Amoeba Music Hollywood Weekly Hip-Hop Top Five Chart: 12:24:10

1) Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam)
2) Nicki Minaj Pink Friday (Cash Money/Universal)
3) Diddy-Dirty Money Last Train To Paris (Bad Boy Records / Interscope)
4) Cee Lo Green The Lady Killer (Elektra Records)
5) Curren$y Pilot Talk II (Def Jam)
Thanks to Ray Ricky Rivera at Amoeba Hollywood for this week's Hip-Hop Top Five chart at the Los Angeles Amoeba store. It includes many of the recent new releases that have been doing well at the other two Amoebas and beyond: Kanye West, Cee Lo Green, Nicki Minaj, and Curren$y. It also includes the brand new DIddy-Dirty Money album, Last Train To Paris, which the artist/rap impresario once known as Puff Daddy said took three years to make and described its sound as "electro-hip-hop-soul funk." In a press release, Diddy said that for this more dance club sounding album he was influenced "by being in the dance music world and doing stuff with Felix da Housecat, Erick Morillo, Deep Dish, DJ Hell and being in Ibiza and DC10," in reference to the big nightclub on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Despite themselves, many Diddy haters will find this album infectious since it is filled with irresistibly catchy choruses. Of course, being the wise overseer / producer he is, Diddy only did part of the real work on this album; he shrewdly enlisted the talents of others to accomplish his musical goals.



Monkey on the D$ck’s image of to be-thonged girls with bullet braces and war helmets facing a large, irradiating, disembodied chimpanzee visage is on a level of bizarreness all by itself. Befitting the rapper’s stature, the album is itself incredibly short – just 21 minutes long and, as with many of Cash Money’s independent-era records, sounds like it was recorded in a single, lazy afternoon. The album's opener, “Manny Fresh (Cash Money Style)” doesn’t even feature her. There’s also a radio version of “Monkey on the D$ck,” another bounce classic, “Charlie Whop!!,” the wordless “Soldier Chant,” and “Magnolia $horty” (featuring BG and Juvenile).


