You’ll have to wait until August 12 to see Baz Luhrmann’s ‘70s hip-hop drama The Get Down, but in the meantime, this dazzling trailer will whet your appetite.

Early Wednesday, news broke that A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg had passed at age 45, with the likely cause owing to a long battle with diabetes, and a related kidney transplant from his wife in 2008. Now, the Queens rapper’s family has confirmed and released a statement via his publicist:

Sit down, my fellow children of the ‘90s. Today, rapper and leap year baby Ja Rule enters into the fifth decade of his life. But if the thought of Ja turning 40 makes you dizzy, take solace: according to the leap year schedule he’s merely 10.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis have released an eight-minute song featuring Jamila Woods, “White Privilege II,” about white privilege, beginning with Macklemore’s own feeling about whether he can meaningfully participate in a Black Lives Matter march and spiraling into different movements questioning what his own white…

Lin-Manuel Miranda was reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton on vacation, goes the fable of the year, when he was struck with inspiration. Later, at the first public performance of a song from his musical, he told his audience at the White House that Alexander Hamilton was “someone I think embodies hip-hop.”

We’ve seen plenty of reality shows about the spouses, families and mooches of famous people—many of which are still popular (see: Love & Hip-Hop)—so we knew this was coming. Growing Up Hip-Hop is a series that follows the spawn of well-known hip-hop stars and their growing pains. In other words, a real-life Empire.

Fetty Wap has multiple anthems about putting his lady on a pedestal, including a song about spending QT with his trap queen while cooking crack. But is he a feminist?

Recently, as if acting of their own volition or by the direction of some cruel puppeteer, my hands navigated to iTunes and purchased Drake’s single “Hotline Bling.” At first I bemoaned this purchase, which I was certain would result in nothing more than the foolhardy loss of $1.29 and some extra data languishing on my…

On Monday night Drake released the video for “Hotline Bling”—his maybe inspired, maybe remixed take on D.R.A.M.’s “Cha Cha.” As he has rather consistently done for the past few years, Drake delivered in the most deliberately viral and Drake-y way: like a huge dork.

Julia Beverly is your favorite rapper’s favorite hustler. Her Agency Twelve books MCs, R&B stars and reality TV provocateurs all around the world, including a current 40-date mixtape tour for Lil Wayne. A thriving business, Agency Twelve grew out of an unexpected extension of casually making connections between…

Hip-hop is growing in Uganda, so much so that teens are being hired to rap the nightly news and using their bars to push for social change.

New Jersey State Police, dressed in riot gear and driving armored military vehicles, deployed tear gas into a crowd trying to make its way into MetLife Stadium for Hot 97’s Summer Jam concert Sunday night.

Over the last week, fans, tabloids and this very website inferred from a series of cryptic Instagram posts that Her Minajesty, Onika Maraj, may have dumped recent manfriend Meek Mill right on his ass. Those posts included two May 31 photographs of Minaj quoting lyrics from Beyoncé’s “Best I Never Had” (“Thank God ya…

Ana Tijoux, the powerhouse French-Chilean diva who is one of the most recognizable and important rappers in Latin America, has just released the video for “Antipatriarca,” one of the more explicitly feminist songs in her repertoire. It’s glorious.

Your favorite Twitter personality Azealia Banks just landed the lead role in her first feature film.

On paper, Hamilton is unlikely: a nearly three-hour-long musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton based on an 800-page historical biography and, for the most part, rapped the entire way through. But after runaway success at New York’s Public Theater and almost unanimous critical acclaim, it’s now headed to…

A movie about a wannabe cool black nerd obsessed with ’90s hip-hop and Game of Thrones sounds like a movie I’m very interested in seeing. Following up its buzzy trailer and major Sundance reception, here’s the first clip from Dope, which looks to be a worthwhile watch in the tradition of all my fav addictive…

Killer Mike is the latest guest speaker at MIT’s “Hip-Hop Speaker Series,” which has previously enlisted a shirtless Lil B (video). Mike, one of the most salient politically-minded figures in current hip-hop, will deliver a speech entitled “Race Relations in the US” on April 24. Do we need a petition to award him an…

In the lyric pamphlet to Black Messiah, D'Angelo's third album after 14 years away from the spotlight, the soul-savant explains his reasoning behind its title and sudden release: "Some will jump to the conclusion that I am calling myself a Black Messiah," he begins. "For me the title is about all of us...It's about…