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After all the hype and air-guitar awards-show appearances, Lil Wayne's much-anticipated debut as a full-on rock performer, "Prom Queen," has finally leaked. This will be above-the-fold news on whatever content-aggregator supplies your RSS fix, but only because for the music business right now is about as slow as things get. And really, "Prom Queen" isn't all that different from Weezy's normal milieu - it seems to be mostly about the preferred unmentionables of some corsage-sporting hottie who won't give him any play, and there's loads of Auto-Tune.

Listen for yourself here, and stick around to read a few of the decidedly split comments. Rocks Off gives it about a 6 (maybe), and would just like to add a few words. Vernon Reid. Bad Brains. George Clinton (Funkadelic, not Parliament). Sly Stone. Props to Wayne for bringing gnashy guitars into the hip-hop conversation, but let's not forget who taught him how. 

Beyonce stepped back into her Cadillac Records character Etta James to sing "At Last," and sing the hell out of it, for President and Mrs. Obama's first dance at last night's HD Neighborhood Inaugural Ball in Washington, D.C. It's hard to imagine either a better singer or song for the occasion - sorry, Etta - especially the line "I found a dream that I could speak to/ A dream that I could call my own." Cadillac Records, which by the way is excellent, is due on DVD March 10.

In this week's installment of Noise, Rocks Off's bass-playing friend and neighbor Nick Gaitan talks about how our building inspired his song "I've Found My Weakness in You," and how his boss Billy Joe Shaver liked it so much he decided to record it. Part of our conversation veered into Shaver's experiences in the Bayou City, but first, the song...

Rocks Off: I was wondering how much time he's spent here.

Nick Gaitan (smiles): He's always talking about how rough it is.

RO: What does he say about Houston?

NG: He always talks about it just being rough, like 'Oh, be careful down there,' kind of like you'd hear in a Leadbelly song. Or he introduced me to this lady one time - he said, 'This is Nick, he's from Houston. He's got Houston written all over him.' He has his own version of Houston in his head.

RO: I bet he's got a bunch of ties to this area.

NG: Oh yeah. Billy has his own Houston, because he's been here a lot. 

Something Fierce

There Are No Answers

www.somethingfiercemusic.com

Open letter to the Warped Tour: If you don't include Something Fierce on your 2009 80-something band docket, you deserve to have Andy Macdonald or Kyle Loza do one of their extreme-sports stunts right into your figurative nuts. Or whatever. Not every band in its early (early) twenties can find the Buddy Holly heart inside an MC5/Sex Pistols riff machine like "Modern Girl," after all.

This list was damn near impossible to compile. The criteria: original holiday songs recorded after 1990. There aren't many tunes that qualify, and of the ones that do, few of them are worth listening to. Like fake marshmallow froth atop a cup of instant cocoa, here's the crème de la crème of the less-than-lame holiday songs.

5. Savatage, "Dead Winter Dead": Hails from the 1995 metal album of the same name, which also spawned the overplayed hit "Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)." The latter is now performed by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a side project of Savatage vocalist Jon Oliva. "Dead Winter Dead" rocks harder than "Christmas Eve," and its gloomy lyrics are great for Scrooges.

]4. Killola, "Santa Give Me Something I Can Use": This jingle is suitable for adult boys and girls who prefer naughtiness to niceties. Indie pop/punk band Killola makes a musical wishlist of gifts including "dollar bills," "lots of pills," and "free booze," all of which are more useful than new socks or an argyle sweater. Available for download here, and, in the spirit of giving, the band's entire 2008 album I Am the Messer can be downloaded for free on its MySpace page.

Local Beefheart-style rockers Organ Failure have recorded a parody of M.I.A.'s late-blooming smash "Paper Planes" with a Santa twist. The Sri Lankan indie-rap star's Clash-sampling hit gets turned into the Santa-hustlin' jam "Christmas Wrapping Paper Planes." 

"Paper Planes" was everywhere this year. We heard it in movie trailers, grocery stores, women's clinics and senior centers. Anywhere with a radio, really, it seemed at one point.

Organ Failure's version will be stuck in your head till the Super Bowl just the same. - Craig Hlavaty

Hard to believe it's been 20 years since gangsta rap went overground with N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton. Through Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg to Tupac and Eminem, it launched most of hip-hop's biggest stars for a good decade, but these days even artists like T.I. and Lil Wayne have sacrificed serious street knowledge for bizarre metaphysical narratives and crossover-friendly celebrations of the high life (both kinds).

Which makes sense. People just aren't as easy to shock as they were in 1989. Lyrics that sparked suburban-parent outrage back then would barely raise an eyebrow today - probably because an awful lot of suburban parents now grew up on Ice Cube and Tupac themselves.

But from out of the Piney Woods north of town, a trio of "prison city playas" calling itself Huntzville, mentored and produced by former Geto Boy Willie D, may be about to raise a ruckus with its debut single, "Backpack Fulla Gunz." The track peers not into the mind of a lunatic, but the pre-and mid-rampage thoughts of a high-school student all set to go Columbine on his classmates and teachers.

[Note: This is the first in a series of articles that constitute Village Voice Media's year-end music package. The others - pop, indie-rock, dance mixes, Latin, country, alt-country/Americana, metal, rap/hip-hop and special graphics breaking down the year in charts and 2008's worst lyrics - will be posted on Rocks Off throughout the rest of the holiday season.]

It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.

BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco exploded, the Piano Man's deeply unhip 1978 breakthrough proved that top-shelf Broadway/Brill Building songwriting could still sell - and, occasionally, rock. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)" remain priceless snapshots of Annie Hall-era NYC, the title track bares real teeth, and the Kenny Chesney fave "Only the Good Die Young" - banned from several college-radio stations for its unseemly insinuations about Catholic schoolgirls - is still a corker.

Extras: Complete June 1977 Carnegie Hall concert; DVD of Joel's March 1978 appearance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test; thirty-minute making-of doc and facsimile of his lyric sketchbook, scratch-outs and all.

WILLIE NELSON
Stardust
(Columbia/Legacy)
Nelson's 1978 dunking of the Great American Songbook into his whiskey river, with producer Booker T. Jones riding soulful shotgun, shattered all sorts of precedents. It gave Irving Berlin ("Blue Skies") and Hoagy Carmichael ("Georgia on My Mind") their first number-one country hits, proved record-buyers wouldn't blanch at long-haired rednecks covering Duke Ellington and Kurt Weill (more than five million copies sold) and set the tone for this year's stellar Wynton Marsalis Quartet collaboration, Two Men With the Blues.

Extras: A complete second disc of Stardust outtakes, wherein Nelson unleashes trusty acoustic guitar Trigger on "What a Wonderful World," "Stormy Weather," "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and more.

After my displacment during Hurricane Ike, I found a CD with a demo from my pre-Black Math Experiment band, Hixon, which managed to survive when so much of my BME memorabilia was destroyed. This band was rightfully and thankfully ignored by all of you, and eventually I was kicked out for "holding them back."

I have a lot more self-esteem than I used to, so I decided to post it on the BME MySpace as a lesson in humility to myself. I thought you guys might get a kick out of how bad I used to suck. The song is "Don't Fade Away," and I'm sorry. - Jef With One F

[Ed. Note: This originally came over as an email from Jef. A little raw, but Rocks Off can discern a whiff or two of the Soft Boys in there, so it's not totally awful.]