In this week’s issue of the magazine, Kelefa Sanneh writes about Dapper Dan, a designer who co-opted luxury-brand logos out of his Harlem boutique, creating one-of-a-kind outfits for hip-hop artists, rappers, and gangsters in the eighties. The photographers of the day, like Janette Beckman, Glen E. Friedman, and Paul Natkin, captured Dapper Dan’s custom outfits. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/ZHROm8

This week in the magazine, Kelefa Sanneh profiles the genre-jumping musician Kid Rock, who got his start in hip-hop, went platinum with rap-rock, and then transitioned into country music. Here Sanneh listens to Kid Rock’s music with Curtis Fox and talks about how his early years in Detroit’s hip-hop scene shaped his identity as a country-rocker. Also, Donald Hall on what reading poetry has in common with oral sex (spoiler: vowels). Listen.

The Best Hip-Hop of 2011

My favorite two hip-hop albums yawed towards what might have once been thought non-commercial, though it’s hard to say if that distinction will survive. A collaboration between MC Ride, the drummer Zach Hill, and the keyboardist Andy Morin, the Death Grips trio self-released “Exmilitary,” which has little use for anything that slows down time or blurs the edges. Start with the video for “Guillotine” and move on—the album is one long, wide-awake, multi-colored holler. Ishamel Butler, veteran of nineties group Digable Planets, brought his mysterious Shabazz Palaces to Sub Pop records and created “Black Up” with various unnamed collaborators. It’s a marvel of details that you can’t initially hear, but which eventually surround you as Butler raps, sounding no more wound up than he did twenty years ago. In the year of disorientation, Shabazz Palaces created the clearest, loveliest fog.