It's been an exceptional week for female rappers. Azealia Banks released a video for "1991" that does justice to that year's aesthetics (she called it homage to Madonna, Crystal Waters and Aaliyah, but I detect some swag copped from Black Box mouthpiece Katrin Quinol, too). Her clip has made my affection for the track jump exponentially. Missy Elliott debuted some new songs live. All we got was this shitty, blown-out YouTube video as a result, but still: new Missy. People care about Nicki Minaj's voting choices, and also she proved to be the best thing about the new Alicia Keys single, "Girl on Fire." (Too bad Alicia didn't release this earlier this year so she could have at least gotten some mileage out of the Hunger Games reference.)

Animal Collective makes music like San Francisco/Cleveland/Seattle/Blaine, Missouri/Iceland/everywhere (apparently) makes weather: If you don't like a melody, wait a few bars. That's the case for their twisty ninth full-length, Centipede Hz, which is out this week. Their endlessly shifting melodies and tempos make for an exhausting experience — I was listening to this album at the gym yesterday and noticed that it only made my workout seem longer. Though psychedelic, this music is no poor man's vacation — it is demanding and unsettling. Acid is an uncomfortable drug, and so is Centipede Hz.

Jay-Z's "99 Problems" has been refashioned as rap-rock so many times (via Danger Mouse and Linkin Park and there's also this alt-country cover that that irritating, self-consciously cheeky and ironically white sensibility that these things usually do). It makes sense — Rick Rubin's original production was riff-based and tougher than Tougher Than Leather. So why not join Pearl Jam onstage on Sunday at Philadelphia's Made in America concert for yet another go? One Judgment Night isn't enough for this guy.

The best track from Portishead's 2008 album, Third, gets a house makeover that emphasizes the track's staccato snare blasts. This retains most of the original's malice while pushing Portishead into unfamiliar club territory. It sounds unsettled, even for them.

At 20-years-old, Sky Ferreira has been rebooted more times than a superhero. She's been dance pop, she's worked with Ryan Tedder, she's done an neo-alternachick thing, she's had her debut album delayed and delayed. It still hasn't arrived — "Everything Is Embarrassing" is supposed to be on her second EP, Ghost, (after last year's As If!), which is set for an October release. Nothing about it screams commercial smash, which is both reassuring (she seems committed to the art of pop) and somewhat confusing given how invested Capitol seems to be in making her a star. Whatever. Max Read and I were talking earlier today about whom exactly this song is for. All I could muster was people who are into chillwave who also like a Britney song (probably "Toxic") and maybe once contemplated buying a Stevie B 12".

With the right pick-ups (and Hipster Runoff placement), Brooklyn's TEEN could be equally loved and loathed. The Brooklyn-based band consists of four very cute girls who play messily — the musical equivalent of unkempt beauty. They remind me of Shaggs crossed with the Carrie Nations (after the principal hit them up with a couple of caps of acid), pumping out psychedelia caked in reverb and effects. Instead of being pretty at its core (a la shoegaze) TEEN's music is sometimes flat, sometimes meandering and often lacking in choruses and harmonies. Too structured to be deemed atmospheric and too reliant on heavy texture to be mistaken for pop, TEEN's music would infuriate if it didn't routinely soothe. But I predict that a bunch of girls not acting musically ladylike (in often the gentlest way possible) will piss people off anyway. Good.

Matthew Dear's fifth album under his own name, Beams, is a woozy rifling through preexisting musical styles, and the combinations that emerge make for an unsettling listening experience. It acts like upbeat pop music, but Dear is always subverting his setups — with weird interjections, with contrasting rhythms, with his own vocals that speak of indecipherable commands in a cartoonishly low voice that saunters with a twang-free, country swagger. He sounds like what Madonna wished her Music-era cowboy at made her look like, a loner and individual in this world of pulsing electronics. He never sounds lost, though, and in fact, seems more confident than ever, a mirthful ringleader appropriating sounds because that's how genres are made in the endless chain of dance music. His singular offshoot is a doozy — this sounds like everything, but nothing sounds like it.

Below is a remix of Gawker favs Niki & the Dove's "DJ, Ease My Mind," by Gawker favs Twin Shadow. Mr. Shadow strips the song of its furiously swirling house and surrounds it with a plaintive electric guitar and some other atmospheric effects. Voila: a dance song becomes a ballad. It's an effective trick, but kind of a cheat: many dance songs are ballads at heart and to place them in such a straightforward setting is ultimately reductive. For that reason, I have come to loathe Frente!'s alternahit cover of New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle." Yeah, we get it: the song is sad. We don't need your weeping guitar to prove what has been conveyed in a more exciting and complex manner.

Yet another of the "new" offerings from the upcoming Bad 25 box set has leaked: a remix of "Speed Demon," best known for its video (really, an excerpt from Moonwalker), in which Michael Jackson dances alongside a clay rabbit that is also himself. Or something.

The just-released video for Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded highlight is literally brilliant, with a neon color scheme and skewed sense of geometry that recalls Beetlejuice. The self-conscious oddness against this cartoon-goth backdrop is reminiscent of Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)." For the raw eye candy alone, this is probably my favorite video of the year — the insane amount of visual wit (courtesy of director Colin Tilley) is a good match for Nicki's tightly packed bars. "I'm a brand, bitch, I'm a brand," Nicki bellows in this latest round of brag-rap. If that is true, it's a wildly inconsistent brand, but her lows (see: virtually every one of her pop/house songs) make the highs that much more eye-popping.

This is the perfect example of a video making a song — a hypnotic, wobbly house track, you either like what this is doing or you don't. Your body either responds to these particular sounds and frequencies or it doesn't. Simple. However, pairing it with a host of insects whose antennae twitch rhythmically and whose running (on a turntable) is synched with the beat makes it fascinating. This is among the most bizarre ways to convey how the song is behaving.

Mykki Blanco is the "teenage female rapper" persona of the 25-year-old New York rapper Michael Quattlebaum. At least she was — in the video for Quattlebaum's intoxicating "Wavvy," which Gawker is premiering, Quattlebaum appears in and out of drag going from a backward cap and tight-jeans look to wig-and-makeup evening wear and back.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O's contribution to the soundtrack of Tim Burton's upcoming full-length Frankenweenie movie is brazenly sweet, even coming from the woman responsible for the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack. It is sugary enough to speak the language of children fluently.

Here are '90s R&B songs directly referenced to '90s R&B that I noticed in the first single from Wish's newly released free mixtape, Me Against Her, "Used to Love You":

The first single from Until the Quiet Comes, the fourth album from California genre-smearer Flying Lotus, has arrived with a crash and a flutter. "See Thru to U" features laconic sing-song vocals from the reliably fearless Erykah Badu, the eye of the storm in this collage of mostly gentle sounds that when combined have the effect of fury. Beguiling.

If Feist's last album, 2011's Metals, were more like this spacey remix, I would have made it through the whole thing.

Here's the new video for disco-kissed pop duo Kisses' wonderfully airy cover of Robert Palmer's new-wave classic "Johnny and Mary," filmed on tour in Rio. The L.A. band is finishing up a new album, featuring production by Tim Larcombe and St. Etienne's Pete Wiggs; till then, you can listen to the first single, "Funny Heartbeat," here.

In advance of the Aug. 24 release of blog fav Róisín Murphy's "Simulation" single, the label that's releasing it, Permanent Vacation, has leaked this subdued, housey remix of it. A demo of the original, slow-burning disco version leaked a few months ago; Spin reports the finished version is "11-and-a-half minutes of heavy breathing, and featuring one seriously ecstatic chorus." Love to love you, Murphy.

Earlier this week, Brit-pop's finest Blur released Blur 21, an exhaustive box set featuring expanded versions of all seven of their studio albums, bonus discs of demos and outtakes and a few DVDs. It's over 20 hours of music. Blur has long represented something very particular in my life whatever the time (Damon Albarn is the first guy I ever allowed myself to acknowledge being attracted to) and with this insurmountable deluge of media, now is no exception.

Long live boom-bap.