I haven’t made a habit of posting on the weekends, but I decided that various odds and ends warranted a day of miscellany, overlooked items or unsolicited submissions. It’s a good way for me to catch up, and maybe give the readers some breezy weekend material.

The first installment of the Grab Bag starts with the new E-40. I’ll be honest: I’m more of a “backpack rap” (ugh) kinda guy. Gimme some Hiero, some De La, some Digable and I’m a happy dude.

Seems the backpack vs. street rap debate has been heating up, with Pitchfork contributor Tom Breihan staunchly defending placement of certain artists (Beanie Sigel, Young Jeezy, etc.) on P-Fork’s year-end Top 50 list. Breihan calls the indie-rock backlash against mainstream rap “more than troubling, it’s shameful.” He makes a valid point – that “indie-rock supposedly prides itself on open-mindedness and liberalism and independent thought” – though I resent him calling De La Soul “granola-munchers.”

I’m not one for arguing this point, as my grasp on the latest surge in street/mainstream rap is limited. But for some crossfire, listen to Oliver Wang’s excellent commentary on NPR: “Has Hip-Hop Lost Touch With Reality?” In it, Wang states, “As hip-hop gained popularity and power it’s become more enraptured with its self-created worlds and less engaged with the actual world around it.”

To that end, I will say that seeing these videos and MTV’s Cribs, who can relate to this stuff? Breihan argues that there is no discussion of the rap itself, as an art; it’s more “outright dismissal.” But the image some rappers put forth is a turn-off. There’s nothing in the lyrics that strike me personally, and that’s what part of the listening experience is about. (Did I say I wouldn’t argue the point?)

So, with all that as a backdrop, I present Tell Me When to Go, the new track from E-40, who might well fall under that “street rap” category. The song has a cool beat and catchy chorus (loop copped from Run-DMC’s Dumb Girl).

E-40 | Tell Me When to Go

The last place I’d expect to find a music article would be Nature, a weekly science journal. But that’s exactly where my best friend John, a grad student at UCLA, pointed out a story to me about the social networks of rappers.

In short, Reginald Smith of the Sloan School of Management at MIT “mapped out the network of the rapping community by processing data from online rap and hip-hop archives.” From a collection of 6,552 rappers and over 30,000 songs, Smith discovered that rappers – because of their collaborative nature – are separated by 2.9 degrees of separation. “In this respect, rap exhibits the same spirit as early jazz, where musicians had on average less than two degrees of separation,” the story states.

Also worth noting is that well-to-do rappers tend not to associate or collaborate with those similar to themselves, a trend unlike other human networks. “Smith suggests that this might be partly due to commercial competition between successful artists, who are reluctant to lend their cachet to a rival.”

Smith’s study is filled with frightening equations and algorithms that my pea brain just can’t grasp. But in layman’s terms, Snoop Dogg (natch) claims the crown as most-connected rapper.

Whatever the case, I think we’re on to a new Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game here: 2.9 Degrees of Snoop Dogg. In the spirit of this article, I’m going to toss out quite the appropriate song – Leaders of the New School: Spontaneous (13 MCs Deep!).

How many degrees will it take to connect to Snoop? It’s helpful to know that the most recognizable emcee on this track is Busta Rhymes. (Get the rest here.) … Game on!

Leaders of the New School | Spontaneous (13 MCs Deep!)