Rivers Cuomo, lead singer of Weezer, recently shocked his fans—and the rest of the bemused music world, still chuckling after learning Cuomo planned to call the band’s new record Raditude (due Tues., Nov. 3)—by announcing that a new song would feature a rap verse from Lil’ Wayne. What Cuomo, who even at 39 still looks like he gets his head flushed in the high school bathroom, is doing hanging around with Lil’ Wayne, who dropped out of high school at age 14 and told Katie Couric on national television that he still smokes pot (“I’m a rapper. That’s who I am, Miss Katie, and I am a gangster, and I do what I want. And I love to smoke.”), is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Cuomo, too awkward and shy to ask for directions, got lost and ended up in Lil’ Wayne’s studio by accident?

The origins of the Weezer/Weezy collaboration aside, this sort of genre-hopping seems to have become the norm recently. As Yale learned firsthand last year, mashup artists like Girl Talk are more popular than ever, and (although I’m still not sure this is actually going to happen), Lil’ Wayne says he’s recording a rock album. Even more surprising was the end-of-summer news that Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed up at a Grizzly Bear concert in Brooklyn—when asked, Jay-Z called the indie titans an “incredible band,” saying that “what the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring.” He continued, noting that he feels indie is in the same place rap was ten years ago, that he hopes indie music will “push rap back a bit because it will force people to make great music for the sake of making great music.”

Jay-Z’s got a big heart—he’s so generous with the cute little indie bands, green behind the ears, getting their first taste of the Real World. But he’s behind the times, and surprisingly, Weezer and Lil’ Wayne had the right idea: It’s not important, like Jay-Z claims, for the two genres to push each other, but for musicians to stop feeling bound to genres altogether, for indie and rap and any other genres out there to stop looking at themselves as so different in the first place. Instead of pushing apart, genres should be pushing together, referencing, borrowing, and stealing elements from other genres. Even if Jay-Z hasn’t realized this—and his lackluster, by-the-numbers, The Blueprint III seems proof enough that he hasn’t—plenty of other artists already have.

The most obvious ones doing the so-called breaking down of genre barriers are, of course, the mashup artists, who—with little more than brute force and varying degrees of tact and cleverness—combine two or more disparate musical styles into the same track. The popularity of Girl Talk, The Hood Internet, or Super Mash Bros shows that there’s certainly a market for songs that fit no established genre, but the fact that most of these songs rely heavily on the “gotcha” moment of realization—“Oh my god, that’s like, Kanye rapping! But Death Cab For Cutie is singing! So cool! I love mashups!”—means they end up, more often than not, feeling like gimmicks.

Still, that is not to say that all genre-hopping works boil down to parlor tricks. Some of the best artists out there today are the ones who didn’t stop at the edges of their style’s domain, but traveled deep into foreign territory to bring back the musical equivalents of Columbus-era spices. Guys like Cleveland rapper Kid Cudi, whose new album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, actually features some mainstays of the music scene Jay-Z speaks so highly of, namely MGMT and Ratatat, and Yoni Wolf from indie-hop band Why?, whose bleak, poetic rapping fuses seamlessly with indie instrumentation, are the ones who are pushing music in general, not just their respective genres. Bands like Animal Collective, who stole the Beach Boys’ vocal harmonies, flipped them upside down, and bathed them in layers of reverb and noise, all set to a tribal drum beat, or Beirut, who after a teenage Euro-trip borrowed Balkan brass instruments and melodies and French chanson sounds, and fused them with a Magnetic Fields-influenced indie aesthetic, are the ones to watch.

What Jay-Z missed is exactly why he is getting left behind by the younger generation. He was close, but still not right. It’s not about indie pushing rap music, but about ditching the boundaries altogether. Rather than separate distinct forces pushing together, music should be a big, gooey communal blob, with ideas slipping from group to group through diffusion and through osmosis, divisions forgotten. All of us are friends anyways, right Jay-Z?