Music
Survivors?
You thought Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was tough? Try keeping a slot in an of-the-moment girl…
Jon Caramanica
Music
Eminem and ‘dem
D12 Devil’s Night (Shady/Interscope) Eminem told Spin recently that he started his label, Shady Records, only to put…
Music
The last dons?
Hip-hop’s first don was Russell Simmons, who in the early ’80s partnered with a longhair named Rick Rubin…
Music
Scarred sons
No artist in hip-hop has gone as criminally unsung as Scarface. For well over a decade, the Houston…
Music
Garage Sale, Vol. 1
It’s hard work representing for the hip-hop nation. So hard, in fact, that no institution seems capable of…
Music
Starr struck
After my dad got burned in a carburetor explosion at the auto repair shop he owned and managed,…
Music
The peacemaker
Making up is hard to do. At last week’s MTV Video Music Awards, Destiny’s Child (at least, what’s…
Music
Rap dinosaurs
Do you remember the Los Angeles season of MTV’s The Real World? Race and politics were all over…
Music
Niggaz We Assimilate—Dynamite Hackand Kid606
Seeing a bunch of white guys bopping across MTV pretending to be rappers is no cause for critical…
Music
Hard pimps
Methinks the baller doth protest too much. Polite, gold-toothed, braided, and jovial-as-he-wants-to-be, 8ball is hardly the prototype for…
Music
Masked avenger
We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1895) We wear the mask that grins and lies It…
Music
Pretty thugs
Chick rappers used to be only slightly more popular than white rappers. Or gay rappers. In the brutally…
Music
Slanguistics
PASTOR TROY Face Off Madd Society/Universal PREFUSE 73 Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives Warp THE SOUTH’S FIRST HIP-HOP…
Music
Rap Smart
RAS KASS Van Gogh (Priority) Ras Kass was the answer. Seven years ago, the Carson, Calif., native appeared…
Music
Coming off the bench
FABOLOUS Ghetto Fabolous (Desert Storm/Elektra) Twenty-plus years of hip-hop evolution—a steady, sometimes seismic process of natural selection—and at…
Music
Ghostown.com
About a month before 360hiphop.com launched, the bombs started dropping. Every morning, as folks would turn on their…
Music
Brass monkeys
I had checked off “percussion” when Ms. Weiskopf handed out the thin slip of paper that listed our…