This New Orleans MC (and former Lil Wayne protégé) has celebrated his move to a new label by darkening up his trademark weed-rap, backing his hazy musings with gritty, paranoid production that's more New York than NoLa. Curren$y's topics — cars, kush, and cash — are familiar and repetitive, but his intricate, stream-of-consciousness narratives come with varied flows. Sample-dicer Alchemist is the maestro here, lacing Covert Coup with tumbling chops of obscure soul and dusty space-funk. It's the perfect backdrop for the rapper's stoner humor ("Patty cake, patty cake/I'm baked my man") and for quality cameos from the freshly paroled Prodigy and blog darling Freddie Gibbs. Straight edge listeners won't be disappointed, either

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“Helen Wheels”

A rollicking good-time hard rocker, "Helen Wheels" was not about a woman but about Paul McCartney's Land Rover, the anthemic chorus voicing the vehicle's reckless joy as "she" took to the road. The song was added to the U.S. version of Band on the Run but was issued only as a single in McCartney's native U.K. "I like that because it's a British road song and there's not many of those around," said McCartney. "It's always Route 66. But Carlisle? How many songs have got Carlisle in them?"