Photo by Sacha Waldman Jaded Hip-Hop-Purist Insight #1: You cannot spit in the wind without being hit by 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. The Reverend Jesse Jackson ran two presidential campaigns sloganeering "I am somebody" to a rainbow coalition of captivated masses during the 1980s. Meanwhile, the youth of that......
What the hell is going on with hip-hop right about now? Rap‘s most popular, most talented MC -- at one point in the running to grace the cover of Time as Person of the Year -- is a white kid from a Detroit trailer park. Capitalizing on a singsong, nursery-school-rhyme......
Your mouth is contorted into a G. Dubya--worthy smirk. Your mind is flooded with the sights and scents of your adolescence: your senior prom, that dash through the girls‘ locker room, cutting class to swig a 40-ounce Private Stock on your first brew run. In your hands is the latest......
Photo by Glen E. Friedman Eddie Vedder cares. If the casual music enthusiast remembers nothing else about Pearl Jam beyond their Beatles/Rolling Stones polarization with Nirvana in the early ’90s, he recalls the band warring with monster-magnate Ticketmaster in front of congressional subcommittees. If you’re one of the 1.5 million......
Photo by Anton Corbijn CURRENT ROCK CARRIES THE AIR OF AN APPREHENSIVE lover who's lately been having a bit of trouble maintaining an erection, fretfully wondering, "Will I be able to get it up tonight?" To the degree that record sales connote cultural significance, recent offerings from juggernauts like Nine......
And so was written the MC genealogy of the late Notorious B.I.G.: Grandmaster Caz was the father of Grandmaster Melle Mel, Grandmaster Melle Mel the father of Kool Moe Dee, Kool Moe Dee the father of Slick Rick, Slick Rick the father of L.L. Cool J, L.L. Cool J the......
Webster‘s Unabridged defines the all-American midlife crisis as “a period of psychological stress occurring in middle age, thought to be triggered by a physical, occupational or domestic event, as menopause, diminution of physical prowess, job loss or departure of children from the home.” The average life expectancy of an African-American......
Photo by Daniel HastingsNAS, THE 25-YEAR-OLD HYPERLYRICAL elder statesman of now-school hip-hop, celebrated the release of his third album, I Am . . ., three weeks ago at Float in midtown Manhattan. Downstairs, six saline-endowed dancers in leopard-print G-string bikinis writhed around to DJ Funkmaster Flex selections. Upstairs, beyond two......
Foxy Brown is a chickenhead. Regarding her creator, 19-year-old Inga Marchand, let’s reserve judgment, though she’s reportedly spit at hotel concierges, engaged in high-speed car chases pursuing hip-hop-magazine editors and swung blows at her fiancé (Tha Dogg Pound’s Kurupt) on the set of his own video shoot. Inga’s another story,......
'Round midnight on December 20, 1989, at the World in downtown Manhattan's Alphabet City, Terence Trent D'Arby trooped back onstage to perform an obligatory encore for a scant crowd of a couple hundred concertgoers. The black-clad, dreadlocked soul singer was promoting his commercially doomed soph-omore album, Neither Fish nor Flesh,......
