The Black & Blue Album: After the brouhaha over DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album--the controversial mashup of The White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album--comes Jay-Zeezer, a mix of Weezer and Jay-Z.

Song-Poems Scam: Nestled in the back pages of '60s and '70s magazines, among ads urging you to "Draw Tippy" or buy breast-enlargement cream, were ads seeking "song-poems." Budding lyricists could pay cut-rate recording professionals $200 to $400 to set their "song-poems" to music, tapping into desperate dreams of making it big in the music biz. It was basically a scam: the promised promotion and distribution of the resulting singles and albums never happened, and the music was often so bad--often churned out on quotas of 12 recordings per hour--that it couldn't serve well as even a demo. But hearing the music today--schlocky, antiquated, and tinged with melancholy and weird optimism--the songs are a kind of time capsule from a different era, when we trusted the integrity of those who place tiny ads in the back of Popular Mechanics and when American Idol wasn't there to turn regular folk into superstars. Listen to the American Song-Poem Archive's extensive mp3 collection here.