You thought Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was tough? Try keeping a slot in an of-the-moment girl group. There…
D12 Devil’s Night (Shady/Interscope) Eminem told Spin recently that he started his label, Shady Records, only to put out his…
Hip-hop’s first don was Russell Simmons, who in the early ’80s partnered with a longhair named Rick Rubin and converted…
This week, I listened to albums so you don’t have to. . . .
No artist in hip-hop has gone as criminally unsung as Scarface. For well over a decade, the Houston native has…
It’s hard work representing for the hip-hop nation. So hard, in fact, that no institution seems capable of giving out…
After my dad got burned in a carburetor explosion at the auto repair shop he owned and managed, my mom…
Mariah Carey strips down to a rawer hip-hop sound.
Making up is hard to do. At last week’s MTV Video Music Awards, Destiny’s Child (at least, what’s left of…
Do you remember the Los Angeles season of MTV’s The Real World? Race and politics were all over that ill-fated…
Seeing a bunch of white guys bopping across MTV pretending to be rappers is no cause for critical reflection these…
Methinks the baller doth protest too much. Polite, gold-toothed, braided, and jovial-as-he-wants-to-be, 8ball is hardly the prototype for post-Too Short…
We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1895) We wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our…
Mos Def and company transition from hip-hop to Hendrix, but can it be done?
Chick rappers used to be only slightly more popular than white rappers. Or gay rappers. In the brutally masculinist world…
PASTOR TROY Face Off Madd Society/Universal PREFUSE 73 Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives Warp THE SOUTH’S FIRST HIP-HOP wave may…
RAS KASS Van Gogh (Priority) Ras Kass was the answer. Seven years ago, the Carson, Calif., native appeared out of…
FABOLOUS Ghetto Fabolous (Desert Storm/Elektra) Twenty-plus years of hip-hop evolution—a steady, sometimes seismic process of natural selection—and at the beginning…
About a month before 360hiphop.com launched, the bombs started dropping. Every morning, as folks would turn on their machines, the…
I had checked off “percussion” when Ms. Weiskopf handed out the thin slip of paper that listed our sixth-grade band…
Pity the P. Diddy. For the past two weeks, Sean Combs has been trapped in court all day, listening to…
Hip-hop’s lyrical fight club
Certain things are meant to be bought on the street. It’s clear, for example, that the trade in certain mind-altering…
