Various Artists: Violator: The Album

One of the more promising musical developments of the past few years has been the spirit of community that seems to have taken the world of hip hop by storm. Putting aside the scene's penchant for turf wars and coastal beefs, new albums like Soundbombing and Sway & King Tech's This Or That have shown, if nothing else, that artists are more than willing to cooperate as long as there's an opportunity to make lots of money and win favor with the industry's movers and shakers. Vialotor: The Album is just the latest product of the genre's new open-mindedness, compiling tracks from artists either affiliated with the successful Violator management company or wanting desperately to be aligned with its stable of platinum artists. The album gets off to an impressive start with Q-Tip's "Vibrant Thing," a track that finds him sounding far livelier than he's been in ages, throwing off the sluggishness that afflicted the last two Tribe Called Quest albums and getting down to business. Other highlights include "Heavyweights," a knockout posse cut from three men—Big Pun, Fat Joe, and Eightball—who are so phat that they're morbidly obese, and The Flipmode Squad's "What You Come Around Here For," a song far better than anything on the group's underwhelming debut. Of course, every compilation is going to have weak songs, and Violator is no exception, featuring a number of lame gangsta-rap tracks from the uninspired likes of Franchise with Ja Rule and Mobb Deep, who combine childhood self-pity and adult psychosis on "Nobody Likes Me," a song whose chorus flips the script by exclaiming, "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me / I'm gonna get some guns." If Violator is little more than a slickly packaged label sampler, it's still worth hearing, if only because it provides a good overview of what commercial hip hop has become.