Articles tagged "rap"

Noble and mostly failed bedroom attempts at remaking crucial beats.

When I first heard this mix of Jay-Z tracks layered over Chrono Trigger's soundtrack, my socks were pretty much blown off.

Brain Scanners Reveal the Secrets of Creativity in Rappers' Minds

Like a hip hop Woody Allen with a psychedelic drum machine.

Rap is steeped in a long, _long_ musical and oral tradition of boasting, and as such it's no surprise that so much of what rappers rap about involves being tough and manly. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but as DMX's "freakout…

In 2007, journalist and musician Abdullah Saeed, who also goes by the nickname "Blame the Kid":http://blamethekid.bandcamp.com, was stabbed in the neck in Baltimore when a pack of kids tried to steal his phone. Because of nerve damage in his neck and…

h5. ^Image: "Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal":http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303640104577436392955009490.html^ At the end of last week the old Internet exploded with a lot of breathless excitement about how the GZA was

Club kids drawing on the sounds he grew up with doesn’t bother him, exactly. It’s just that, to his ears, most of these so called “trap” tracks are soulless, saccharine approximations of the latest Top-40 trap street hustler hit.

Trap music’ is one of those broad musical genre-terms that does little to warn you that it includes such diverse sounds as the shallow intensity of Lex Luger’s midi-horns on “B.M.F.” and the Promethazine dread of UGK’s “One Day.” Thus it shouldn’t be…

By and large, the hip hop community has remained curiously silent on the topic of rooftop solar installation. This is a shame. Fortunately, that coal-powered silence is about to be broken. I give you Sustainable John, and his new eco-rap video "Occup…

Imagine Kreayshawn or, really, any other internet-famous rapper popular among the internet cool kids of 2012, and it's an image not so much startled by the spotlight, but stupefied by it. Your latest rap meme is Kitty Pryde and the Florida rapper's m…

Let's get this out of the way first: there's a difference between rap, which is what rappers do, and hip-hop, which comprises the whole culture of rappers, DJs, b-boys, and graffiti artists. I bring this up because, while styles and trends are contin…

Last Friday, keen-eyed Twit-wit, Andrew Bloch, noticed something slightly askew in his copy of Malaysia's top-selling English-language periodical, The Star: namely, that America's third richest hip-hop star, 50 Cent, was only worth RM1.50 in local c…

Rap has always been about braggadocio. That's not to say that a lot of rappers aren't (or weren't) very tough dudes, but during the era of millennial rap, when video after video was shot with different people standing in front of the same rented Lamb…

Coachella, long the hipster's choice for desert festivals featuring hyper-relevant indiebuzz bands, this year played host to a throwback to the Southern California G-funk days of yore. Yeah, Snoop and Dre were both looking particularly smiley -- perh…

We've all used music as therapy before, but what if your health depended on, say, the booty-bouncing thumps of Miami Bass? New research from Purdue University would require just that. Purdue researchers have developed an implantable medical sensor th…

According to the FBI, the Wu was basically the new mob.

Gary Grice, aka GZA, aka "The Genius" was at Harvard the other day lecturing about a whole bunch of GZA-type stuff like kung-fu, nursery rhymes, "chess":http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/arts/music/07clan.html, TV forensics shows, and rapping. Post-l…

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA) is the name of a loose collective of rambunctious friends from Los Angeles who make their own beats, write their own raps, and film videos of themselves slapping each other.