Nicki Minaj was six years old in 1990, when Island Records released Lin Que's first album, "Rebel Soul." Lin herself was then only 18. She was a member of the Black Nationalist group X Clan and was known as Isis. Just a year removed from high school, she traveled the world, meeting celebrities like Prince and Diana Ross. “I got bit by that bug, you know?” Lin told me on the phone last spring. “I’m a teenager and I want to be a star—but I don’t know shit.”

What she didn’t know would eventually hurt her. By 1997, Lin had signed three additional record deals, but "Rebel Soul" remained her only full-length album. She had sat through countless meetings with A&R executives, publicists and producers, attempting to convince them all that she could sell records, that the music she wanted to produce was both meaningful and marketable to the public. She had written and recorded enough songs to fill multiple albums, but label after label told her that they “couldn’t hear the single.” Lin got more frustrated with each meeting. She couldn’t understand the industry and her place in it. “I’m like, wait a minute: you signed me, so why don’t you just trust me?” Lin said. “Just trust me. I am hip hop! I live this.” READ MORE

A declaration of "holy shit!" seems to be the standard response to this. And I agree. Listen to this vocals-only track of the Rolling Stones song "Gimme Shelter." Listen to the part that comes around 2 minutes and 50 seconds in, when back-up singer Merry Clayton is singing. Is the hair on your arms standing up? No? Then you don't have hair on your arms. Or arms. (In which case, sorry. This is not so funny.) The Dangerous Minds website has put up all the instrumental component tracks that went into making the song. And, again, holy shit. It's awesome.

And tempting fodder, I imagine, for some enterprising young hip-hop producer who might like to sample bits from each of track and make a new song out of them. READ MORE

Here is Rock, a.k.a. "Da Rockness Monstah," one-half of the Brooklyn duo Heltah Skeltah, rhyming over the beat to Tupac's "Ambitionz As a Ridah." (It is, I think, the best beat of any Tupac song; it was made by Snoop's cousin, Daz Dillinger, of the Dog Pound.) Fifteen years ago, Heltah Skeltah was a major part of the Boot Camp Clik, a collective that also included Black Moon, Smif-n-Wessun (who changed their name to the Cocoa Brovaz after the firearms company sued them), and O.G.C. (Originoo Gunn Clappaz), and recorded for Duck Down Entertainment, the label Black Moon MC Buckshot started with his partner Dru Ha. Boot Camp were some of the most outrageous spellers rap has ever known, and their music was great. READ MORE

Earlier this month, students across the UK began protesting against planned increases in tuition fees and the cutting of university services. Today, students have been occupying buildings in Birmingham and hurling snowballs in Edinburgh and marching in London. All of this thoughtful demonstrating—which is winding down in arrests and some clubbings and the offering of mince pies to politicians—takes place against the dramatic backdrop of the first demonstrations on November 10th, when tens of thousands of young people stormed London. At the end, in Millbank, in central London, some demonstrators smashed windows; fires were set; and an occupation of Conservative headquarters by a few hundred ensued (from that building, an 18-year-old threw a fire extinguisher off the roof). Further, the second wave of demonstrations, on November 24, went off with some hitches when some small violence against property ensued and the police cornered and arrested a number of marchers.

The media refers to both the November 10th and November 24th demonstrations as "riots." ("As Students Rampage...," headlined the Mirror last week.) So what is becoming lost is what the November 10th demonstration was like for the 30,000 to 50,000 peaceful protesters who flooded the streets outside Parliament in defense of higher education. READ MORE

"Will.i.am has recused himself from the questions. He’s just rocking his club, and not badly."
—Ben Ratliff, in today's review of the Black Eyed Peas' new album, The Beginning.

"I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictment. It is illegal being not appointed by the UN General Assembly, so I have no need to appoint counsel to (an) illegal organ."
—Slobodan Milosevic, at the opening of his 2001 hearings before the International War Crimes Tribunal.

The problem with making the Internet safe is that it would necessarily make the Internet the same. That's the reason Facebook creeps people out: it tries to impose a uniform user interface on the existing heterogeneous online experience to make it appear homogenous, and in so doing actually transform the culture into one where everything is the same. In an op-ed in today's Times, Julie Zhuo, a product design manager at Facebook, goes further, proposing that non-Facebook content providers standardize their approach to anonymous commenting to rid the Internet of trolls. (Or hey, maybe they could just use the Facebook commenting system!) But what would the Internet be without trolls? Hell, what would New York City be without trolls? Denying the ability of different online communities to respond to disruptive or contrary commenters in a way that reflects the values of that community ultimately denies the wonderful cornucopia of microcultures that is the fantastic, awful Internet we all know and (mostly) love. READ MORE

"Chefs, among them Hes ton Blumenthal of Bray, England, New York City’s Wylie Dufresne, and Chicago’s Grant Achatz, have taken to foaming all manner of savory foods. These dishes have an aura of mystique about them and not just for their novel texture. Although foams may look like random jumbles, the bubbles within all foams seem to self-organize to obey three universal rules first observed by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau in 1873. These rules are simple to describe but have been remarkably hard to explain. The first rule is that whenever bubbles join, three film surfaces intersect at every edge. Not two; never four—always three. Second, each pair of intersecting films, once they have stabilized, forms an angle of exactly 120 degrees. Finally, wherever edges meet at a point, the edges always number exactly four, and the angle is always the inverse cosine of –1/3 (about 109.5 degrees)."
—Foam is scientifically interesting. But I still wish chefs would stop trying to pass it off as sauce. Because it doesn't taste as good.