As Sasha Frere-Jones quipped in these pages a while ago, El-P is something like the Steve Albini of hip-hop: fanatically opposed to major labels, addicted to noise. Extending the analogy a bit, you could imagine a few years down the line the emergence of a rap equivalent to grunge ("grime," maybe): underground in style and sound, but hooky and forceful enough to storm the barricades of Hot 97 and BET, thereby terminating the entire bling-bling era (hip-hop's equivalent to hair metal). And a few years after that, El-P will be drafted in—to render radio-unfriendly the postbreakthrough album In Wu-Tero by spearhead grime-rappers Gnosis . . .