Search Results for: Alex Pappademas

“The Ghost in the Machine.” Alex Pappademas, Playboy.

You made it now, Lex remembers Jay-Z saying. You got Beyoncé bopping to your beats.

Lex didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand. He went with the hug.

It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.

“Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This.” — Alex Pappademas, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Alex Pappademas

You made it now, Lex remembers Jay-Z saying. You got Beyoncé bopping to your beats.

Lex didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand. He went with the hug.

It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.

“Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This.” — Alex Pappademas, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Alex Pappademas

Winona Forever

Winona Forever

All The Dirt That’s Fit To Print

Longreads Pick

We’re used to National Enquirer stories on “shocking” plastic surgery, but in 2010 the rag almost won a Pulitzer. Alex Pappademas chronicles its evolution from tabloid to breaking-news contender

Source: GQ
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,053 words)