So it's Friday night (or about to be). You just got paid. Unless you actually just got laid the fuck off and are now feeling the crunch, desperately searching old jackets and flipping couch cushions for Pabst money. (Raise your hands.) Hopefully you saved enough to hit the December 19 CD- release show for The Gutterbrook, the debut album from UW grads Rudy and the Rhetoric. Rhetoric is the MC, who chatters out a dense verbal binary smacking of Aesop Rock or perhaps Onry Ozzborn (who appears along with his Grayskulian co-defendant JFK on "Bladerunners"). Rudy is the producer. You know how the producer from Jedi Mind Tricks calls himself the Enemy of Mankind? Rudy should call himself the Enemy of Sound Guys. (Club owners: just kidding!) It's just that his home-crafted beats slap hard and heavy like your dad after happy hour—razor synths methodically saw through your skull, the bottom jackhammers your sternum into shepherd's pie, people go apeshit. It's a good thing. The pair have a trademark sound here—a hard enough thing for any emerging act to come up with—they just have to find some more breadth to keep it fresh. Meanwhile, Gutterbrook is a steel-hard, paranoid work of PDK-rap, a fresh debut that hints at big things for these two—so check them out at Nectar along with Grayskul, the Let Go, Candidt, and a rare appearance from ace turntable terror(ist) Waystyles.

Best news I heard all week: This weekend, to celebrate seven successful years, the world-famous Yo, Son! is doing a special OG version (with DJs Scene and DV One) on Sunday, December 21, at Chop Suey in addition to their typically wall-to-wall-packed edition at War Room on Saturday (this weekend featuring DV One, Soul One, B-Mello, and Fourcolorzack). Those storied, shit-faced Sundays are the stuff of local legend, and were the uncontestable highlight of my going-out experience as an adult; the patented "Low Class Hiphop, Turntablism & Bad Taste" vibe set the bar high enough to make me wholly uninterested in any other club night for the half-decade since. Often imitated, never duplicated, its eclectic-on-accident mix of b-boys, punk-rock kids, and all-purpose shitbags made for rowdy drunken debauchery this city hasn't seen since, son—seen? It's gone a lot glossier in recent years, with more hair product, fashionista bullshit, and expensive kicks, but I'm not mad at all—as long as I can wreck my liver this one last time at this rare revisit to the real. Steady & Stuck Under the Needle, this is your present to me—aw, you shouldn't have!

That said, sorry, kids, I just can't fuck with 808s & Heartbreaks, like, at all. What's more, Kanye, sorry, but light-skinded niggas might be coming back in style, too, as the new joints from Ludacris and Common are both very solid. I'd advise you to stuff a stocking with 'em, then Wake Up and Smell the Chestnuts. recommended