“Dope beats, dope rhymes, what more do y’all want?” Phonte once asked, and the question remains a potent one: hip-hop, particularly of the underground variety, turned a more experimental corner around the time of the millennium, and for many, the art of the simply-constructed, plainspoken hip-hop LP fell by the wayside. The loose-limbed, live-band feel of the Roots; the lush soundscapes and penetrating self-excavation of Kanye West; these are the things that we’ve been conditioned to value in hip-hop. Some […]
Posts tagged "hip-hop"
The Blerd Interview: DJ Axel Foley
If you think you can tap into the mind and soul of a DJ strictly by the songs they spin, you couldn’t be more wrong. Thats like saying you can judge a book by its cover, and we all know the rap about that. You need to find out the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ before you can really know the deal…..you gotta dig in those crates before the precious reward can be mined. Now, some of you may be […]
Spin Cycle: The Knux’s “Eraser”
The merger of rap and rock is a notoriously dubious proposition: sure, sometimes you get surefire party-rockers like Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s legendary “Walk This Way” team up, Anthrax and Public Enemy’s raucous “Bring the Noise”, or the entire righteous-anger-fueled career of Rage Against the Machine. But more often than not you get Crazy Town. You get Quarashi. You get Limp Bizkit. You get Lil’ Wayne’s Rebirth album, the sound of leaping headfirst into a blender and turning it on. Enter The […]
Why the Hell Should I Like… A Tribe Called Quest? (The Rebuttal)
“ Why the hell should I like… ?” is an experiment of sorts between Popblerd and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit . What we’re going to attempt to do is to pick 10 songs from our favorite artists — one for which the other has professed dislike or disinterest — and show them why they’re wrong. I know it’s probably hard to believe, but I didn’t listen to a lot of hip hop growing up. I know, it’s nuts right? Sure I had a copy […]
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 […]
Spin Cycle: That Handsome Devil’s “The Heart Goes To Heaven, The Head Goes To Hell”
I imagine that relatively few people decide to go to a rock concert twenty minutes before it starts. But, see, my wife and I were spending the week in Boston, and we had a Friday night with nothing on the docket. There was talk of a movie; there was talk of dinner, but ultimately, we wanted to do something unique, something singular. Take in a play, or some jazz, or climb a mountain (which, to be fair, is kind of […]
Chart Stalker: Throne Maintained; Weezy & Drake’s Domination
This week’s Billboard album chart has a familiar ring to it: Jay-Z and Kanye West hold the #1 spot for a second week with Watch The Throne. Featuring the hit single “Otis”, the hip-hop superstar summit rings up another 177,000 units in sales this week. It sells more than double the quantity of the week’s #2 album, which is–looky looky–Adele’s 21. Now riding the wave of a second hit single (“Someone Like You” hits the Top 40 this week), Adele’s […]
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 […]
Spin Cycle: Jay-Z & Kanye West “Watch The Throne”
I’ll admit to having a fair share of trepidation prior to hearing Kanye West & Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne album. Let’s face it, Jay-Z’s had a pretty rotten track record when it comes to collaborations. How many of you still bump those Best of Both Worlds albums with R. Kelly? What about that Collision Course thing with Linkin Park? No? Me neither. Actually, my copies of all three of those albums (yes, I bought all three) are now in the […]
The Jukebox From Hell 01: “Wildside”
You know you’re hot when you can take your little brother and turn him into a star-and there were very few people hotter in the early Nineties than Donnie Wahlberg. His group, New Kids on the Block, was a pop phenomenon, starting with their first Top 10 hit, “Please Don’t Go Girl”, in the fall of 1988 and peaking with the simultaneous number one success of the “Step by Step” single and album in 1990. Donnie’s younger brother, Mark, was […]
