Hip Hop

The young men are barely awake, stumbling into a van outside their Albuquerque hotel for a quick 8 a.m. road trip. The radio is already blaring. "It's a little early for the metal, all right, dude?" growls Johnny 3 Tears from the backseat, slouching in his aviator shades with a tall cup of coffee. He lights a cigarette. Morning has broken for the band Hollywood Undead, as three of its vocalists ride toward the local "new rock alternative" FM station, ready to talk up that night's concert and "Swan Songs," their debut album of anxious hip-hop and rock, just certified gold with sales of 500,000.

Jay-Z "The Blueprint 3" (Roc Nation) Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4) It's tough for hip-hop stars to age well. Once they become celebrities living in mansions and starring in family movies, street cred is usually the first thing to go. Just ask Ice Cube. Longevity just wasn't built into the hip-hop lifestyle, with its premium on youthful swagger, street tales and fast turnover. But Jay-Z, who turns 40 in December, asserts that he's the exception on his 11th studio album, "The Blueprint 3" (Roc Nation)

Echo Park resident Joseph Lee doesn't necessarily look like the leader of a musical movement. Blanketed in thug-like tattoos, a menacing goatee and often photographed in bandanna and Tupac Shakur tee, Lee could easily pass for a long-lost member of Cypress Hill. Yet under the sobriquet Deadlee, Lee is arguably Los Angeles' most prominent gay rapper, having helped organized the first national "homo-hop tour."

At Low End Theory, a weekly club night for experimental hip-hop and electronica artists at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights, there is one square foot of standing room where the music sounds perfect. To get there, patrons must climb a stairwell that opens onto a bleak stretch of Broadway Avenue, be frisked by a bouncer, proceed to the middle of the dance floor, which is almost always humid with body heat, then walk exactly 12 feet back from the stage and wait for the bass. "We wired the P.A. setup so that's the spot where the 20hz frequency is strongest," said Kevin Marques Moo, a record label owner and DJ who co-founded Low End Theory three years ago. He pointed to the dance floor and grinned.

His last album soared to the top of the charts, selling more than 1 million copies in a single week. He won multiple awards at this year's Grammy ceremony, and he's become one of the most popular touring acts working today. But hip-hop artist Lil Wayne's decision Thursday to plead guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon in New York likely could bring a halt to the New Orleans rapper's recent professional momentum. Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter, is expected to receive one year in prison, according to a spokeswoman for the New York district attorney's office.

Passenger heroes: An article in Thursday's Section A about hip-hop musician Chris Llewellyn and other passengers on an L.A.-bound flight who subdued a man claiming to have a bomb said the plane was a Boeing 757. It was a Boeing 767-400 series.

Lil Wayne winning album of the year? That wouldn't just be a surprise, it would be a Grammy landmark considering that most of the rapper's catalog isn't appropriate for prime time, and the ceremony didn't even have a best rap album category until 1996. What follows is a brief look at how hip-hop has fared in the Grammys' top contests. 1991: MC Hammer's "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em" becomes the first hip-hop record to garner an album of the year nomination, one of five Grammy nods for the light-footed rapper.

Drawn to the lavish dance numbers in films from India, or just bored with their gym workouts, people are flocking to Bollywood-style dance classes that mix Indian folk dances with hip-hop moves. And the U.S. exercise industry is taking notice. Long enjoyed by young people of Indian descent, and common in big cities on the coasts, Bollywood-style classes are popping up in regions of the country where Indian cinema is new and there aren't as many people of Indian descent. Fans of Bollywood -- an informal term for Hindi-language films, often romantic musicals -- want formal instruction in its foot-stomping dance numbers that put folk moves and hip swings to pop beats.

Hamish Linklater cuts a winningly dweebish figure as the overwrought title character of Michael Sargent's "The Projectionist," an eccentric pulp drama set in the early '80s in one of the shabbier second-run cinemas on Hollywood Boulevard and populated with a gallery of kooks whose dreams appear to have been not just broken but smashed to smithereens. Yet the real star here is the Kirk Douglas Theatre itself, where the play is performed in the lobby of this former movie house, whose retro concession stand and ticket booth seem made to order.

Soulja Boy Tell'em harbors no ill will toward his haters. Not even the ones who since his 2007 debut album, "Souljaboytellem.com," have been loudly, and with almost numbing constancy, calling for the death of the rapper-producer's career. He incurred the wrath of an angry hip-hop nation after the meteoric success of his breakthrough single, "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," a by turns menacing and minimalist pop confection that seemed to capture the zeitgeist two year ago. It spent eight weeks atop the national singles chart, resulting in 5.5 million digital downloads and 3 million ring tone sales.