Tag: Rap
Early evening television is currently deep in the throes of Jeopardy’s “Battle of the Decades,” a royal rumble of past champions, and this week, a category devoted to “The 1990s Rap Song” saw all-time great Ken Jennings laying waste to the competition. “What is ‘Mo’ Problems,’ Alex?” […]
“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 […]
“Hip–hop is not afraid of showing pride for its own power, and to translate that into an aesthetic of regality which is beautiful and timeless,” Cecilia Azcarate tells DAZED. “People represented in these paintings and sculptures were not there by chance. They were people of power, being it religious, political, or economical. Intellectuals, gods, saints, and people whose […]
Ordinarily, we wouldn’t encourage you to look at advertisements in your free time, but this Japanese-market Vitamin Water spot is an easy exception. Soundtracked by a goofily catchy new song about NYC by former Das Racist guy and all-around great rapper Heems (“New/plus York/equals New York!”), a dude with a weird turntable/boombox hybrid for a […]
Migos’ No Label II is a good mixtape, but it’s also 25 tracks long. Commenting on the tape at Pitchfork, Carrie Battan wrote, reasonably, that she would “enjoy this mixtape quite a bit if it were six to eight tracks shorter.” Well, here’s 10 Track Tapes, a new project from Meaghan Garvey aimed at “streamlining new and […]
Last time we looked at Mass Appeal’s “Rhythm Roulette” series, El-P crafted a dissonant banger out of three records selected at random. The latest installment is from Detroit producer Black Milk, who makes something altogether more chilled-out. Shout out to Herb Alpert, staple of thrift stores and record store bargain bins everywhere. […]
De La Soul are suddenly on the forefront of music distribution. The classic hip hop group, who haven’t released a physical album since 2004’s underrated The Grind Date, put most of their records online for free download in February. And now, they’ve released a new mixtape exclusively via BitTorrent. Well, that “new” part needs a bit of a […]
