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Last year, Diddy donned the Puff Daddy moniker once more for the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, a mobile mega-concert looking back at the biggest hip-hop label ever. Of the 52-song setlist, Diddy performed the first seven and returned to feature on six more. Both New York City dates sold out within seven minutes.

Listening to any one of these songs is sufficient to determine whether you'll enjoy the album, which doesn't necessarily mean that they all sound the same. Rather, Lana Del Rey is the holder of the music industry's most credible claim to a singular identity, a characteristic that has the win-win effect of repulsing dummies and raising her to veneration beyond comparison in the eyes of the faithful. The effect is similar to finding that entirely unknown artist who was somehow communicating your exact emotional state, but the artist happens to be internationally recognized and the you've now spent years in the headspace.

Lulu is back, baby! To be completely honest, I haven't listened to much of Vega's 21st century work, so it may in fact have been 2007's Station that was back when Lou Reed and Metallica blessed us with the decade's most maligned record. In any event, Alan Vega died last year, obligating at least one good faith listen to his first posthumous release.

All dub techno sounds the same, yes, but only some of it is good. It’s a curious scene; its origins and heydey alike were practically the exclusive domain of two dudes, Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. Across several aliases (Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound, and most centrally Basic Channel) they both invented and spearheaded the exploration of the genre, perhaps the purest representation of the utterly wild frontier available to electronic musicians in the 90’s.

My first draft of this was real angry, mostly because I wasn't sure how to write a shrug. Far be it from me to knock Jay-Z's cynicism; the guy's got an otherworldly ability to suss out what's commercially viable in rap at any given moment (when you refuse to release your music on streaming services other than your own free trial factory, you have to pander to the people that actually buy CDs). There's just no particularly compelling reason to listen to this.

Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things would have you believe that people move to California solely because they’re paid as hell and need to distance themselves - spatially, and grip-on-reality-wise - from the human cost of their good fortune. He’s correct. San Francisco and LA, the two major destinations, offer opposite approaches: in the former, the outside world is an obsession, with no end of jackasses all too willing to reassure you that you’re making it a better place; the latter sprawls enough to be entirely self-contained, with vast expanses of natural beauty as a second line of defense.

A few strange things happened during my conversation with Laraaji. First, about halfway through (at the part where he's talking about Switzerland), he smoothly transitioned into clipping his toenails without ever breaking eye contact. Afterwards, in my car, he spent several minutes questioning me intently about the protective capabilities of some Magic: the Gathering cards that I had left in a cupholder.