Miranda Lambert is spending her fourth week at No. 1 on the Billboard country song chart with "The House That Built Me," while Lady Antebellum's Need You Now luxuriates in its 21st week as the top-selling country album.

Selfish? Exhibiting a disinclination to share? You make the call.

Now That's What I Call the USA: The Patriotic Country Collection -- a various artists package -- is the week's highest-charting debut album, checking in at No. 12.

The only other new album also has a flag-waving tint. It's Ray Stevens' We the People at No. 58.

Re-entering the album chart are Jason Boland & the Stragglers' High in the Rockies: A Live Album (No. 71), Colt Ford's Live From the Suwannee River Jam (No. 73) and Alan Jackson's Songs of Love and Heartache (No. 75).

The Randy Rogers Band's "Too Late for Goodbye," arriving at No. 55, is the highest-debuting of four new songs. The others are Bomshel's "Just Fine" (No. 56), Steel Magnolia's "Just by Being You (Halo and Wings)" (No. 57) and George Strait's "The Breath You Take" (No. 58).

Rounding out the week's Top 5 albums are the Zac Brown Band's The Foundation, Dierks Bentley's Up on the Ridge, Lambert's Revolution and Carrie Underwood's Play On, in that order.

The No. 2 through No. 5 songs are Jason Aldean's "Crazy Town," Brad Paisley's "Water," Luke Bryan's "Rain Is a Good Thing" and Clay Walker's "She Won't Be Lonely Long."

With the dress rehearsal now completed, the clock is ticking down to the opening of the 2010 CMT Music Awards. Kid Rock hosts the show that airs live Wednesday (June 9) at 8 p.m. ET/PT from the Bridgestone Arena in downtown Nashville.

The night will be highlighted by performances from Toby Keith, Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood and the Zac Brown Band. Keith Urban and John Mayer, who will be featured together on an upcoming episode of CMT Crossroads, will perform "Hit the Ground Runnin'," a track from Urban's Defying Gravity album.

Laura Bell Bundy, Sheryl Crow, Gloriana, Faith Hill, Martina McBride, Kellie Pickler, Blake Shelton, Taylor Swift, Trisha Yearwood and the Zac Brown Band will be presenting awards.

As always, the CMT Music Awards will also feature a wide array of non-country celebrities as presenters. This year's list includes TV personality Paula Deen, American Idol judge Kara Dioguardi, NFL great Terrell Owens, actress Hayden Panettiere, NASCAR legend Richard Petty, actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, comic-actor David Spade and Saturday Night Live's Kenan Thompson. Also presenting awards are Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino from MTV's Jersey Shore and Dancing With the Stars finalists Erin Andrews and Maksim Chmerkovskiy.

During the awards show, Bundy, Easton Corbin, Justin Moore, Steel Magnolia, Trailer Choir and Chris Young are set to perform from the Nationwide Insurance stage. Leading up to the main show, CMT Music Awards Red Carpet 2010 will feature all the excitement of the red carpet arrivals. Hosted by The Singing Bee's Melissa Peterman and CMT's Evan Farmer, the red carpet festivities begin at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

It wasn't exactly a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. When cryptic online ads for an Irving Plaza show featuring Incognito Bandito began appearing about a week ahead of time -- alongside Toby Keith's photo and statements like "the best $25 you'll ever spend" -- there wasn't much detective work required to deduce that the venerable, 1,000-capacity New York City club would be hosting a low-profile concert featuring the country star.

Even so, on the eve of the performance, fans who shelled out for tickets in good faith still couldn't be 100 percent sure they'd see their hero onstage once they got inside.

After a series of hopeful chants of "To-by!" all uncertainties were allayed when Keith finally took the stage. Bearing a battered acoustic guitar and his trademark trucker-on-a-lunch-break look with faded jeans and ball cap, he was flanked by a six-piece band of two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and a jack-of-all-trades on saxophone, harmonica and pedal steel.

They tore into a tough, tight version of Johnny Paycheck's bluesy 1976 hit "11 Months and 29 Days," followed by Roger Miller's good-time "Chug-a-Lug," before Keith paused to tell the enthusiastic but still slightly bemused audience, "This ain't about Toby Keith shit. This is about some of the greatest session players in the world."

He went on to explain that the men and woman backing him have played on his albums time after time, and they decided to book a barely-publicized club date just for fun, figuring, "If they [audience members] show up, they show up. If they don't, f---- 'em!" With a full-scale, summer-long tour set to kick off Saturday (June 19) in nearby Holmdel, N.J., Keith was apparently embracing the opportunity to play whatever tickled his fancy before spending the next three months plowing through his hefty catalog of hits.

After a faithful take on Waylon Jennings' "High Time (You Quit Your Lowdown Ways)," Keith went on to play the only two original tunes of the evening, but even these turned out to be deep cuts. "If You're Tryin', You Ain't" and "Missing Me Some You," from last year's American Ride and 2008's That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy albums, respectively, were never even singles, let alone radio hits. Afterwards, Keith revealed the band had only one rehearsal for the show, adding admiringly "That's how good these f---ers are."

From there on, it was a wild, unpredictable ride through nearly every branch of American music's family tree. Jack Greene's 1969 country hit "Statue of a Fool" gave way to Three Dog Night's "Shambala" before the band settled into the slow, blues-baked feel of R&B hero Johnnie Taylor's "Last Two Dollars." As they moved into the greasy two-step of Jennings' "Waymore Blues," Keith declared "Most of this roots music ain't got a lot of changes in it, you just gotta get the groove really f----ng good."

Keith and company honored another Outlaw legend by sliding into Willie Nelson's nocturnal standard "Night Life" and then geared up for some get-down on a gutbucket-funk version of "Harper Valley PTA." As they worked the crowd up into a roiling, R&B frenzy, it began to seem like a door had opened into an alternate universe where Keith was the leader of the greatest bar band in the world, and he seemed to echo the idea. "How about that for one rehearsal?" he shouted after the song's explosive ending.

The last portion of the almost two-hour show continued to jump from one end of the roots music spectrum to another, with a simmering serving of Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown," a sleazy, slide-guitar-soaked drive through ZZ Top's "Mexican Blackbird" and detours into a hard-country standard, "Truck Driving Man," and a Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." After closing out the set with a sweat-soaked run through the Chuck Berry stomp "Memphis, Tennessee," Keith left the stage sporting a broad smile.

Brought back by a still-hardy crowd, Keith explained, "These are the songs we love and grew up playing," encouraging expectations for repeat performances by adding simply, "We're gonna do this sometimes."

Following a poignant version of Hoyt Axton's Mexican-flavored ballad "Evangelina," the band kicked into funk mode one last time for a burning "Polk Salad Annie," giving the old Tony Joe White tune every ounce of country soul it deserved. A blistering bass solo suddenly slammed things into James Brown territory until the song eventually erupted into a volcanic climax.

Come Saturday, that alternative-universe portal will snap closed -- at least for a while -- and Toby Keith will be an arena-filling superstar again. But the fortunate few on hand at Irving Plaza surely won't soon forget their glimpse into his secret sonic identity as a bar-band bandito.

Remember I posted that video yesterday from WorldStarHipHop.com where these lames allegedly robbed Soulja Boy for his SODMG chain. Well Soulja came back with a video in response to it. First of all he rolls up in his black Lambo, stuntin heavy. Then he shows the replica SODMG chain that "It" (VH1) and his goons purchased from Ebay that they used in their video. And just in case Soulja wasnt killing 'em enough, he whips out his Louis Vuitton briefcase and shows the SODMG chain which is way bigger and has actual onyx diamonds in it versus the Ebay replica. (((Clapping))) Well done Soulja, you showed them. Nice try, I guess "It" and his group of morons are back to the drawing board looking for a better way to gain publicity. Check out the video at the bottom.

Brad Paisley, the proud papa of three-year-old Huck and one-year-old Jasper, says he may soon forget what it was like not being a father. "You feel like what you've done up until now is to prepare yourself for this, and that starts to be a memory that you associate with your kids. So, I can see how eventually, I won't be able to remember who I was before, because it does change you. It's already changed me a little bit, and it'll change me more with every heart attack [they] give me!"

Rascal Flatts' Jay DeMarcus says his father told him "to be the lead singer because they got all the attention and all the women. And I wished I would've listened to my father now." The Flatts real lead singer Gary LeVox says his dad's advice was: "Never eat yellow snow." Jay adds, "Liquor before beer, never fear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. That's what my dad taught me, and I've followed that to a T." That was pretty normal advice with the way the guys grew up. "All our dads have always played honky-tonks, so we've always gotten [that] kind of guidance in our life," explains Gary.

Carrie Underwood knows her dad is proud of her, even if he doesn't tell her himself. "My dad's the kind of person that most likely he'll never look at me or my sisters and say, 'Hey! I'm proud of you,' or 'You're doing a great job,' or anything like that. But I catch him watching things that he's taped of me on TV. That means a lot. I'd meet co-workers of his that used to work with him, and they'd say, 'Your dad has pictures of you all over his desk.' Proud to the world [laughs] ... not so much to me, but proud to the world."

Martina McBride says, "The basic advice that [my father] gave me and all of us kids was just to work hard. I was raised with a really strong work ethic that if you worked hard enough you could have just as good a chance to be successful as anybody else, but it wasn't going to be handed to you. He still asks me if I'm still happy. I love that. He'll say, 'Are you still having fun? Are you happy?' And I think the message in that is do what you love and love what you do and work hard at it."

Keith Urban cites his father as the reason he made it to Nashville and is doing what he loves to do. "His record collection was what got me pointed towards Nashville," says the multi-talented musician. "He drove me to the music store to buy my first guitar. He was always extremely supportive of my music, and I have a lot to to be grateful to him for. Years later, he's still married to my mum, and he's got two sons that love him. So, I think that counts for a good job." Keith actually wrote a tribute to his father, aptly titled 'Song for Dad,' which appears on his 'Golden Road' album.

Being a father himself now, Keith says he loves everything about being a dad to Sunday Rose, who will turn two in a couple of weeks. But he and wife Nicole Kidman do want to instill some core values into their daughter as she grows up. "The biggest thing for us to instill a work ethic, that's the thing that's most problematic for me -- this unwillingness to have a work ethic. The ability to access information so quickly makes people think that their ability to achieve something is also meant to be expedited, but it doesn't work that way. It's never going to work that way, and if we're going to build something solid, it's going to be built slowly, step-by-step-by-step ... and there's nothing sweeter than having to work for something. It's a tremendous feeling."

Alan Jackson hopes his three daughters would say that he was fun and had a sense of humor. "I'm not just some serious dad, and I talk to them. If they're dating some boy, and I want to know what's going on, I'll ask them. I tell them, 'Me and your mom were dating when we were 17, and I know what's going on!'" When Alan was a boy, he says his father never really talked to him, but rather showed him by example. "My daddy never said much, and he never really gave much advice. He just kind of lived it for you, and I've always said that if my parents did anything good for us, it was unintentional, but they left you alone to make your own way but guide you in the right way ... instead of a parent that's pushing you one way or another. They allowed you to do what you wanted to do and supported you."

Dierks Bentley is very grateful to his own father for turning him on to country music as a kid. "My dad is my biggest influence in country music because my dad loved country radio," states the proud father of Evie, who's nearly two years old. "We always drove around listening to country radio -- George Strait, Hank Williams and Randy Travis and all these guys. So, without him, I wouldn't be doing this, that's for sure."

Tim McGraw says family comes before his career. "You don't balance them," he says emphatically. "If you try to balance it, you're fighting a losing battle. I mean, it really isn't a balance. You've got to put your family first and try to do everything you can that way. Whatever's left over can go to your career or whatever else. Your priority list gets a whole lot smaller when you have a family."

Blake Shelton is another who learned by example from his father. "My dad was real good just teaching me patience. He's always been a very patient guy whether it's in business or with women or whatever. He picks the right battles, and I've always admired that about him. My dad has been a rock for my family, since my beginning. He still is that rock, even though my parents aren't married anymore. He's still the person that holds the entire circle together."

Joe Nichols is preparing his nearly teenage daughter, Ashelynn, for the future by teaching her respect now. "Respect for men and respect from men -- I think that's probably going to be the most important influence I can have on her as she grows up. If I show her respect and love, she will look for that in a man later on, rather than the opposite. And that's my job to show her that a man figure in your life can be loving and trusted, and I think that's important. One day, she's going to marry a good man."

Jack Ingram feels he is a father and being a musician is what he does. "Having three kids and being involved with their life on as much of a day-to-day basis as I can be, it creates much more of an atmosphere in my life -- this music business is what I do, and my family is who I am, and that's really what it's done for me. It's created a grand divide and given me levity. This is fun, and I love doing it and it's important because it provides for my family. That's my life -- those kids and my wife, that's who I am!"

Blaine Larsen is the father of Zoe, his two-year-old daughter who is the spitting image of the young singer-songwriter. He says the best thing about being a dad is the love you receive from your child. "The best thing is when I get home and she runs over and gives me a hug and says, 'Daddy,' and she says, 'I love you, Daddy,' and she gives me a kiss -- that's the highlight right now."

We all know that while Drake has plenty of mentors in the rap game (such as Jay-Z and Kanye West), his most important hip-hop role model by far is Lil Wayne.

In light of Weezy’s current incarceration, Drake has been seen rocking “Free Wayne” t-shirts and constantly expressing his support for his mentor, frequent collaborator and friend. Drizzy even gave his opinion of Wayne’s arrest and imprisonment on CNN of all places:

“To him, there’s a whole world moving out there that he hasn’t seen for so long. He was just like, he told me something I never thought I’d hear him say, which was, ‘You’re the ultimate artist. You’re better than me. You don’t have the tattoos, you don’t cause any trouble. People like you.’ He was like, basically, ‘Look at me and look at you.’ He was like, ‘Man, listen. You know what I think you’re about to do? You’re about to do two million.You’re about to do two million the first week. Whatever, man, whatever you do, do not get no tattoos never in your life. They gonna think you got it because you came around me.’ He said the same thing to me [during the Rikers visit]: ‘Don’t change yourself, please. You got it. I’ve never met a young dude that has it figured out, but you got it. Don’t mess it up. Just be you. Sing! Rap! Be you. Don’t stop smiling.’ That’s what he said.” (MTV)

While Wayne spoke specifically about smiles and tattoos, I think his advice has more significance than the exterior. He’s telling Drake not to become influenced by his surroundings and circumstances to the point that he changes who he is and conforms to the norm in the game and the urban community.

This points to a greater issue in the urban community. All too often, we tend to celebrate and glorify our culture’s less than glorious features. We need to realize that even if we have had to learn to endure the worst of our culture, this merely makes that endurance a necessity, not an aspiration. Also, by branding ourselves with the image and attitude that are often associated with our worst, we diminish our self-worth and give those we meet the unfair opportunity to limit and narrow their view of who we are (not that some wouldn’t do it anyway).

Certain words from the man born Dwayne Michael Carter jump out at me. “You don’t cause trouble. People like you.” Those words are in direct conflict with the gangsta image so popular within the culture of hip-hop and that so many attempt to emulate in their daily lives.

What Drake has ‘figured out,’ and what more of us need to learn, is that who he is is quite good enough. It appears Wayne has had a lot of time to think and possibly reconsider his lifestyle while locked up, and almost sounds somewhat regretful of some of his decisions. Because he’s so influential, it will be important to see if he makes corresponding changes upon his release.

Until then, he will certainly remain in the thoughts and prayers of fans worldwide.