N.O.R.E. - "Trying To Hear Cuts From N.O.R.E."
Don't know if it's Swizz again, but yet another track with a sample from a Jay-Z verse for the hook, slowed down and almost not recognizable (from the Blueprint 2 filler "2 Many Hoes", right before the one good line, "and you keep talkin' over the beat like Clue"), with some other sampled shoutouts from Capone and Fat Joe shoehorned in there. Not that hot, though, dude can stick with the raggaeton for now.

R. Kelly - "Sex In The Kitchen"
In '03 on the promotional appearances and tours for Chocolate Factory and The R In R&B, Kells would sing an a cappella version of this, and it was this perfect miniature, less than a minute long, silly singsong melody, playful innuendo culminating in the punchline "we'll be making love like the restaurant was closed". He played a full band version on tour before Happy People/U Saved Me, but it didn't appear on either of those albums, for kind of obvious reasons. And for some reason just now the studio version has leaked, and it pretty much sounds like it was done back in '03, circa "Laundromat" and "Ignition", when he was using that bubble popping sound on everything, and the punchline doesn't hit as well when it's repeated over and over on the outro chorus.

Clinton Sparks ft P. Diddy and Miri Ben-Ari - "Run This City"/P. Diddy and Heavy D - "Big Booty Girls"
I originally wrote about "Run This City" a few months ago, back when Sparks had just started spinning it, but now it's the official first single from his Koch album "Get Familiar 1: Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too", which is being released in March, 6 months to the day after the New Radicals album of the same name, for some strange hilarious reason. The new version of the song is more or less the same as before, except with Miri adding some good foreboding violin parts on the the choruses and a nice sweep over the 2nd verse. Puff's performance is pretty great, screaming "y'all killed Big, y'all wanna see me cry? that ain't enough, wanna see me die!?" / Heavy D continuing his Kwame-esque resurrection via production (well, he did that Jay-Z song before "On Fire", so maybe technically Kwame is the one who's Heav-esque, but whatever), doing a hook with a "Without Me" jack (or was that "round the outside" bit ripped from somewhere else?), ok latin-ish beat that might make a good diddy bop jam when the summer comes.

Snoop Dogg - "Ups & Downs"
I kind of like the part where Snoop sings on "Let's Get Blown" and the part at the beginning of this where he's talking in that weird voice (what kind of accent is he trying to do?) just because it's fun to hear him do something different with his voice for once, after hardening it into the same register and doing nothing but the same flows about the same tired pimp shit for so long. And that Bee Gees sample is killer.