A little Foo Fighters action? Dave Grohl and company have two albums in the latest installment of the ’90s best albums. See who else made the cut!
Posts tagged "Nas"
Spin Cycle: Lil’ Wayne’s “Tha Carter IV”
Rapper Lil’ Wayne once said, via an album title, I Am Not A Human Being. Listening to his new album, Tha Carter IV, it’s not difficult to see where Wayne was coming from – it’s not difficult to envision the rapper being dropped from a UFO into someone’s Hollywood backyard on a quiet, chilly night. The objective? To ruin hip-hop by turning it into an exaggerated version of its worst stereotypes, to behave in a deliberately bizarre fashion to court […]
Rolling Stone Introduces “The King of Hip-Hop” In New Article
…and actually, I have less of a bitch about this than you might think. Of course, Rolling Stone magazine has never exactly been the go-to place for anything related to hip-hop culture, so I automatically took their list of hip-hop titans with a grain of salt-even before I dug into it. However, upon reading it, I realized that their list was less about a “best rapper of all-time” discussion (which, let’s face it, would place them WAY out of their element) and more about […]
Blerd Briefs: Sly’s Back (?), Common Switches Labels & Doughty Goes On Tour!
In “News You Never Expected to Receive”, how about this one? Sly & the Family Stone are releasing a new album! Well…sort of. I’m Back! Family and Friends is the title of the Sly & the Family Stone album being released on August 16th. It’s the first album released by Sly in nearly thirty years. The album consists of re-workings of Sly classics like “Everyday People” and “Stand!”, as well as three new songs. If you can only come up […]
Hear Here: “Nasty” by Nas
Yeah, he’s stillmatic. Despite releasing an excellent collaboration album with Damian Marley last year, Nas has been in the headlines more recently for gossip rag-type stuff. The controversy he faced upon titling his last solo album Nigger (later changed to Untitled after allegedly catching flak from his record label…I’d be more inclined to believe it was all a publicity stunt), drama with his now ex-wife Kelis, major financial woes and the typical rapper label woes (remember the open letter to […]
Festival Summer: Rock the Bells & Afro-Punk Announce Lineups
Quiet as kept, the Rock the Bells festival has become THE event for hip-hop fans every summer. The 2011 iteration of the road show just announced it’s lineup for this summer, and Lauryn Hill and Nas are the main attractions. Hill, whose wildly inconsistent performances (not to mention habitual lateness) drew the ire of many fans last year, will be looking to redeem herself on the 2011 jaunt. Hopefully we get more soulful, inspired performances like the one she did […]
The 5ive at 5: Reasons Not to Hate will.i.am (#2)
I’ve never been that big a fan of will.i.am to begin with, so he never really has to do a lot to impress me. When it comes to Nas, though, it’s a much different story. The gifted rhymer had been jumping in and out of my good graces for almost a decade and a half by the time “Hip-Hop is Dead” came out in 2006. His prior album, “Street’s Disciple”, still stands as one of the albums I’ve been most […]
New Release Report 9/21/10: Wanna Get Your Hands All Over Maroon 5?
I’m scared of the new Maroon 5 album, “Hands All Over” ( purchase on Amazon mp3 ). The first single, “Misery”, seemed like the height of laziness to me. If you stuck “This Love” and “Makes Me Wonder” in a blender, the result would be “Misery”, and despite the critical arrows that seem to get slung Adam Levine and co.’s way, they’re definitely better than that. However, no less an authority on music than Popdose’s Grand Poobah Jeff Giles Y’all has deemed M5’s third studio effort, “Hands All Over”, […]
Chart Stalker 5/27/10: Exile on My TV
The biggest news on this week’s album chart? A TV show. The second biggest news? A 40-year old album. First things first. “Glee: The Music: Showstoppers” bows atop the Billboard 200 this week, with 136,000 copies sold. It’s the second chart-topper to boast the “Glee” brand in the past 6 weeks. The hit FOX show is now a true phenomenon, with no end in sight. A distant second goes to the reissue of the Rolling Stones’ 39-year old classic “Exile […]
"Distant Relatives": THIS is What Collaboration Sounds Like
The multi-artist album in hip-hop has a pretty short history. It also has a pretty shitty history. As evidenced by the two terrible R. Kelly/Jay-Z teamup albums, getting together for an album-length collaboration is generally not the greatest idea. With memories of “Best of Both Worlds” in my head, I wasn’t even going to purchase “Distant Relatives”, the album that teams veteran rapper Nas with the son of the late Bob Marley, Damian, also known as “Jr. Gong”. It wasn’t […]