My standard Friday morning routine is to load 10 to 15 new albums along with a bunch of new tracks and singles into a SONOS playlist, hit shuffle and let it play in the background while I go about my day. I let gravity (and rhythm and melody and the power of a great voice or an intense sound or an unexpected turn of phrase) do the work from there, pushing random tracks into the foreground of my easily distracted brain. Songs are favorited, songs are deleted, songs are repeated, lunch is consumed (oh how I miss you, YUCA'S), random connections are made. I am my own algorithm. Not counting the entire FIONA APPLE album, the "unofficial album of the pandemic," which I cheated and played in full before I did anything else, and which I'm still absorbing a week and a million or so plays later, the first track that stopped my brain last Friday wan't quite a song. It was a minute-long sample of CHRISTIE'S auctioneer JUSSI PYLKKANEN selling LEONARDO DA VINCI's SALVATOR MUNDI for $450 million to an anonymous bidder who happens to be Saudi Arabian Crown Prince MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN, one of the world's richest and worst humans. The track is called "400 MILLION PLUS TAX" and it's the perfect opening salvo on Buffalo rapper WESTSIDE GUNN's third album, PRAY FOR PARIS, whose tracks kept distracting me for the rest of the day and beyond. They're seductively minimalist productions, by the likes of the ALCHEMIST, DJ PREMIER and TYLER, THE CREATOR, over which a street rapper who's been hanging around the fashion and art worlds seems to zig and zag between drug money and art and fashion money while sometimes making sense and sometimes making none whatsoever, kinda sorta like a one-man version of NEW YORK magazine's Approval Matrix who simultaneously exists in all four quadrants. The second song that stopped me in my tracks was "PARA TRANSCRIBIR (LUNA)," the glorious a cappella closing track, with layered vocals, on LIDO PIMIENTA's MISS COLOMBIA. That drew me into an album that the experimental singer-songwriter from Colombia, who now lives in Toronto, calls a "cynical love letter" to her native country. Pimienta filters cumbia and other Colombian styles through an orchestrated electro-pop aesthetic that registers as part protest, part transcendance, and makes for an apt, inadvertent soundtrack to this disturbing and maddening moment. Or maybe it isn't inadvertent; a virus may have sprung from seemingly nowhere, but the madness was already here. "I resist," she declares in one song (she sings almost entirely in Spanish), and perhaps you do, too... Which is all basically my way of saying that last Friday, April 17, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, with so much else on your plate and on your mind, may have been the release week of the year, and it may not have been an accident. Art responds not only to the time in which it's made, but also to the time in which it's unleashed... SPOTIFY has added an "Artist Fundraising Pick" feature that gives artists the ability to ask fans to donate money to Spotify-vetted Covid-19 charities or to themselves. The second option is basically the tip jar idea that the streaming biz has been batting around for a few years, but now aimed at supporting artists during a crisis. The layout doesn't make it immediately clear if you're donating to a charity or to your favorite musician, which is a little weird. And it raises a question. If artists ask for tips for their streamed recordings—whether during an economic crisis or not—should they be obligated to share it with songwriters and producers? Should it be split the same way streaming royalties are split, or can they ethically pocket all of it?... ICE-T, CHUCK D, DE LA SOUL and ROXANNE SHANTE are among the artists participating in the HIP HOP LOVES NY livestream at 6pm ET today. MASS APPEAL and the UNIVERSAL HIP HOP MUSEUM are the presenters... Do colliding black holes have a thing for ELVIS?... RIP JOSÉ TORRES.