New Year’s Eve offers a few guarantees: drunk, raucous crowds with tacky countdown goggles, a boom in sales for streamers, confetti and whistles and, for those who decide to celebrate from the couch, "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve."

For its 39^th consecutive year, the show, now hosted by Ryan Seacrest after Clark suffered a stroke in 2004, will once again ring in the new year with an impressive lineup.

The more than three-hour bicoastal celebration will feature performances from Drake, Willow Smith, Jennifer Hudson, La Roux, Far East Movement, Jason Derülo, Mike Posner, Natasha Bedingfield, Ne-Yo, Avril Lavigne and Train from both Los Angeles and Times Square in New York.

Black Eyed Peas frontwoman Fergie is returning for a fifth year to host the Hollywood portion, while Seacrest will be joined by funny girl-cum-bestselling author Jenny McCarthy from Times Square.  

As usual, Clark will be doing the countdown to midnight from the comfort and warmth of ABC studios.

-- Gerrick D. Kennedy
twitter.com/gerrickkennedy

Photo: Willow Smith performs live at the holiday tree lighting and opening of the L.A. Kings' holiday ice rink at L.A. Live on Saturday. Credit: Katy Winn / Associated Press

Pop & Hiss is live -- sort of! We're about 4 miles from MTV's annual pat-on-the-back party, but we're still grading all the performances as fast as we can, complete with typos. The two hours of hype will be documented here, but we also recommend you follow the tweets of our chief pop critic Ann Powers.  

 
Eminem, "Not Afraid/Love the Way You Lie." The show begins with a close-up of Eminem, his face shrouded in a hoodie, all Dungeons & Dragons sorcerer-like. But there's no 20-sided playfulness here, as Em is all solemn and serious -- stalking the stage face-down and plundering it with rhymes. "Not Afraid" is an overly forced tale of overcoming addiction, but it's stronger than anything off of last year's "Relapse." It comes alive as Em struts from a brick-adorned back room to a stage that's spread among a host of Googie-inspired symmetrics, allowing for some creative displays of light. Eminem has stolen some of Kanye West's "Heartless" drum line, and it gives the cut some award-show oomph, but doesn't add to the song's tenseness so much as explode it. The tautness comes courtesy of Rihanna, who appears onstage with a colorful, Hayley Williams-like hairdo. Her vocal delivery is straight-up stern, the perfect counterpoint to Em's more forceful hits. Overall, a solid opening: B

Justin Bieber, "Baby." Remember a couple years ago when the Jonas Brothers performed outdoors at the MTV VMAs? This year it's Bieber who’s the young'un who can't play inside with the grown-ups. He rolls up to the  downtown L.A. venue in a red convertible, chased by teenage girls. His "Baby" is fluffy retro-teen pop, and the vintage car and screaming girls attempt to connect Bieber to idols of yore. But Bieber is no Beatle, and his "Baby" is the kind of inescapable pop hit that already sounds dated, forever affixed to spring 2010. It's a sugar high, and Bieber isn't here to sing it so much as to show off his high-flying dance moves in his Team Bieber varsity jackets. But lest we think he's completely void of musical talent, he makes a brief racket on the drum set, immediately after dancing with some tykes half his size. The giant "B" on Beiber's jacket tells us what squad he’s playing for, but this belongs to the Mickey Mouse Club: D

Surprising precisely no one, Canadian rapper Drake topped the Billboard album chart Wednesday, selling 447,000 copies of his debut album, “Thank Me Later” – the year’s most heavily hyped hip-hop release – in its first week.

As is well known, the 23-year-old Toronto native has some heavyweight institutional backing: His mentor and Young Money label boss is rap rainmaker Lil Wayne, and Kanye West serves as Drake’s frequent cornerman (the producer-rapper-Auto Tune over-achiever produced two songs on “Thank Me Later” and raps on Drake’s hit single, “Forever”). Others co-signing for the validity of hip-hop’s undisputed Young Lion include Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Young Jeezy and Jamie Foxx. Never mind that Drake started off as a teen TV star on the Canadian high school drama “DeGrassi: The Next Generation” before reinventing himself as a rap star.

If there is a knock against Drake, however, it’s primarily that he was born on third base and has gone through life feeling like he hit a triple (as the old aphorism goes).

With that in mind, P&H; would like to shed light on a little-known factoid about the artist alternately known as Drizzy Drake: As a young teen, he refined his rap skills with the help of a hip-hop elder with unimpeachable street cred -- dude happened to be behind bars, serving a prison sentence at the time he was hollering at Drake.

Canadian soap opera-star-turned rapper Drake titled his 2009 debut EP "So Far Gone." He's proving to be anything but, as the young star's full-length entrée "Thank Me Later" entered the U.S. pop chart at No. 1, tallying first-week sales of 447,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

That number is good enough to give Drake 2010's third-highest debut, placing him behind first-week totals from the likes of Sade and Lady Antebellum. Sade's "Soldier of Love" moved 502,000 copies in its first week, and Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" posted an initial showing of 481,000 copies. 

There was some speculation by the media that Drake would have a massive, Lil Wayne-type debut, including a leading MTV headline that proclaimed Drake could sell 1 million. Yet Drake's total still builds mightily on last year's "So Far Gone," which entered at No. 6 with 73,000 copies sold. To date, the latter has moved 485,000 copies, and it rests this week at No. 7.

Entering at No 2 is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Mojo," which received a heavy boost from a ticket promotion. Those who purchased tickets to Petty's summer tour were offered a chance to download the artist's first album with the Heartbreakers since 2002's "The Last DJ," and it helped give "Mojo" a solid first week of 125,000 copies sold.

Downloading the album was a relatively easy process, as ticket buyers were guided via e-mail to a website to redeem the album on its day of release."We've gone back and forth on various scenarios," said Billboard's director of charts Silvio Pietroluongo about the decision to include the concert-related downloads in the first week sales tally."In the move to digital, we've OK'd a bundle where you receive a redemption code, so the consumer still has to make an active decision and download it ... You'd be surprised at what the redemption percentage was, and this one was very high."

For most of the last decade, major-label rappers extolled the virtues of the “good life,” a sentiment best expressed by the Champagne-sipping Kanye West single of the same name. The vanguards of the next generation seem determined to convey the exact opposite: the perils of being young, gifted and miserable. This is the conflict at the core of 23-year-old Drake's debut album, “Thank Me Later” — how to reconcile fame and fortune with the aggravations of living in the public eye.

Like his peer Kid Cudi, the Toronto rapper-singer born Aubrey Graham uses West as his central aural and emotive influence (West produces the tracks “Show Me a Good Time” and “Find Your Love”). Ignoring West's celebratory side, Drake continues where “808s & Heartbreak” left off, in search of anthems for the easily alienated.

A former child actor-turned-Cash Money prospect-turned-hip-hop's next great hope, Drake sets the tone on the very first line of his official debut with the admission that “the money changed everything.” On “Karaoke,” he kvetches, “don't be fooled by the money, I'm still just young and unlucky.” The hit single “Over” centers on the lonely-in-a-crowd hook, “I've seen way too many people … who I didn't know last year.” Boasting rigid rhyme schemes descended from his other mentor Lil Wayne, Drake often finds himself outclassed by his blockbuster guests: Jay-Z, T.I., Young Jeezy and Wayne.

The album's salvation is its immaculate chrome-plated production and silken pop hooks — like some unholy amalgamation of the Backstreet Boys, Phil Collins and Mase. Unfortunately, the emotionally charged lyrics rarely evolve beyond platitudes, exposing a profound emptiness at its core. The gratitude can wait, but therapy now might not be such a bad idea.

— Jeff Weiss

Drake
"Thank Me Later"
Cash Money/Universal
Two and a half stars (Out of four)

Given the kind of saturation radio play he's been getting around the FM dial for the last few months, you'd be forgiven for lumping Canadian hip-hop supremo Drake in with the likes of Justin Bieber or the Black Eyed Peas -- as little more than a mainstream mainstay. A pop prince more concerned with mass appeal than artistic integrity.

But to hear it from Drizzy (who is profiled in this Sunday Calendar story), nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a demonstrated crossover appeal that resulted in an intense major label bidding war in 2009, Drake considers himself a true hip-hop head -- an unreconstructed "backpack rapper" who has somehow convinced the mainstream to remake itself in his image rather than vice versa.

In an interview with Pop & Hiss at a penthouse suite of the SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills last month, Drake emphasized his "credibility," recalling a phase when he held certain strong convictions at odds with his present situation as rap's No. 1 draft pick. "Everything mainstream is wack. I just want to rap, man. I want to rap like Jay[-Z] but my favorite rapper is Phonte" of North Carolina alt-hip-hop duo Little Brother.

Moreover, Drake seemed downright apprehensive about being tarred and feathered by rap aficionados as "not hip-hop enough." In the lead-up to his much-anticipated debut album "Thank Me Later," which goes on sale Tuesday, the 23-year-old MC took pains to portray even his biggest hits -- like "Best I Ever Had," which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year -- as "real" rap records, not gimmick-y pop ditties.

In the process, he gave an explicit shout-out to A Tribe Called Quest band members Phife Dawg and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. "I used to be a real backpack rapper. That was my thing," Drake said, leaning back on a white leather sofa. "I even say on this album, 'I'm just trying to kick it like Ali Shaheed and Phife Dawg/Because people really hate when a backpack rapper get rich or start living that life, dog.'"