A concert featuring blog-rappers the Cool Kids and Wu-Tang Clan legend GZA might look at first glance to be a passing of the hip-hop torch, but GZA isn't giving it up quite so easily.

GZA, aka Gary Grice, rocked a crowd of thousands at Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square on Sunday to mark the end of another NXNE, giving everyone who showed up for the free show exactly what they wanted. The old-school traditionalists got a set heavy with classics from the Wu-Tang catalog and his seminal album 'Liquid Swords,' while new-school fans were thrilled by the now-ubiquitous presence of King Khan, who brought his dime-store guitar to the stage for a handful of tracks.

The show opened with the classic '4th Chamber,' and the laid-back beat and Khan's twangy guitar built excitement from the start. Other highlights of the woefully short 40-minute set included 'Liquid Swords,' the call-and-response of 'Clan in Da Front' and a tribute to fallen comrade Ol' Dirty Bastard on his classic 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya.'

Just as satisfying as the ageless rhymes was GZA's appreciation for the fans who came to see him. When the organizers told him he had five more minutes, he brushed them off and did 10, and when the set finished, he spent several more minutes shaking hands and signing autographs.

Canada's biggest music festival is about to take over downtown Toronto's music venues, bars, theatres, squares and curfews for five ear-blasted and booze-drenched days and nights. But with over 500 bands and 100,000 people expected, North by Northeast can seem overwhelming.

So here's a handy breakdown of NXNE '09. You can thank us when you recover!

What's it all about?

Started in 1994 and modeled after Austin, Texas' SXSW festival, NXNE has grown into a massive showcase of music, speakers, movies and arts from more than 25 countries.

Miles Copeland grew up around spies and diplomats -- his dad worked for the C.I.A. and the family lived in the Middle East for much of his childhood. Still, he was surprised to get a call from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office a few years ago. He thought it was a friend pulling a joke.

Instead, it was the start of a chain of events that took him to Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan to recruit Arabic stars for collaborations in Los Angeles with Western musicians. In Cairo, he found boisterous shaabi-style pop star Saad El Soghayar. In Damascus, he signed up devout Muslim composer/keyboard player Tareq Al Nasser. Beirut, at the time reeling from military conflict with Israel and the bombing assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, yielded both young singer-activist Tania Saleh and pioneering hip-hop artist Wael Kodeih (a.k.a. Rayess Bek). Also brought into the project was Iraqi guitarist-composer Ilham Al Madfai, whose groundbreaking blends of Western and traditional music in the '60s and '70s led to him living in exile since the 1979 revolution.

For their upcoming album, 'Villainaire,' the Dead Science took inspiration from an unlikely source. "The Wu-Tang Clan hold a heavy thematic and stylistic influence over 'Villianaire,'" Dead Science bandleader Sam Mickens tells Spinner. Specifically, Mickens identified with the Clan's "mode of embedding a great deal of content subdermally into their songs."

Throughout 'Villianaire,' fans can expect recurring themes, buried treasures and other Tang-flavored treats. "Also, a lot of their content grapples essentially with the tension between being a fairly degenerate type of dude and trying to maintain higher aspects of your intelligence and consciousness," Mickens, who embraced that concept -- as well as straight-up Wu-Tang Clan references -- in many of the songs on the album, says.

When pressed, many musicians will admit that what they really want to do is act, and many actors will admit that what they really want to do is direct. But what Wu-Tang Clan mastermind, established solo artist, actor, soundtrack composer and author RZA really wants to do is become a one-man U.S. government think tank. "They'd have to pay me millions of dollars for it 'cause I got a millionaire life, know what I mean? Maybe that's the reason it don't happen," he says, laughing. But he seems to be pretty serious about the concept. "All these f---ing ideas I got in the scientific world, they just not being heard because I'm a musician. That's kind of weird. I was talking to my wife about this recently. I was like, 'Yo, don't you think [the government] should just hire me and put me in a research lab for ten years so I can just research something?'"

Until that day when he puts on his government-issued lab coat, RZA has got a new release from his alter ego Bobby Digital set for release this month. 'Digi Snacks' is the third concept album dealing with the exploits of his character, this time augmented by the contributions of members of System of a Down, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante and rapper David Banner. RZA has found inspiration in some of cinema's greatest for his Bobby Digital persona. "When I made the first Bobby Digital album, I was inspired by Robert De Niro. I was high, of course," he admits. "I have many voices in my head, many styles of rhyming. I said, 'I'm gonna become a character when I do my styles.' For me, it's all part of expressing artistic creativity, whether I'm doing it musically, acting on the silver screen or whether I'm sitting there playing chess."

• Wu-Tang Clan's RZA will return as his alter ego, Bobby Digital, for a new album, titled 'Digi Snax.' The effort hits shelves on July 1.
  

• Legendary music executive Clive Davis was replaced by Barry Weiss as chairman and chief executive officer of the BMG label group on Thursday. Davis will become the chief creative officer of Sony BMG.

• Sheryl Crow announced a new U.S. leg of her world tour. The second round of dates will launch on July 24 in Nashville, and wrap in Auburn, Washington on August 30.