It's about rhythms and samples and technology, some hot-shit combination of which whispers the bomb. Hip-hop – the virtues of its best MCs notwithstanding – has proved the most significant means of pop-record production since the Beatles and George Martin because of the actual music that its methods yield. And ever since DJ Kool Herc set a needle down on the juiciest break in some old disco song, that music has been all about entering people's bloodstreams on contact.

That's the message producer Sean "Puffy" Combs keeps giving the LOX on Money, Power and Respect. It's a hardcore hip-hop album leavened by the party principle, the kind of hip-hop that – instead of obsessing on ruffneck algebra – just feels, as James Brown said, good.

In what has become one of massmarket hip-hop's familiar moves, the LOX – three ambitious rappers from Yonkers, New York, called Jadakiss, Sheek and Styles – present themselves in the thick of things, in the heart of rap central. As they relate in their music or on their album sleeve, Mary J. Blige discovered them, and they eventually recorded "We'll Always Love Big Poppa" (their sweet elegy for the Notorious B.I.G. from last year, which also appears on this album); they've also guested on other big hits, from Puffy, Mase and even the late B.I.G. himself. Now their debut drops them squarely on the scene, which is to say, the radio.

The LOX have paid close attention to HRH Puffy, last year's king of the pop universe, who (although he gets a tad more respect than M.C. Hammer) has always suffered at the hands of samplephobes and hip-hop purists. There's an apparent artistic tension between Combs and this East Coast underground crew – they've said in interviews that they're not your typical Bad Boy act – but that conflict between artists and producer has, in fact, yielded a smart album. The LOX simultaneously worry about and envy the byproducts of success – on "If You Think I'm Jiggy," they brilliantly appropriate the threatened-playboy melody of Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" as they fret about pulling girls who expect "Prada and Escada." And the LOX don't kid themselves that as sales increase, respect often decreases.

But at the same time, Puffy and Puffy-blessed producers keep things pop-y or soulful or dance-minded or whatever the music needs. The LOX thread their concerns through delicious master jams such as "Get This $," in which Puffy and co-producer J-Dub are at large with a bit of the Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing," and "Can't Stop, Won't Stop," in which Puffy and Co. are equally geniuslike with Spoonie Gee and one of his impossibly elastic party beats. It's whatever-works hip-hop, carried off in the same spirit that Puffy resurrects David Bowie or the Police for their bad bass lines.

That mongrel aesthetic has been seized and fostered with wild creativity by club and electronic artists the world over during the past decade. Its value is not lost on Armand Van Helden. Van Helden is an internationally known Boston-born DJ and club maven who is right now also the hottest remixer in the business. His first solo album, Enter the Meat Market (recorded under the name Armand Van Helden's Sampleslaya), is what happens when you immerse a dance producer in hip-hop rhythms.

A wacked-out little voice at the beginning of Van Helden's album plainly introduces Enter the Meat Market as a collection for "all the heads that represent the outside of hip-hop." Van Helden is utterly unconcerned with rhyming; instead, he is interested in the particular kind of rhythm-based instrumental music he can coax out of his fond memories of old house-party rap. He's scarily good at the execution of his notions. Although he samples everyone from A Tribe Called Quest and Erick Sermon to Los Angeles popjazzbo Jeff Lorber, he taps them not as ways to remind listeners of his favorite passages but as sly compositional gambits; he doesn't call himself Sampleslaya for nothing. On "Hot Butter," this collection's highlight and a future dance classic, he layers a few unknowable words about butter and popcorn against sensuous repetitions of the affirmation uh-uh-uh and what sounds like a slightly decrepit rap crew cheering, "You got it, you got it." Elsewhere, the track balances a synth part that could have come from a sixties gameshow soundtrack against laid-back, acoustic-toned drumming. The samples are recognizable (Q-Tip, Eric B. and Rakim, Gang Starr), but unlike Puffy's, they're not meant to be nostalgic. Instead, "Hot Butter" turns hip-hop nuttiness – a sense of humor that has long informed the very construction of the music – into a sizzling étude.

Van Helden comes out of house, the most club-specific dance style of the last twenty years, with its unchecked bass lines, aversion to sophisticated pop textures and endless tolerance for endless repetitions. Enter the Meat Market is very purely that dance sensibility applied to historic hip-hop. It can be an uneasy marriage when Van Helden takes his rap-isms too far; his shout-outs to the boroughs of New York on "Blakpeoplez" are somewhat unconvincing. Yet on tracks like "Daaboodaa Munks," with its foregrounded harp pings, and "Hood Movie Stars," with its dusty parade of ghetto celebrities, or the terrific "Six Minutes of Funk," Van Helden's unerring sense of sound and friction – and just plain crowd-pleasing break beats – make for music that really does something to a room. It starts a party. Puffy would understand. (RS 781)

JAMES HUNER