Game stirs things up with Jay-Z

NEVERMIND that he offered the proverbial olive branch to arch nemesis 50 Cent during a radio interview on New York’s Hot 97 FM last month, Compton gangsta rapper the Game has officially replaced 50 as hip-hop’s most vituperative MC.

Nearly three years’ worth of the Game’s scathing mix-tape attacks have targeted various members of 50 Cent’s G-Unit crew, including “120,” “300 Bars and Runnin’,” “240 Bars (Spider Joke)” and “The Funeral: 100 Bars” (are we detecting a leitmotif here?). He’s also put out numerous vocal broadsides against revered Angeleno rhyme sayer Ras Kass (via mix-tapes, interviews and YouTube.com clips). The Game, it would seem, is unwilling to back down for anyone. Not, as it turns out, even for hip-hop icon Jay-Z.

The Island Def Jam president recently came out of rap retirement for a world tour and will release his album “Kingdom Come” next month -- just one week after the Game’s album “The Doctor’s Advocate” hits record stores.

Earlier this month, the Compton rapper, who said he expects to sell at least a million copies in the CD’s first week, told SOHH.com: “He should move his album away. Jay is a legend, we all love Jay and respect Jay but it’s that ‘out of retirement’ album.”

Picking up on an analogy Jay-Z makes on his album’s lead single, “Show Me What You Got” -- that Jay is “the Mike Jordan of recording” -- the Game went on to say that fans wonder, “Are we gonna get the old Michael Jordan back or are we gonna get that Mike that played for the Wizards? So everyone is gonna wait to see what he’s gonna do -- but I know what I got.”

That’s a lot like waving a red flag in front of a raging bull when you consider Jay-Z verbally disemboweled Queens, N.Y., rapper Nas on diss tracks released over the course of their four-year beef. (The rappers put their mutual animosity to rest last year.)

The Game’s comments also underscore how November is sure to be a busy month in a somewhat lackluster year for hip-hop. Also set for release: “The Blue Carpet Treatment,” Snoop Dogg’s much anticipated return to gangsta triumphalism, and Nas’ “Hip-Hop Is Dead,” an album the iconic MC has touted as “the best I ever did.”

When Johnston puts pen to paper

DANIEL JOHNSTON, the lo-fi recording legend, Kurt Cobain muse, Beatles obsessive and severe bipolar disorder sufferer, is also known for his distinctive artworks: doodles, really, done in ballpoint pen. Last week, Culver City’s Angstrom Gallery mounted an untitled exhibition of 52 of the iconoclastic singer-songwriter’s works on “repurposed” paper (that is to say, scrawled on the back of already used typing paper).

Drawn circa 1980 in his signature childlike, cartoon-y style, depictions of Johnston’s abiding fascinations abound: Captain America, robust women, anthropomorphic ducks, walking eyeballs and -- befitting the title of the recent documentary about his life, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” -- Beelzebub himself. The same kind of things appear on Johnston’s album covers.

The show runs through Nov. 28 although none of the work is for sale -- it belongs to Angstrom’s owner, David Quadrini, a longtime Johnston pal.

Carrying a torch for ballads

HITMAKING songwriter-turned-recording-artist Johnta Austin has a message for a guy who is already the butt of this year’s most over-used pop-music-related punch line, Mr. “Sexyback” himself, Justin Timberlake: “Sexy never left,” Austin says.

It’s not just an academic issue for Austin, 26 (whose first name is pronounced “JOHN-tay”), a prolific songwriter for hire who is behind many ubiquitous recent R&B; hits: “Be Without You” by Mary J. Blige, Chris Brown’s “Yo (Excuse Me Miss)” and Mariah Carey’s smash “We Belong Together,” to name a few. Austin sees it as his duty to put balladry front and center in his music in order to bring a moribund musical genre back to glory.

“R&B; is lagging behind hip-hop,” he says. “I’m a fan. But when the influence of hip-hop came in, R&B; got away from concepts. It got to being about getting played in the clubs, getting the party started and away from ballads and stories. But it’s the ballads, the quality of concepts, that make people connect.”

Named an America Online “Break Out” performer and featured on the cover of Billboard magazine earlier this month, he was only 15 when he wrote his first hit: “Sweet Lady” for Tyrese.

Now, after 11 years behind the scenes, Austin’s first single, “Turn It Up,” is getting major urban radio airplay. And he is being groomed by super producer Jermaine Dupri to follow in the footsteps of fellow songwriter-turned-pop-star Ne-Yo with the release of his album, “Ocean Drive,” in December.

New Jack Swing, it isn’t. “I like records I feel like I can play for five or six years,” Austin says. “The club scene changes. One minute this is good, next it’s that. A strong ballad is timeless.”

Bloc Party sounds a second alarm

EAST End London quartet and Coachella Music and Arts Festival darling Bloc Party has finished recording its second album, “A Weekend in the City,” in Dublin, Ireland, and set the date for release: Feb. 6, 2007.

Expectations are high. The dance rockers’ first album, 2005’s “Silent Alarm,” was voted album of the year by NME magazine and heaped with critical acclaim. Lead singer Kele Okereke said in an announcement that he found inspiration this time in “the living noise of a metropolis.”