I didn't even know that Thebe Kgositsile, a.k.a. Earl Sweatshirt, went to my elementary school before I started leafing through old copies of "The Poet Tree," the poetry collection from our alma mater, Community Magnet School in Los Angeles.
His poem "Mummies" (my favorite of the two here) needs no explanation, except to note that it's incredible to see a five- or six-year-old with the swagger of Biggie or the like. This bigger-than-the-world-and-all-the-scary-things-in-it mentality is something that many rappers front, but what makes Earl Sweatshirt so amazing is that he's genuinely had it since he was a tot (just compare his poem to the one below his to see the [...]
Tucked on 7th Avenue, between 35th and 36th, sits the music store Rock and Soul, which has been providing the city's DJs with gear and vinyl since 1975. Over the decades, a number of influential DJs and musicians have made Rock and Soul their hub, among them Kid Capri, who deejayed for seven seasons of Def Comedy Jam and has produced tracks for Heavy D and Quincy Jones; DJ Funkmaster Flex, who played a pivotal role in introducing hip hop across the radio waves on NYC’s Hot 97; and legendary hip hop pioneer Kool Herc.
A couple years ago, the store started offering DJ lessons, and [...]
Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.
Hip hop’s lyrical narrative often gets unfairly abbreviated to being about nothing more than posturing and persona, a never-ending series of mostly meaningless boasts about how nice my rhymes sound, and so on. That’s been a component of the story for a long time—recall Sugar Hill Gang’s proud pronouncement, in 1979, that “I got a color TV, so I can see/the Knicks play basketball”—but hip hop verses are also a place for confessions, specifically for those of black men. There's a reason, for example, that Scarface once wrote a song [...]
Mister Cee, a Hot 97 DJ and semi-old-school hip-hop guy, was arrested last week and charged with public lewdness and exposure, according to the NYPD. The rumor mill has been great on the blogs! A sample: "Rumors of Mr. Cee engaging in homosexual activity have run rampant for years"! And there's some great hedging: "allegedly arrested after he was caught receiving oral sex from a male prostitute dressed as a woman, according to several news reports." What could it all mean? Perhaps… an "April Fool's Day prank or possibly someone that is not too fond of Calvin Lebrun aka DJ Mister Cee set him up [...]
I'm not always a big one for instrumental music. My mind starts to wander if someone isn't singing or shouting at me. But this track from rapper/producer/Def Jux Records founder El-P is excellent in a way that would be like if Dan the Automator had gotten Dave Pajo to play on the Dr. Octagon album. And the video, directed by Shan Nelson, is really terrific, too.
Man, when you're on a roll. To accompany his comeback single "Power," which has many people standing up at their computer terminals to shout out loud and type extra hard about how much they love it, Kanye West went and got the renowned New Hampshire-born artist George Condo to paint his portrait for the cover.
The text at the beginning of Drake's video for "HYFR"—"On October 24th 2011 Aubrey 'Drake' Graham chose to get re-bar mitzvah'd as a re-commitment to the Jewish religion … the following is a clip displaying the event that took place"—can be taken as seriously or sardonically as you want. Drake's much-anticipated "bar mitzvah" video, released on the first night of Passover, was originally hyped on the web as a "re-creation" of his original childhood ceremony. We get actual footage from baby Drake’s celebration at the intro, but beyond that, this is a music video staged at a bar mitzvah. If we hadn’t been told in advance that it means [...]
Consider this: according to Discogs.com, about 800 remixes were released in 1983. In 1990, more than 4,000; in 2000, almost 15,000. And in 2010, there were 22,750 remixes released, an increase of more than 450% in twenty years. Not surprisingly, as that number has leapt up, remixes also have come to represent a much larger share of what's being released: in 1983, they accounted for 2% of all releases; 7% in 1990; 17% in 2000; until, by 2010, a staggering 20% of all releases were remixes.
How did we get to the point where a one-hit-wonder band from the '90s like Marcy Playground can release an entire [...]
When I was in eighth grade, I was madly in love. But the girl, who I wanted to marry and sometimes wrote sad poems about, didn't feel the same way. So I decided to prove my love with a mixtape. For me, music was (and still is) the most intense force in the world, so I thought this would truly make her reciprocate my affection. I set my plan in motion by stealing my oldest brother's Motley Crue cassette, putting pieces of tape over those tiny holes so I could record over the screeching of Vince Neil, and adding songs to my mixtape that would show just how great I [...]
Sad hip-hop news: Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell, whose block parties in the Bronx in the 1970s gave birth to hip-hop, is sick with an undisclosed illness and having trouble paying his medical bills. A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip suggests, "maybe island/defjam, warner, interscope, can pay dj kool herc's hospital bills?" That would be nice.
Kanye West seems to really like Hawaii, where he is recording his new album, A Good Ass Job. So much so that he has put his kind of boring 3-bedroom, 4,214-square-foot Hollywood house, built in 2002 at 7882 Fareholm Drive, up for sale for $3,995,000. (It's way overbuilt on the lot, which is only 5,320 square feet.) The decor is what you'd expect: the cool earth-tones and open space of the "Love Lockdown" video, set of by bright-blue pop art, giant-sized children toys and Takashi Murakami stuff. It gets a little Romper-Roomy sometimes, but the fish-tank bathtub is the best idea since Hot Tub [...]
Earlier this month, Becca Simone’s music appreciation class at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, NY, sat down to a test. It was four pages long. The test started with:
1. List three characteristics about the Bronx in the 1970s:
2. What type of music was popular during the 1970’s when the hip hop movement was beginning?
And once the students got through those (and the 28 questions following) they were met with the essay question:
Part 2. Write a brief (about 5-8 sentences) response about the hip hop movement. What about it do you find interesting? How has the music changed over the years (i.e., in terms of [...]
Aubrey “Drake” Graham released his sophomore album, Take Care, the other week. On it, Drake talks about many women, and sometimes a single woman, and all the ways they’ve hurt and mistreated the rapper-singer from Toronto. And, of course, there is one song on the album he reserves to sing directly to the ladies. It’s called “Make Me Proud"—and it’s his requisite Song for Women.
It's hard to think of a current rapper who’s gotten as much out of this tradition as Drake, the 25 year old who is “hip-hop’s current center of gravity.” The Song For Women is not a new staple in hip hop—go back [...]
Late on Friday night, I joined a lot of other white people at the Highline Ballroom to see Odd Future. At the door, a girl in a Juicy sweatshirt handed out paper masks of Tyler, The Creator’s face. The image was borrowed from his self-designed Goblin album cover. There were eyeholes punched out, so that you couldn’t see the milky black irises he’d Photoshopped onto his own face, and so that every person there could resemble Tyler while they chanted “swag,” “goblin,” and “Free Earl," who needs no freeing, at the 20-year-old with a microphone and a record deal who claims not to care for his own music.
"It was definitely a landmark for the underground movement of the '90s. Young people who've never touched wax probably don't know what the closing of a store like this means… It just means that we're heading to a place where music won't exist in a physical form anymore." -Rap producer DJ Spinna on the news that Fat Beats, a store on the corner of 6th Ave. and 8th Street in Manhattan that specialized in vinyl records and served a hip-hop community that might best be described as the opposite of this, will close its doors next month after 16 years in operation. (The LA outpost [...]
Rap Radar's B.Dot says T-Pain's new chain looks like "a bedazzled dildo." He's right. It does. Meanwhile, that massive medallion swinging from Kanye's neck during his performance at Sunday's BET awards? It was in the shape of the falcon-headed Egyptian deity Horus, and it cost $300,000. So there you go.
There was a benefit concert at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn last night to raise money to help A Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg, who has diabetes, pay his medical bills. At the end of the show, Phife's old partners Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad joined him onstage to perform a string of songs from 1993's Midnight Marauders album. Here's "Oh My God"-during which Q-Tip mimes the act of giving Phife dialysis-and "Award Tour." Pretty joyous.
