Lin-Manuel Miranda, your impossibly cool dad, has a lot going on besides starring in the most obnoxiously successful musical in history and probably crushing all the awards at the Tonys on Sunday. An old show about his freestyle rap improv group will be available for streaming this summer.
After a somewhat harrowing promise that Views would debut on Beats 1 Radio at 10 PM, a delay, and its actual appearance on Apple Music an hour later while OVO Radio was playing Rae Sremmurd’s “Look Alive,” we have so much to talk about. While it’s not exactly the frenzy that Lemonade conjured—it’s 20 songs long, my…
The late, notorious Christopher Wallace died of gunshot wounds nearly two decades ago. Soon, however, we will witness his resurrection as an exclusively licensed hologram.
It’s ironic that a rapper named Young Thug—an almost comically unimaginative alias that on its face evokes the laziest stereotypes about rappers and their glorified street mentality, reveling in a heartless world of wanton violence and not much else—would actually be the current hip-hop artist most dedicated to to the…
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…
Netflix’s docu-series Making a Murderer depicted a number of grotesque miscarriages of justice, regardless of whether one believes Steven Avery committed the murder of Teresa Halbach. The most affecting injustice was the mistreatment of Brendan Dassey, Avery’s learning-disabled 16-year-old nephew who was improperly…
Missy Elliot has made her official return, and it is fucking excellent.
This week, TI appeared on DJ Whoo Kid’s radio show to discuss important political topics—or shall I say, TI holographed in from 1954 to drop his extremely idiotic opinions about how a woman shouldn’t be president because we make rash decisions and could nuke something.
The first musical soundtrack I ever heard was for A Chorus Line, at age seven or eight, long before I even knew what Broadway was, or meant. My mom had the original cast recording, from 1975, and apparently I spent enough time unsupervised to have nabbed it from her cassette collection, because that shit was dirty,…
Kari Faux, a very cool young rapper from Little Rock, Arkansas, invokes Solid Gold and Soul Glo in this cheeky, soft-focus video for “Supplier,” a track so unbothered her flow sounds like it’s reclining with its feet up. This is the confidence that comes with knowing you’re so fly you don’t have to put forth any…
Earlier this year, A$AP Rocky referenced his past relationship or whatever-ship with Rita Ora on his song “Better Things,” rapping, “I swear that bitch Rita Ora got a big mouth/ Next time I see her might curse the bitch out.”
Whoever was responsible for writing the BBC’s subtitles for Kanye West’s headline performance at Glastonbury on Saturday night apparently had a complete fucking meltdown.
After rapping about rape in not one but two leaked songs, Rich Homie Quan is going on record to state that he doesn’t condone said rape.
Ana Tijoux, the powerhouse French-Chilean diva who is one of the most recognizable and important rappers in Latin America, has just released the video for “Antipatriarca,” one of the more explicitly feminist songs in her repertoire. It’s glorious.
Action Bronson, a Queens rapper who’s found great popularity in the underground and released a major-label album in March, is being protested by a Toronto woman citing his “violent misogyny” and “history of recording music that brags about gang-raping and murdering women.”
A$AP Rocky’s new track “L$D” is pretty far outside his previously established oeuvre—he’s sung on tracks before, but this is something of a weeded torch ballad, a deeply contemplative and poetic track from the guy who once wrote an entire song around namedropping popular and obscure fashion labels. (“Fashion Killa,”…
There’s a new-old Rich Homie Quan song out that contains gross lyrics about raping a woman.
A couple of weeks ago, I was trawling Soundcloud when I was abruptly paralyzed by something—a track with the fairly clumsy name of “Concealed the outro (fuck em rmx),” the last stop on a mixtape called (somewhat clumsily as well) Abstract Art, on the page of an essentially unknown rapper calling himself K.A.A.N.
