she'd been sitting on, all hunched over, still chuckling. Her audience completely lost it.

"It was horrible. I think it may have been the worst thing I ever — [the] way I felt while I was doing something I was scared to do. Like, this is not right," she said. "Why has God forsaken me?"

Telling this story, Badu used the word "we," drawing us close to her: "It's amazing what we think about in this kind of moment." She said her video was performance art in the spirit of Josephine Baker or Nina Simone or John Lennon, and that she was trying to pull focus to groupthink. Defining the term, she named Irving Janis, the researcher who coined it, and used the example of Jesus and Barabbas. This is a lofty "we": we who see our little flaws, we who get naked anyway, we who make art that receives loud and divergent responses.

"There were people who wanted me in jail," she said. "There were people who wanted to bulldoze my albums. All of those reactions were the right one, because the idea of art is to create dialogue."

What does Red Bull — a company that sells an energy drink — want with her? As a public figure, she promises that being kind of weird doesn't mean you'll be cast out. She explicitly said that on Tuesday: "Don't live anybody else's dreams but yours. And two wrongs don't make a right, but it'll damn sure get your money." If a drink could make that come true, we'd all buy a case a week.

And what does Erykah want with us? There's the nice answer: "It's actually a very selfish act, creating. When I'm creating I'm trying to heal. I'm trying to feel good, feel better. When it reaches y'all — that's why I stayed in the music business. I appreciate it." There's the cash — after all, she's got kids. "They're one of the reasons I do what I do," she said. "So that they can continue to live the way they live."

And there's the truth. Which is out of her control, too. "The hard reality is that, even though you give birth to it — human or music — it still doesn't belong to you. It's something you have to nurture and mold but it doesn't belong to you," she said. "It's some big girl shit. It really is. You have to let stuff go. It's hard."

Last week, a new Beyonce debuted a new song, "Standing on the Sun," in an online advertisement for the clothing company H&M. In the 90-second ad, she models bikinis while staring into the camera, dancing, splashing in the water and lip-synching the song. Apart from two bits of text on screen identifying the clothing maker, it looks like a Beyonce video. So does another commercial, released a couple of weeks earlier, that introduced the song "Grown Woman": In between sips of Pepsi, Beyonce dances with multiple mirror images of herself, dressed in outfits from her previous videos.

This isn't the first time a pop star has introduced a new song in an advertisement, but as with nearly everything Beyonce has done recently — gestate and bear a child, perform at President Obama's inauguration and at the Super Bowl, present an awkwardly assembled home video — it has felt like news, and fodder for endless discussion online.

"There's as much Beyonce as you can take," NPR Music's pop critic Ann Powers tells Morning Edition's David Greene. It's not unusual, that idea of using celebrity to sell a product. "In the early days," Powers says, "fan magazines were invented so that products could be pushed through the images of very early movie stars. Like Mary Pickford, for example: Her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks was the early 20th century version of Beyonce and Jay-Z."

You may think she's great; you may think she's overexposed, but there's no denying: Today, Beyonce stands alone in the pop landscape.

"One of the things about Beyonce's saturation of every moment of our lives is that she is largely in control of it," Powers says, "which makes her very different than many tabloid stars. The nature of tabloid media is that it's not in the star's control. We think of Britney Spears, that moment years ago when she shaved her head. Beyonce has almost completely taken command of her representation in these media, which is extremely unusual."

That control, and her drive for perfection, which led, indirectly, to both the inauguration controversy and the Super Bowl spectacular, means that we scrutinize her differently. "I do feel that what we're watching, we might call it The Beyonce Experiment," Powers says. "She wants to be A-class, No. 1 in critics' eyes. She wants to sell the most, and she wants to influence the culture. I'm interested to see how far she can take it. Plus, her new song is bangin'."

New York rapper Roc Marciano, riding a wave of acclaim for his second solo album, Reloaded, is moving into a position usually awarded to musicians with platinum plaques on their walls. The work he's produced over the course of his career, while critically respected, hasn't resulted in huge sales, but his opinion is valued enough that a small Virginia label sought him out. Roc has recently taken the position of Vice President of A&R for Man Bites Dog Records and is now responsible for quality control and the signing of new acts.

I spoke to Roc and Man Bites Dog founder Ryan "RML" Lynch earlier this month about his new role, one in which he seems to have an angel on each shoulder: the businessman trying to move product on the left, and, on the right, the passionate artist who says "I'm still trying to make music like I'm not worried about money."

He's not going in cold, having A&Red his own albums and come up with two of the best hip-hop A&R guys ever, Schott Free and Matty C. He says he learned from them, but he's still learning.

"There might be things that are not my taste necessarily, but it may be someone else's, and I can see the value in it," Roc says. "I always have to see the vision. And a vision of an artist isn't always just his music. Sometimes it's a complete package. Sometimes the music isn't as strong as how marketable a person is."

Marketability is, as ever, a huge consideration for labels when deciding which artists to bet on. A&Rs routinely ask musicians to send YouTube clips as well as — in some cases instead of — audio files, and music videos on the streaming service have been responsible for jump-starting the careers of a few prominent rappers in the past couple years.

After putting out two mixtapes that didn't do much for him, last March Chief Keef released a song and music video (over 20 million views and counting) that, less than a year later, landed him a three-album deal worth $6 million with Interscope. Trinidad James signed with Def Jam for an unconfirmed $2 million after his debut single "All Gold Everything" took the internet by storm. There was also Kreayshawn's deal with Columbia back in 2011, rumored to be worth $1 million, which stemmed from her sensation "Gucci Gucci."

"If something has a million views, there's some interest there, so a businessman who's thinking numbers is definitely going to pay attention to that," Roc says. "Take Chief Keef for instance, you can't ignore that. You gotta go sign him and get in business with him. You just gonna let this man make all his money without you? You'd rather go into partnership with him."

A demonstrated audience provokes a bidding war in the industry, which usually results in a better deal for the musician at its center. In 2009, Drake got a $2 million advance, a bigger share of his profits and an unusual amount of creative control. But this was after three widely-heard mixtapes, the careful construction of a rabid fanbase and one bona fide hit. Music executives are giving serious consideration, and serious cash, to musicians with a shorter and shorter track record. And the hip-hop community isn't sure the recent signees are worth the seven-figure deals.

In his new position, Roc has to weigh those who are selling at the moment against those who might have staying power. The fast money and the slow money. The stuff he feels in his gut and the stuff that's already working.

"People are trying to keep their jobs — that's how I look at it. So they sign these guys because people like them. You don't necessarily have to be a great artist for people to like you. Sometimes people just like the person and that's OK," he says. He's also thinking about why people like what they like.

"The internet allows you to get so close to people. You can see a dude chilling at home with his girlfriend. You can see his family life," says Roc. "People just take a liking to certain artists. They just like these characters. They like Trinidad James, they like Riff Raff."

Roc sounds hard-nosed, but not like he plans to play it safe every day. Northern California-based rapper Lil B, though unconventional by some people's standards, is an artist whom Roc says displays qualities that could convince him to take a risk.

"A lot of people think that's wildin' over the top, but me, I see the brilliance in that," he says. "I'd sign something like that because he's brave."

Roc and Man Bites Dog founder RML want to sign artists who can bring in the most return. I asked them what's more important to their jobs right now: talent or marketability?

"The talent comes first. That's more important to me. The talent lasts," Roc says. "I will say though, if the talent's there, you look at that second one," says RML. "You could have all the talent in the world, but can't sell a single record."

And selling records is and always will be the ultimate goal of most any record label — a goal that requires long and unusual hours. This creates another consideration for Roc and RML as they mull over potential signees.

"You want someone you can get along with. Because you're going to be stuck together in a car at some point," RML said. "Stuff is going to happen. And when that stuff happens, if you can be with an individual who remains calm, doesn't have a big ego — I think everyone wants to business with someone like that." Roc agrees. "I just pride myself on doing business with good people," he says. "If a person's talented, but they're a d—-head, it's not going to matter. Who wants to be around a clown?"

Man Bites Dog is home to artists like Copywrite, Killah Priest and Vast Aire — all of whom carry a gritty, old-school hip-hop sound similar to that of Roc. In an interview last year, RML told We Goin In "the vision was to make classic records that reflected a certain time period in hip-hop." It's really no surprise that he thinks Roc can steer the label in that direction, or that his music fits nicely into that mix.

"He has an ear for classic music," RML says. "That's a good person to put into a guiding position for what we're doing."

Roc will release his next album, Marci Beaucoup, under the Man Bites Dog imprint this summer. It includes verses from Action Bronson, Ka and Freeway — visual storytellers all. "I just want to bring great music to the table that's critically acclaimed," he says. "I look for passion. I think that's the way to see through it all."