hip-hop
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A Music Drama (Actually) about Music
Netflix’s The Get Down is receiving quite a bit of attention for being the unicorn of music drama: for once, a show about a moment in musical history is actually about the music! Directed by Baz Luhrmann, the show is receiving accolades for following…
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Looking Back to New Jack City
The 1991 cult film New Jack City is once again examined and celebrated this week, with okayplayer. publishing one piece celebrating its soundtrack, and another with a behind-the-scenes reflection from the film’s star Ice T. The artist talks about playing a cop for his first…
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Dinosaurs, Aliens, and Rappers
In its infinite wisdom, VICE has produced a show for the company’s TV channel, VICELAND, where Action Bronson and his friends smoke themselves into oblivion while they try to grapple with the immensity of history and the cosmos as communicated by cheeseball history…
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Living Performance Art
The Internet’s been freaking out about Kanye West’s latest bid to be the center of all things surreal about our culture: his video for the track “Famous” features breathing sculptures of celebrities who may or may not have given permission for…
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Cosmically Illegal
At the Kenyon Review blog, Brian Michael Murphy celebrates the sheer density of reference and intricate structuring of rap lyrics revealed by a computer program, The Raplyzer, and its Rhyme Factor Scale. Murphy dissects the lyric genius of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah…
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Drake’s Working with Everybody
Drake came out with a collaboration with Gucci Mane and Justin Bieber took part in a remix of “One Dance” off of Drake’s album VIEWS. Listen to and read more about the Gucci Mane collaboration here and Bieber’s part in the remix here.
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A Language Only We Can Hear
Kendrick Lamar’s debut album “Good Kid, M.A.D.D. City” contains the basic, essential elements of a novel: a protagonist faced with an antagonistic outer world, plot and its arc—from opening scene to crisis to climax on down to denouement, a narrative…
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Zane Lowe Interviews Chance the Rapper
Following the release of his latest mixtape Coloring Book, Chance the Rapper spoke with Zane Lowe in a lengthy interview about the work, the recording process, and the artist’s growing collaborative relationship with Kanye West. Listen to the full conversation via okayplayer and stream the mixtape here.
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Drake Returns to SNL
The artist delivered a plea that he is “more than a meme” during his host’s monologue on SNL this week before performing “Once Dance” and “Hype.” Catch all of the videos via okayplayer.
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The Recipe to Decolonized Love is in Beyoncé’s Lemonade
“There is a curse that will be broken,” she promises.
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The Future of Hip-Hop
The rap golden age of the ’90s may be over, but rappers today are achieving a kind of mainstream cultural influence that would’ve been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Over at The Walrus, Simon Lewsen writes about Canadian rapper Drake,…
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The Literary Value of Hip-Hop
At Electric Literature, Mensah Demary argues that there should be greater appreciation of hip-hop as a powerful storytelling medium, positing Nas as a master of literary narrative: If presented with a choice, I’d rather discuss classic hip-hop albums than short…