Click to listen to Spank Rock's 'Everything Is Boring And Everyone Is A Fucking Liar'

Early on his new album, this Baltimore rapper name-checks scholar Cornel West – just after roughly a half- dozen lines about dry-humping over a speaker cabinet. Duality is Spank Rock’s genius on a hook-loaded, avant-garde dance record that admits what’s on its mind: sex, dancing, failing schools, a "post-black personality crisis," partying, war and sex. (Yes, he's like many of us.) He's a provocateur à la Odd Future’s Tyler, the Creator – "Shake it till my dick turn racist," he instructs in "Race Riot." But if there's a guiding spirit here, it's 1980s Prince: wildly funky pop music led by an impressive creative hard-on. 

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“Ambling Alp”

The "Ambling Alp" was the nickname of the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Primo Carnera. Though the song is named after the Italian-born 1930s heavyweight champion, Yeasayer are actually paying tribute to boxing legend Joe Louis with this first-person psychedelic dance-rock tune. “I was always interested in writing a song that had boxing mythology in it,” Yeasayer’s Chris Keating said. “It’s pretty fascinating: There were so many amazing characters, and it was so closely entwined with 20th century history.” Yeaseyer also invokes German champ Max Schmeling and hints at the historical significance placed on the historic bouts between the Nazi-era boxer and the African-American Louis.