Tag: hip hop

Killer beats, huge hype, and failure to follow through.

“Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for.”

Music as original as Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s sounds evergreen, but originality came with a high personal cost for its maker.

Hive is a new Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

An economic downturn in 2008 shuttered numerous publications and further marginalized people of color in an already minimally integrated industry. But in the 90’s and early-aughts, multicultural publications flourished, providing an alternative model for journalism that bears remembering.

Hip-hop was a different kind of music that needed a different kind of writer to cover it. This is how Michael A. Gonzales came of age in a time when Black writers began breaking the white ceiling.

Sometimes the most fertile creative relationships are the most unlikely.

Carina del Valle Schorske traces a lineage of Puerto Rican backup dancers in American entertainment from Rita Moreno to JLo.

For stroke survivor Sherman Hershfield, rapping and rhyming kept his seizures under control.

Rapper Robin Allen’s hit song bypassed the hip-hop boys club that held her debut solo album back.

In hip-hop and skateboarding, one young man finds an outlet for his aggression.

OutKast’s masterful 1998 album “Aquemini” defined a bold and Black South and predicted today’s pop music landscape.

From its first issue in 1993, Vibe magazine reflected the “multicultural mainstream.”

On one summer day in 1998, XXL magazine gathered 177 hip-hop artists for one of the greatest musical photographs of all time: A Great Day in Hip-Hop.

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds looks at 20 years of Auto-Tune.

The death of popular rapper XXXTentaction raises questions of ethical consumption.

It has already, time and time again.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s work always feels honest, as writers have found when they dive deep into his literary influences.

When the nineties’ heart of whiteness met g-funk, it was the illest — and wackest — of times.

The hip-hop artist sits down for a wide-ranging interview with NYT executive editor Dean Baquet.

Zandria F. Robinson narrates her coming of age Memphis while examining contemporary southernness.

Understanding what the rapper means to her audience, beyond the flash of celebrity.

The modern hip-hop classic reflects growing up in Compton “one thousand percent.”

A look at how the Beastie Boys invented themselves with their 1992 album Check Your Head.

Kyle Kramer, editor at Noisey, talks with A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip about staying true to himself while evolving with the sound of hip-hop.

Journalist Jeff Chang’s 2005 book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop offers a history of hip-hop culture, and he’s particularly good at capturing the 1970s Bronx neighborhood party scene that helped start it all, with a young Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell—who moved to the Bronx with his family as a child and soon started hosting parties as […]

“When Our Kids Own America,” Gene Demby, NPR.