A little blue with her velvet

WHO knew Norah Jones had a potty-mouth?

Supplying guest vocals on “Sucker,” a song from former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton’s hip-hop-inflected side project Peeping Tom, the multi-Grammy winner dismisses a suitor, telling him to keep his pants on, then purrs: “What makes you think you’re my only lover? Sucker!” And her semi-whispered chorus finishes on a note of silken threat -- with a word that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

Turns out Patton recruited the singer-songwriter specifically to subvert her solemn public image.

“The track was finished and I knew I wanted some catty vamp to do the vocal,” Patton says. “For maximum effect, I started going through the most unlikely candidates in my head: LeAnn Rimes, Lucinda Williams, Paula Abdul.

“I was just joking with my engineer, saying, ‘Wow, Norah Jones with her velvety voice -- wouldn’t she sound amazing on this?’ ” he continues. “Turns out he worked with her before. He was like, ‘She’s a really good sport.’ Then he played matchmaker.”

Patton, a co-owner of the Ipecac imprint (the label is scheduled to release the album, titled “Mike Patton,” on May 30), never even met Jones. Like most of Peeping Tom’s collaborators -- including British trip-hop group Massive Attack, Brazilian bossa nova chanteuse Bebel Gilberto, alt-hip-hop maestro Dan the Automator and rapper Kool Keith -- they conducted what Patton calls “a file-swapping adventure.”

That is, he would mail his guest stars a rough cut of a song on CD, they would record their part in another studio and then mail the CD back. “Let’s just say we’re closer musical friends now,” Patton says with a laugh. “A lot of these people are strangers to me. They were out of sight but very much in mind.”

The result is a free-form but beat-driven amalgam of different genres gathered under the umbrella of Patton’s sometimes macabre, sometimes cartoonish aesthetic -- and shot through with his soaring, quasi-operatic voice. Taking a break from his noise-rock group, Fantomas, Patton describes Peeping Tom as a “pop album” even if its sound is light years from Justin Timberlake.

“It started in the latter days of Faith No More, probably around 1998, just with me writing a couple of songs for fun,”

he says. “I had no idea I wanted to start a band. All of a sudden you have three or four songs

on the shelf. And when there’s

10 or 15 and they’re great, you start thinking, ‘I better do something about this. It’s collecting dust!’ ”

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Lil Jon rallies rap and rock forces

IT wasn’t enough for hotshot Atlanta producer Lil Jon to shift hip-hop’s paradigm in the early part of this decade with his synth-driven reinterpretation of Euro-disco, Crunk music. The dreadlocked hit-maker’s new sonic direction promises to be equally epochal. His first album as a solo artist: “Crunk Rock.”

“This is a project Jon has been talking about doing for the last couple of years -- it’s serious,” says Bryan Leach, vice president of artists and repertoire at TVT Records, the label releasing “Crunk Rock.” “It

was important to him to not have it look like a novelty record.”

That means working with a who’s who of rock stars. On the lineup so far: super-producer Rick Rubin, members of the alt-metal band Korn, Transplants drummer Travis Barker and the pop punk group Good Charlotte.

But don’t expect “Crunk Rock” to lack rap merit. “We did a rock record that Pharrell co-produced,” Leach says. “It’s not just going to be the rock community. It might be a song co-produced by Jon and Rick Rubin that features T.I. and Young Jeezy. It’s gonna be an exciting marriage: Trick Daddy and Twista on a hard crunk beat with rock guitars.”

Leach points out the producer has a history of making rock-rap. His 2004 album “Crunk Juice” (recorded with his group, the East Side Boyz), includes a track that updates Venice punk band Suicidal Tendencies’ classic “Institutionalized.” And Jon’s remix of “Roll Call” (also from “Crunk Juice”) sampled African American punk band Bad Brains.

“This isn’t such a stretch,” Leach promises. “It’ll be heavy.”