When a rapper's cd booklet includes plugs for his upcoming movies instead of for his other albums, you have every right to suspect that he has put his music career on the back turntable. But on the eleventh record of his amazingly consistent twenty-year career, LL Cool J has as much swaggering presence as ever. His greatest subject matter is himself: "No need for ghostwriters/Every year I get tighter." And if none of the tracks here have the macho menace of his 2003 appearance on J. Lo's Number One "All I Have," he sounds completely up-to-date, thanks largely to Timbaland producing half of The DEFinition. There's nothing new about a track such as "Apple Cobbler" — the bloopity beats sound like any number of Missy Elliott tunes, and LL's lascivious food metaphors date back to his 1990 track "Milky Cereal" — but the Cool J candy is as tasty as ever.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."