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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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Brandon Soderberg

This week, a Swedish 16 year-old named Yung Lean, previously known by blog scourers for March’s half-viral video “Ginseng Strip 2002” – in which the bucket-hat-sporting white boy delivered rambling staccato half-raps about listening to R. Kelly and receiving oral sex from a Zooey Deschanel lookalike, over a gorgeous, sobbing beat – released the free […]

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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 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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July 1, 2013 Adam Katzman

It’s healthy to be at least mildly skeptical of gurus with cultish personas, even if you subscribe to their philosophy. Saturday night’s show with Lil B, an artist whose approach to life I am pretty fond of, was thus something I approached with some trepidation. Would the rap game Tony Robbins ask the Task Force […]

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