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July 22, 2013 Andy Cush

Remember when that unfinished Kanye video leaked and he got all “FUK U” about it? Well, the finished, Nick Knight-directed version is here, and it’s interactive! But it’s also, uh, pretty much exactly like the version that leaked. Interactivity is limited to slowing the song and video down–which is fine, because it sounds fucking awesome screwed […]

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July 18, 2013 Nate Cepis

News Vines is ANIMAL’s reoccurring series in which we retell current events in six-seconds or less. Jay Z would like you to stop using a hyphen when writing his name, please. […]

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Andy Cush

Each week in Sample Wars, we’ll pit two songs which sample the same source material head-to-head against each other, to determine which one rocked the sample better. In some ways, Joey Bada$$ and Rick Ross couldn’t be more different. One is a teenager from Flatbush who, despite high-profile cosigns, still feels like an anachronistic underdog, spitting […]

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July 16, 2013 Andy Cush

There are a few other musicians in this new video for “36” Chain,” by the excellent El-P/Killer Mike duo Run The Jewels. See if you can spot them all! I’ll give you a hint: that first guy, in the all white outfit, is Andrew WK. See, it’s easy! This song rules. […]

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July 12, 2013 Andy Cush

The internet’s got Jay-Z on the mind lately, so here’s a little more to get you through the weekend: illustrations for each of Jigga’s 99 problems, brought to you by artist Ali Graham, who posts a new problem to Tumblr every day. See a few of our favorites in the gallery. […]

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July 11, 2013 Andy Cush

As the art world goes crazy and the rap world goes “meh” for Magna Carta Holy Grail, here’s a very special Jay-Z edition of Sample Wars. “Crown,” one of that album’s standouts, was produced by a 16-year-old girl named Wondagurl, and used a sample from Sizzla’s 2006 dancehall classic “Solid as a Rock” –also reworked for 50 […]

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July 10, 2013 Andy Cush

Jack White has long gone to dizzying heights to make the releases on his Third Man record label as bizarre as possible. From memory, there’s the blues single by Stephen Colbert, a live album by Conan O’Brien, and that unforgettable ICP/White/Mozart collabo. This, however, may present a new high (or low, depending on your perspective): […]

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July 9, 2013 Andy Cush

“Listen In” is a weekly feature in which we ask musicians to curate a mixtape-length YouTube playlist of songs they’re currently digging. That handsome fella to the left is Houston rapper Fat Tony, circa senior year of high school. And though his “Listen In” playlist reaches quite a bit farther back than his own mid-2000s […]

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July 3, 2013 Kyle Chayka

Gavin Brown’s enterprise along with Johan Kugelberg of Boo-Hooray Gallery will be archiving quite possibly one of the most historically significant record collections in hip hop history, in preparation for its move to Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection. The collection of Afrika Bambaataa — one of the forefathers of hip hop, a pioneer of electro funk and break-beat deejaying and founder […]

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July 2, 2013 Andy Cush

To mark the upcoming release of his new album-cum-viral-marketing-stunt, Magna Carta Holy Grail, Jay-Z created some shiny, mostly contentless promotional books, then sent fans on a scavenger hunt to find them. Inside was the album’s tracklist accompanied by black bars that look like censored lyrics–I’d call it some kind of comment on NSA surveillance, but even that […]

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