Tag: Hip Hop
To promote his soon to be released album, Shady XV, rapper Eminem released a new video featuring himself and others spitting acapella verses for 18 minutes straight, but it’s the following 13-second snippet that has lots of people talking: I may fight for gay rights, especially if they dyke is more of a knockout than […]
A new project by Roopa Vasudevan sources hip-hop lyrics by Jay-Z, the Notorious B.I.G., Fat Joe and Rick Ross and the frequency of their particular word patterns. Grillz are lyrics processed by PyGenius, modeled into physical form with the help the geomerative and modelbuilder libraries and 3D-printed in polished gold steel. The technique is clever, but […]
The rap group G-Unit featuring 50 Cent, Young Buck and Kidd Kidd released a video for “Ahh Shit,” a scathing indictment of police brutality and violence against blacks. The video features footage of Eric Garner as he was put in a fatal chokehold by a police officer and Reverend Al Sharpton’s condemnation of the NYPD, as well […]
“Let’s face it. What I’m doing isn’t really vandalism,” Jay Shells tells ANIMAL after a weekend of putting his site-specific Rap Quotes around Philadelphia. “But the questionably legal act of installing signs became trickiest around City Hall and the Liberty Bell where an abundance of bored security guards are waiting to flex on a smart ass like me.” But he got it done. […]
The late rapper J Dilla’s custom-made Minamoog Voyager synthesizer has been recently donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The synth — along with 11 other objects used by the contributors to American music history, from Chuck Berry to Chuck D — will be shown at the “Musical Crossroads” exhibition, to inaugurate the opening of […]
Above, watch outtakes from Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, a new documentary about the legendary underground hip hop label Stones Throw. Kanye West is interviewed and waxes about the influence of the late J Dilla and Stones Throw figurehead Madlib. On Dilla: We gotta make music and we think, ‘If Dilla was alive, would he like this?’ I […]
“The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop,” a data visualization project by Matthew Daniels that’s been making waves since it made the front page of Reddit over the weekend, is interesting for a moment. Quantitative analysis is trendy, and so is rap music, so why not combine the two? One, because using statistics to glean anything […]
“Don’t Cry” is a soulful, melancholy highlight that arrives on the third side of Donuts, the instrumental swan-song from the late hip hop producer J Dilla. To celebrate the music, the blogger Darius Kazemi broke down that beat into its constituent samples — from the Escorts’ “I Can’t Stand to See You Cry” — wrote about […]
On Saturday night in Los Angeles, a crowd filled 1988 Gallery for an exhibition of “Rap Quotes,” a series of works by Jay Shells. The right side of the gallery housed the artist’s New York City street signs, which he’s been hanging at specific locations mentioned in hip hop songs since last year; the left […]
Last month, De La Soul surprise-released Smell the Da.I.S.Y., a collection of vintage De La verses reworked over previously unheard J Dilla beats. Now, they’re doing a limited vinyl release of the late producer’s instrumentals, and, in a continued effort to get more press than they’ve seen since AOI: Bionix, conducting an easter egg hunt of sorts to […]
