Y'know, like "Nightline." In September, with correspondent Robert Krulwich mustering an air of only slightly feigned guilelessness on the mic, MC Ted Koppel's show conducted a painstaking three-night investigation of hip-hop culture, eventually concluding that it makes some very nice bank for a great many people, and (thus) is definitely important, if a little scary and irresponsible.

Then there's Newsweek, which got out the extra-extra-broad brush for the recent cover package, "Battle for the Soul of Hip-Hop," about how today's rap is so violent, misogynistic and materialistic that even some rappers find it troubling. The "Battle" was a celebrity death match pitting Mos Def -- fast becoming hip-hop's most vocal neoconservative -- against Eminem, enemy of all that is good, and Cash Money's iced-down Millionaires. The subtext, roughly, was that because the music reaches a wide, eager and young audience that rock can only dream about, hip-hop's problems are everybody's problems. Also, "booty videos" are bad. Oh, so bad.

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The record's defining moment is probably Beck's contribution, the "amateur night at the Miami bass bar" workout "Boyz," a limp sequel to the "Kraftwerk-meets-Kraft-cheese" funk of Midnite Vultures' "Get Real Paid." Over a skeletal rhythm track, Beck taps out prefab drum fills, Furious Five keyboard arpeggios and canned klaxon sound effects, whispering about "Boyz ... pushing million-dollar buttons ... turning jams up to 11." He sounds as if he's turned on by his own detachment from the process, by the idea of phoning it in, and treats the Groovebox like a labor-saving device; it funks so we don't have to.

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1. Five different people are filming Koala's performance on teeny handheld camcorders. The turntablism movement documents itself obsessively; this equalizes the tension between the genre's improvisational aspects (cutting records back and forth wildly against the needle) and its programmed ones (the carefully pre-planned selection of records that goes into a DJ set). After waiting outside in a line that stretched all the way to Crunch Fitness around the corner, I am part of the fourth or fifth wave of spectators allowed into the store. I have a lousy sight line to Koala's turntables, but I'm able to watch his hands on the screen of a nearby Sharp Viewcam.

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Predictably, Apple's record has already drawn cheap shots and low blows for all the Guinness Book-ready verbiage on its cover, but -- here goes -- "When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and if You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right" is Apple as a "Shadowboxer" turned heavyweight, the pugilist at her best. Don't call it a comeback.

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"Lost in Space/Black Elvis" is Keith's star turn, self-produced but released by a major label, packed with music-industry jokes and rants about the price of fame. But it's not a pop move by any yardstick -- Keith's last album featured a song called "No Chorus," and this whole record could be called "No Hook." Aside from the improbably lovely almost-ballad "Supergalactic Lover" (Keith as a project-dwelling ladies' man driving a "monkey-green ragtop Seville") and the funky "Master of the Game" (featuring the vocodered lilt of late, legendary Zapp frontman Roger Troutman, the missing link between P-Funk and Daft Punk), these songs are as unmemorable as the cash-in junk Keith cut with indie-poppers Getaway Cruiser.

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Between then and now, the absurdly prolific Paradinas -- "5-Ziq," pronounced "mu-zeek," is just one of his many handles -- has released records as Slag Boom Van Loon, Tusken Raiders and Kid Spatula, and remixed musicians like Bjvrk, Whale and Mogwai. But on listening to 5-Ziq's fifth long-player, the forbiddingly weird "Royal Astronomy," I'm still not convinced Paradinas didn't spend the last 16 months marooned on an asteroid, breathing nothing but classical gas. Or maybe that's Glass: A lot of the clunky chamber music that dominates "Astronomy" echoes minimalist Philip's think-piece score for the film "Koyaanisqatsi," or the austere, dopey accompaniment that his cartoon avatar provided for South Park's nondenominational Christmas pageant. To paraphrase Chuck D, this 5-Ziq weighs a ton.

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According to the warning sticker on the cover of "Jet Generation," the band's third U.S. release, the record is the loudest ever made, precision-mastered to fry the indie-rock nation's tender cochleae. My home stereo doesn't measure decibels, so I'm not able to quantitatively verify that boast. But it sure as hell feels loud: Guitar Wolf work with that strain of pure, essentially unbearable volume that makes the nerves in your fingertips crackle.

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Can's music was another story -- alien, kinetic, scary, as rhythmically compulsive as James Brown's "Sex Machine" or the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray," spawned in hash-hazed all-night recording sessions and alchemized with dimension-warping tape edits. Drummer Jaki Leibezeit practically built a fort behind his kit, while the rest of the band surged from Miles Davis modes to cat-scratchy funk to pre-Sonic Youth sound sculpture, producing a primal racket that bubbled up between the beats like magma through undersea faults. Lost somewhere in the mix, a singer -- first the African-American Malcolm Mooney, then Suzuki, a Japanese street performer who sang in English -- crooned or bellowed indistinct mantras.

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The "Felicity" soundtrack is Jewel-free, but it's still all solace, all the time, from Heather Nova's "Heart and Shoulder" (that's "shoulder" as in "to cry on") to Aretha Franklin's version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Appropriately, most of these songs originally underscored shots of Felicity lost in blurred human traffic on the streets of New York, or wordless montages of her and her dormmates helping each other, like, make it through.

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Waits, of course, is an Eyeball Kid made good, an archetypal rock eccentric who has slouched and stumbled his way to an improbable kind of eminence. "Mule Variations" is Waits' 13th proper solo album, his first since 1992's "Bone Machine." He was on Island then; he's on the SoCal punk imprint Epitaph now, presumably free to explore his sonic obsessions, boiler-room rhythms, field-recorded chain-gang calls and battle-stripped jazz and blues without sweating the bottom line.

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So it's a shame that all she does with it is cop a platitude. "Fat Boy" is a tenderly observed Shawn Colvin moment, "Barcelona" (featuring the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, apparently a longtime friend, on bass) a very Joni postcard from the edge. And on "Jupiter," Jewel's nonverbal vocals follow the gulping beat of a tabla, and it's as slinky as the breakdown from TLC's "Creep." But Jewel spends most of "Spirit" tripping over her good intentions like an out-of-her-depth middle child, trying to heal the world with Shoebox Greetings. "If I could tell the world just one thing," she almost whispers at the beginning of "Hands," "it would be 'We're all OK.'" Sappy, sure. But the way she sings it, you almost won't mind.

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