Pete Tosiello

On his first album in over a decade, "Golden Rail Motel," the infamous "Fuck It" singer sounds reborn — maybe because, after overcoming addiction and label woes, he is....

Anthony Cruz, under his hip-hop alias L's, went big for his new G-funk-inspired album "Funkfornia" — especially the track "Foreign," which features 112 parts....

It should come as no surprise that YG's faithful evocation of mid-'90s Southern California G-funk, Still Brazy, has dominated this summer of record heat, gun violence, police brutality and polarizing politics. The Compton rapper's latest captures the tense energy of the times — and recalls another era in American history......

If the term “blue-eyed soul” evokes visions of saccharine ballads and John Oates’ mustache, Jared Evan should change that. A nimble rapper and versatile producer who also happens to croon like the spawn of Thicke and Timberlake, the 26-year-old Long Island native brings a one-man band approach to both his......

While G-funk from Long Beach and Compton dominated hip-hop airwaves through the 1990s, the pulse of underground rap was maintained at the Good Life Café, a health food market and open mic workshop on the corner of Crenshaw and Exposition. After Freestyle Fellowship became the first Good Life group to......

Lost amidst the fanfare of the release of Straight Outta Compton, the blockbuster treatment of N.W.A.'s short, tumultuous run, and Compton, the accompanying album by reclusive icon Dr. Dre, was another long-simmering, backward-glancing record from one of Southern California's hip-hop godfathers: Regulate ... G Funk Era, Part II, the sequel to......

Most of hip-hop’s alter egos — Eminem’s Slim Shady, Nas’s Escobar, Kool Keith’s Doctor Octagon and Ghostface Killah’s Tony Starks come to mind — have been cultivated for stylistic or narrative purposes, allowing rappers to craft fictional first-person accounts free of the criticism that met Rick Ross’s embellished crime sagas......