I appeared on WNYC’s “Soundcheck Smackdown” yesterday to discuss Lil Wayne’s claims to greatness and his long-delayed, finally available album, “Tha Carter III.” Billboard reports:

Unweighted first-day sales of “Tha Carter III” at nine leading accounts through the close of business yesterday (June 10) stood at 423,000. Sources close to the album project “Carter” could shift between 850,000-950,000 in its first full week. That would easily give Wayne the biggest sales week of the year, and the best since Kanye West’s “Graduation” started with 957,000 last year.

This sales spike suggests that giving away music, far from destroying the music business, could be the gesture that saves it. More than a hundred free Lil Wayne tracks surfaced last year, many with Wayne’s blessing. Anyone at the Recording Industry Association of America who felt somehow safer and righteous when DJ Drama (Wayne’s closest mixtape collaborator) was arrested in Atlanta last year might want to revisit those feelings. Outlawing mixtapes is, in essence, firing people who are already working for free to promote your paid employee. But the music business didn’t understand Napster, either. Perhaps they will understand unemployment. Or maybe they will blame that on hip-hop, too.

Speaking of hip-hop and blame, some odd but familiar threads emerged in my radio segment. I may be some kind of unregenerate future freak, but hip-hop has always appealed to me in part because it is willing to ignore well-known templates for song form, melody, and timbre. I am always disappointed to encounter hip-hop fans and artists who find new kinds of rap “too simple,” “not musical,” or in some way not properly consonant with the work of canonical m.c.s. Today’s Rushmore heads are East Coast rappers such as Rakim and Nas; years ago, calcified rock fans would have been holding their noses at punk (and, um, rap), invoking the Beatles, and bemoaning the death of that elephant of radical goodness, the album, a commercial triumph for record companies who wanted to sell their widgets at the highest possible price.

Well, it’s never been clearer that the album, while being one of pop’s commercial forms, is not necessarily its organic aesthetic form. That status belongs to the song (or track, if you’re not in love with verses and choruses)—and Lil Wayne makes umptillions of these things. Some are filler, some are worse, but so many are so good, driven by a loopy sense of humor and an ecstatic embrace of style for style’s sake, that they make albums look like nothing more than expensive file folders sold by people trapped indoors. Many of the rappers trotted out by hip-hop’s hall monitors—usually a somber bunch from the East Coast—lack the charm and broad, playful flair of those from the South, like Lil Wayne and his one real rival this year, Andre 3000, who is rumored to be working on a solo album.

And, sure, comparisons between artists can be relevant, if the artists in question are working in comparable contexts. The Kool G. Rap of 1991 cannot, by dint of wishful transitivity, be substituted for the Kool G. Rap of 2008, nor can the Rakim of 1986 be plausibly included in a discussion of 2008 rap. (I should mention here that Rakim is my favorite rapper of all time.) Wayne is competing with T.I., David Banner, Fabolous, and Jay-Z, among others less likely to do a million in a week. Wayne’s main commercial rival now is the producer for several of the album’s tracks: Kanye West.

In less contentious matters: Toshitaka Kondo interviewed the album’s many various producers and posted a valuable track-by-track companion to “Tha Carter III” at Play, the Rhapsody blog. Points to Shodrae (Mr. Bangladesh) Crawford, the producer of the pounding “A Milli” beat, for being brave enough to express some regrets about Wayne’s approach to “A Milli,” and to brag about the other rappers who like his beat. Mr. Crawford should not be surprised if “Tha Carter IV” does not involve him. Unless he wants to work for free.

Today, Last.FM, “the CBS Corporation-owned social networking music Web site” and “official online media partner of Sigur Rós,” made the new Sigur Rós album available for streaming, two weeks before the album’s release date—an increasingly abstract concept for listeners who have no intention of establishing a commercial relationship with their favorite music. The album’s title, “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust,” translates from the Icelandic as “With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly.” This is descriptive enough of the band’s moony ululations that I am going to overlook the fact that it reads like Cialis spam. (Sorry, Iceland!) Streaming audio is fun and all, but I think Sigur Rós could have gone big on a bricks-and-mortar promotion: providing every citizen of Nova Scotia with their own snowmobile, which will play “Whateveryovyrumlaust” on continual loop.

Garnette Cadogan recently interviewed the musician, composer, and scholar Ned Sublette for Bomb, the only art magazine I have ever subscribed to. (Nothing against art magazines; I can let only so many things pile up unread.) Here is an excerpt from their conversation, which serves as a decent précis of Sublette’s new book, “The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square”:

In its early days as a United States territory, New Orleans was in effect a colony of Virginia, a fact that I think hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated. The Virginians had surplus slave labor to dispose of. If you were an enslaved person in Virginia, you knew that not only did you have no future, your children and your grandchildren would be enslaved. In Spanish Louisiana, although enslaved people were treated badly, there did at least exist a path to freedom. And because enslaved people in Spanish Louisiana were also allowed to play ancestral drums and to dance in public and gather en masse by the hundreds, they had a past. They had an identity and a future. Imagine the difference in morale between those two populations.

Sublette read an early draft of the book’s last chapter, “We Won’t Bow Down,” at the 2005 Experience Music Project’s Pop Conference. It is the only academic presentation that has ever made me weep.

That was, what, a whole week with no Robyn posts? Ugh. Mercifully, Robyn wrote an editorial for the Guardian last week, encouraging readers to root for the Swedish football team during this year’s European Cup. (England was eliminated because they lost or something. Sports are so uptight.)

When not writing editorials or touring, Robyn tells us what to listen to. (More accurately, Robyn told her associate Sandra Nordin what she is listening to, and Nordin sent me an e-mail.) Robyn is apparently a fan of Familjen, the musical alter ego of Johan T. Karlsson. Familjen’s début album, “Det snurrar i min skalle,” was released in Sweden last summer. The title single was a club hit, and went on to win the Swedish Grammy for Best Video in January, 2008. Nordin translates the chorus of “Det snurrar i min skalle” as “My head is spinning, it feels like the first time,” and described it as “a kind of love song.” I sent the song to another actual Swedish person, who enjoyed it and described it as “Skånsk progg techno.”

Live, Karlsson performs with a d.j. named Andreas Tilliander, and, this spring, Familjen toured as support for a Swedish band named Kent. Below are two more Familjen songs, “Huvudet i sanden” and “Kom säger dom,” each with videos that were completed before everyone had to stay home and start watching football.

Last year, Lil Wayne said that he was the best rapper alive. I didn’t see any reason to disagree with him. Even if it is earned, though, this confidence may have run away with Mr. Carter. During a recent interview with Foundation magazine, Wayne condemned mixtape d.j.s in no uncertain terms (and language that is definitely N.S.F.W.), which is kind of odd as mixtapes are exactly what enabled Wayne to plausibly elect himself King of All Rapping. Wayne later called into DJ Drama’s Sirius radio program to clarify his comments. (Wayne is upset about the “Wayne’s World” mixtape series, and a d.j. named Empire, but he would probably be more upset to know that there is a 3.7-gigabyte torrent file making the rounds called “Lil Wayne.” It contains a thousand and forty-one files—his entire catalog, give or take an album—and pretty much backs up his claims to glory.)

Next Tuesday, Lil Wayne’s infinitely delayed new album, “Tha Carter III,” will be released. The first single, “Lollipop,” an Auto-Tuned thing, has done extremely well. The album seems to have leaked, but who knows if it really has: we will see and hear what shows up in stores on June 9th. If you can do it without breaking any laws, find “The Carter III” mixtape, and get yourself a copy of “Da Drought Three,” a double-CD mixtape that Wayne officially sanctioned for free release. These are both intense and complex albums that should be part of Wayne’s track record. (They will be.) That said, the new single, “Milli,” is completely bonkers.

This week’s column and podcast concern Auto-Tune, a magical piece of software that can make anybody sound like a drunken robot bird. Right now the King of Auto-Tune is T-Pain. As he didn’t make it into the podcast, but is featured in the column’s illustration, it seemed right to point you toward some of his biggest hits. (In case the column’s title misreads: T-Pain is no gerbil. “Gerbil” is one of the many nicknames engineers have for the sound effect that Auto-Tune can achieve.) Here is an entire YouTube channel of T-Pain videos. Go nuts.

Matthew Perpetua, of Fluxblog, posted a dizzily upbeat mix on his Tumblr site, and I urge everyone—especially Mets fans—to avail themselves of its healing powers. It is titled “Macarena Til the Break of Dawn,” and this is pretty much exactly right (although the mix contains no Macarenas).

Kerli is a twenty-one year-old singer from Estonia, which is great. (Estonia!) The video for her song, “Walking On Air,” has several things working against it, though. Kerli’s costume is half mall goth and half anime (which probably means it’s German). There is a talking doll in the video which looks like Kerli and is made to sing. We also see a chicken being prepared as food (which Kerli will not eat), instead of a chicken playing tic-tac-toe (who is sorely missed). Embedding for this video has been disabled, so you will have to choose between the low-res YouTube version or a higher-quality version on the Universal site.

Kerli takes her goth seriously—her page on Purevolume features a cover of Bauhaus’s “She’s in Parties.” Not necessary! That said, I enjoy the fake C.G.I. butterfly feel of “Walking On Air.” I cannot account for this.

To help us in our search for the perfect summer soundtrack (the short version), Tim Groombridge, from London, wrote in to suggest “Bongo Jam,” by Crazy Cousinz. (Here is a long and excellent post by Tim Finney on Crazy Cousinz and the British “funky house” scene.)

The d.j. and journalist Philip Sherburne sent in this take on the summer’s dance scene:

In the world of house and techno, or at least certain corners of it, the summer hits are already coming out. Osborne’s Afro-Latino piano-house track “Outta Sight” sounds like an aural equivalent of that old Starburst TV commercial in which the rivers ran red, green, and yellow with stop-animation fruit chews.

In the hands of the German remixers Henrik Schwarz and Dixon, Swedish singer Ane Brun’s “Headphone Silence” comes to represent the opposite of its title, dappled with keyboards and overlaid with a breathtaking vocal performance. Slightly darker, “Back to My Roots,” by the French techno pioneer Laurent Garnier, is like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack recast for a thousand percussionists, and is as expansive as the horizon.

“Remember Love,” by the French group Nôze, actually has some crossover potential. Originally released on Cologne’s minimal house label My Best Friend, it’s just been reissued by Booka Shade’s Berlin-based Get Physical (responsible for last summer’s cumbia-house anthem “Heater,” by Samim). Singing of the joys of infidelity in heavily accented English, Nôze compares an affair to the “flip side” of a record and repurposes the riff from “It Takes Two,” with pistoning piano chords so perky that they could cheer up (and win back) even the cuckolded lover. Out for more than a year now, it routinely inspires sing-alongs on dancefloors, and, from a d.j.’s perspective, is perhaps the best closing song ever.”