Fast-rising Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. does lots of things well. He can flow on a track, produce a beat, spin a yarn and explicate the racial politics and semantic peculiarities of his stage name, in the quick of just a few lines: "What's a K.R.I.T.?/They think it's jigaboo/Why would I minstrel you?/You don't seem them dots?/It’s an acronym/Bitch, I thought you knew?" K.R.I.T.’s guest-packed, largely self-produced latest mixtape (his Def Jam debut is on the way) is a 22-song primer on his casual excellence. Over swank, soul-flavored beats, K.R.I.T. brags about his good reviews and trumpets his southern pride. ("While you was Kid N Playing/I was UGK-ing," he crows.) But it’s his profundity the humanism and vulnerability that he tucks into his rhymes that set him apart. "Too real to beg for meals/too proud to beg for help," he raps in the O.G. reminiscence "4 tha 1's." "I know about the slums and hard times/Folks and soup lines."

Listen to "Grippin' On The Wood":

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“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.