Jeff Weiss

If there are any aspiring young rappers out there reading this, now is the time to rejoice. With his second album, Trilla, Rick Ross has proven that all you need to do to have a viable rap career is the foresight to rhyme "Ross" with "Boss." For those keeping score,......

So I'll be covering SXSW next week for the LA Weekly. I have never been nor do I have any idea of what to expect. I'm pretty excited to go though. I've been asking around and have generally been met with the boiler-plate response that "SXSW is awesome." However, one......

As the voters of Texas, Rhode Island, Vermont and Ohio filed to the polls yesterday to help decide the Democratic Party's nomination for President, will.i.am., the capitalization averse mastermind of the Black Eyed Peas continued his steadfast efforts to help elect Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Indeed, while most election-day......

I actually own this on CD-single, which is either keeping it real, or keeping it really retarded. From the first moments of the reel, one can immediately infer that the film is going to be of quality. Why? The stamp of quality from Mo' Thugs Family Features. Like the ill-fated......

Sometimes, I feel sorry for the 13-year olds of today. I can't even begin to imagine how disgruntled my adolescence would've been had I been forced to listen to "A Bay Bay" and "Low" everywhere I went. We got "Regulate," and "Hip-Hop Hooray," they got the Soulja Boy dance. And......

Whether consciously or not, rappers have understood the concept of branding since the on-and-on-to-the-break-of-dawn days. You can listen to everything from the "The Breaks" to "Crank That" and figure out pretty quickly that they were performed by Kurtis Blow and an autistic 4th Grader with a rudimentary understanding of Pro......

Last week, DJ Khaled announced the creation of his We the Best Music, a new vanity label that will be distributed and released under the Def Jam umbrella. In a press conference to promote the pact, Khaled repeatedly proclaimed "we the best" and that "we taking over internationally." As I......

Pete Rock needs no introduction. His new album NY's Finest drops on Tuesday. While it might not be a classic on the level of a Soul Survivors or Mecca & The Soul Brother, it's a strong record with occasionally great moments. But buyer beware: Jim Jones yells "floooosssssiiiin'" no less......

"This is the number one rule for your set/In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets/And through our travels we get separated, never forget/In order to survive, gotta learn to live with regrets"-Jay-Z "Regrets" Rappers today don't live with regrets. Or maybe they just don't express them well......