"What hit me most about hearing the news of Michael Jackson dying was only then I realized just how much he meant to me, how much his music was such a part of my life," confided my friend Eboness from New York by phone on Thursday evening, just hours after the shocking news of the pop star's passing had clogged all channels of communication. 

One of the many friends and acquaintances who seemed compelled to reach out and talk MJ on Thursday and in the days since, Eboness is 38 and lives in Harlem. Like so many people out there, she grew up on Jackson's music.

She said she and her mom had just come from 125th Street, where a growing crowd was gathering en masse outside the Apollo Theater to spontaneously mourn alongside total strangers in the shared sadness. As Jackson's music boomed from speakers up high, the teary eyed crowd below, with sunken shoulders, sang along to every lyric.

Thursday afternoon's shocking news of MJ passing caught everyone off guard it seemed. When I got that first text on my phone sometime after 3pm from my friend Timi D... which read "Michael Jackson just died???" I thought that maybe it was some of kind of prank or inside joke about the oft mocked star. Maybe it had something to do with his string of upcoming UK concert dates, I theorized as my Google search quickly confirmed the tragic news, with reports citing either the LA Times who broke the story or leading gossip news site TMZ that simultaneously reported on the same story. And when I next logged on to my email, my inbox was overflowing with messages with MJ's name in the subject box. I then clicked on the Amoeblog, where I saw that Whitmore had just posted the news. That was about 3:15 or 3:20 pm on Thursday; by then the news had already spread like wildfire via news and gossip sites and of course via Twitter, Facebook, and every other social network.

1) DOOM Born Like This (Lex)

2) Jadakiss The Last Kiss (Roc-A-Fella)

3) Aceyalone Aceyalone & The Lonely Ones (Decon) 

4) eLZhi Witness My Growth (Fat Beats)

5) UGK UGK 4 Life (Jive)

DOOM, the artist formerly known as MF DOOM, continues to sell well at each Amoeba Music store with his latest album Born Like This on Lex. Last week he was #1 at Amoeba Hollywood, two weeks ago #2 at Amoeba San Francisco, and this week the masked mic master is number one at the Berkeley store, and deservedly so. It's a great album that demands repeated listens! And number two at the Telegraph Ave store this week is the brand release from Jadakiss, The Last Kiss on Roc-a-Fella. If there ever was a cameo-laden, star-studded rap release, this is it. Dizzam, does it have a lot of guests! Jadakiss has eye-catching, big name stars to collaborate with on the 18 track CD -- he only has three tracks to himself! Guests include Lil Wayne, Nas, Mary J. Blige, Young Jeezy, Styles P, Pharrell, Ghostface Killah & Raekwon, Ne-Yo, and Faith Evans, to name but some. Evans, the singer and widow of Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace, appropriately appears on "Letter To B.I.G.," a truly touching tribute to the late, great Biggie Smalls that is also found on the recently released soundtrack to film B.I.G. biopic Notorious.

The new year is already off to a good start with lots of exciting brand new material dropping, or about to drop, such as P.O.S. (the unique Minneapolis Rhymesayers' emcee with the punk rock past), who will be releasing his anticipated new album Never Better on Rhymesayers Entertainment in two weeks (in Amoeba Music on Feb 3rd). I have only heard snippets off of the album so far, but they sound as good as I expected. The record was reportedly entirely written by P.O.S. while in a moving car and hence, I am told, it conjures "get-away cars, racing chariots, the pursuit of sirens, and the occasional rueful nighttime drive."  I believe it based on his powerful past output.

P.O.S.'s last album, 2006's Audition, also on Rhymesayers, was one of the most innovative hip-hop albums of that year and perfectly melded the urgent energy and sonic assault of my two favorite genres, hip-hop and punk rock. Not too surprisingly, then, P.O.S. (or Stef, as they call him at the dinner table) has been invited on the Vans Warped Tour in the past, and will be on the road once again this summer for the 2009 Warped Tour. He is always a crowd favorite.

In the meantime the artist will be doing his own national solo tour starting next month in support of Never Better, with Cali dates in the first week of the tour, including a show at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill on Monday, Feb 9th and the following night, Tuesday, Feb 10th, in LA at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood. Expect an Amoeblog interview with the artist that same week. Scroll down to end of article to hear Never Better's first single, "Goodbye."

In a creepy crime similar to an incident that happened to the late Mac Dre's resting place three years ago when the slain Vallejo rapper's headstone was stolen, the gravestone of former Joy Division front man Ian Curtis was stolen sometime between yesterday and this morning from the Macclesfield Cemetery in Cheshire, England.

As reported earlier today by the BBC, "Detectives said the stone, which has the inscription "Ian Curtis 18 -5 -80" and the words "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was taken...There is no CCTV in the area and there are no apparent leads as to who is responsible for the theft."

The local authorities went on to speculate that the recent surge in interest in the singer might have led to the unusual theft. Last year's biopic on the singer, Control, and the documentary, Joy Division, which was released earlier this year, have both undoubtedly led to an increase in interest in the talented Curtis, who hung himself in the kitchen of his nearby Macclesfield home back in May 1980 when he was 23. Cheshire police have pleaded with anyone who has information to contact them.

This incident brings to mind both the theft of Jim Morrison's headstone from P’re Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 1990, and the aforementioned Andre (Mac Dre) Hicks graveside robbery from Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery in 2005.  Despite the fact that a large reward was posted for the recovery of Mac Dre's headstone (and a beat-down promised if the perp was ever caught), the headstone was never recovered. Eventually it was replaced with a new one that was tightly secured.

Love him or hate him, Lil Wayne (aka Weezy) is the man of the moment with his anticipated new album, Tha Carter III (Cash Money/Universal) released earlier this week which broke sales records - selling close to half a million units on the day of its release. And with an approximated million copies sold within the first week - it is guaranteed to be the number one Billboard pop chart  topper. Undoubtedly the album will also go on to become one of the top selling releases of 2008. 

"It's doing really well here. It got a whole bunch of hype of course. But what is interesting to me is the diversity of Lil Wayne fans," reports Marques Newson from the hip-hop department at the Amoeba Music Hollywood store. "I was on the register Tuesday, the release date of the new CD, and there was literally every type of person buying it, every race and age you can think of.  Not just young guys like you might think...but like 40 or 50 year old white women or 60 year old black women."  

Speaking of age, what is most significant about Lil Wayne, a long established rap star  who just recently scored his first pop hit with "Lollipop," is that he is only 25 years old but has been putting it down in the rap game since he hooked up with the Cash Money Records crew when just a teenager.  Besides Lil Wayne's regular full length releases (it's three years since his last official album Tha Carter II) and the countless cameos he makes on other projects, there are a ton of mix CDs featuring his music, including DJ EFX (not to be confused with Raul "DJ EFX" Recinos -- veteran Bay Area hip-hop/house/ tribal/electronic DJ/producer), who recently dropped the popular Before The Carter Vol. 2.  The mixtape only helped fuel interest in the artist's official June 10th release that is clearly geared for crossover pop success with such high-profile collaborators as Jay-Z.

On top of all this, Lil Wayne recently wrapped up filming a part as a student-athlete in the forthcoming movie The Patriots with Forest Whitaker. So Dwayne Michael Carter (his real name) looks set to be a huge, huge star. Of course, the far-from-humble Dwayne has been calling himself "the best rapper alive" for quite a while already which, note, is one of the reasons he causes so much ire in others. Another reason he gets hated on in hip-hop circles is that the often clearly buzzed Weezy (cough syrup is one of his favorite poisons, as well as weed and E) will utter, or rather slur, some of the dumbest, most unprofessional things at the most inappropriate times (i.e, in recorded interviews), like when he recently told Foundation magazine that mix-tape DJs suck ("Fuck you if you are a mix tape DJ" and "I created the mix tape game" were two of his quotes).