I never met REGGIE OSSÉ, even though we overlapped for a time at MTV NETWORKS, but I've been doing this job long enough to feel like we were friends. That's the vibe he gave off to anyone who listened to his long-running podcast, the COMBAT JACK SHOW, which has basically served as hip-hop's online living room for the past seven years. It has also served, in a way, as the scene's conscience. Ossé had pedigree and knowledge and heart. He knew the game (before he became a blogger and podcaster, he had been, among other things, JAY-Z's lawyer), he knew the players, he knew the music and he loved all of it. And it loved him back. You'll be in tears listening to his final appearance on the Combat Jack Show, recorded a month ago, not long after he disclosed his aggressive colon cancer, in which he talks about the beauty and joy of being inundated with roses while he was still alive. "It's my duty to get by this, to overcome this s***," he said. The roses kept coming; BLACK THOUGHT signed off from his earth-shaking freestyle last week on HOT 97 with a shoutout: "for Combat." Combat Jack succumbed Wednesday morning. He was 48. RIP. And f*** cancer... In his final year, Ossé went into longform podcasting, writing and hosting the series "Mogul: The Life and Death of CHRIS LIGHTY" for SPOTIFY. It was a high point for podcasting in 2017, and is very much worth a revisit... Moving from podcasting with a heart and a message to online radio with a heart and a message, THEO PARRISH and SOUND SIGNATURE have launched this and it sounds fantastic... PENSKE MEDIA buys controlling stake in WENNER MEDIA, and JANN and GUS WENNER will stay on... Where do songs come from? A biology student wrote the beat for POST MALONE's "ROCKSTAR" between finals at (shoutout to my brother JOEY) UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD. ED SHEERAN came up with the main vocal hook for "SHAPE OF YOU" after playing with Legos. Another volume of fly-on-the-wall stories of the making of classic songs. MusicSET: "Behind the Song, Vol. 6"... Goodbye, AMAZON MP3 storage closet... REP. JERROLD NADLER, D-NY, gets a leadership spot on the HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE, putting him front and center on copyright legislation... MusicREDEF is taking a short CHRISTMAS break. Our next newsletter will be a special Christmas Day edition featuring our favorite writing of 2017, and then we'll be back later in the week with more year-end goodies... You'll find some Christmas stocking stuffers sprinkled among the links below... And FRIDAY will still be Friday, so to speak, which means new music from GUCCI MANE, with LIL WAYNE promising a long-awaited mixtape on Christmas Day.