This year marks four decades of avant magazine the Wire. Throughout, the British publication has frequently if fitfully championed interesting rap artists.
View More Forty Years of The Wire and Hip-HopCategory: Spotlight
Opening Acts: When the Tide Is High
Wu-Tang Clan’s second album, Wu-Tang Forever, elicits a discussion on the end of imperial eras. Plus, thoughts on Kendrick Lamar’s new album and a Fat Joe TV doc on A&E.
View More Opening Acts: When the Tide Is HighOpening Acts: Rock & Rap’s Imperfect Hall
This week’s entry discusses the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted Eminem on May 4; and picks a few nuggets from Ben Merlis’ oral history of the Juice Crew and Cold Chillin’ Records.
View More Opening Acts: Rock & Rap’s Imperfect HallOpening Acts: The Best Rapper Alive Since…
This week brings a new column of hip-hop happenings past and present: Opening Acts. The inaugural edition mulls over a GQ cover story on Future, Alchemist vs. Get on Down, a reissue of Godfather Don’s Hazardous, and the UK group Caveman.
View More Opening Acts: The Best Rapper Alive Since…Curren$y & The Alchemist, Continuance
Continuance is the latest in a series of well-received collaborations between Curren$y and the Alchemist, engaging an audience in thrall with classicist tropes.
View More Curren$y & The Alchemist, ContinuanceSole & DJ Pain 1, Post American Studies
On his latest collaboration with DJ Pain 1, Sole delivers an anarchist broadside against global inequity and US hegemony.
View More Sole & DJ Pain 1, Post American StudiesA Company Flow Fan’s DJ Bag in 1997
As I spent the weekend revisiting Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus — an album I once had on constant rotation — I began to wonder…what other records did I spin as an amateur DJ in 1997?
View More A Company Flow Fan’s DJ Bag in 1997Count Bass D: Acting Out
In a 2007 interview for Creative Loafing Atlanta, Count Bass D discussed his career and his album, Act Your Waist Size.
View More Count Bass D: Acting OutNotable Hip-Hop Albums of 2021
Hip-hop in year two of the pandemic felt deeply unsettled and chaotic, with a dearth of aesthetically vital artists who dictated the culture and served as targets to rebel against. Despite it all, good rap music still exists.
View More Notable Hip-Hop Albums of 2021Inspired by Shel Silverstein: MidaZ the Beast, Mavi
In the past two years, album covers for MidaZ the Beast and Mavi have drawn inspiration from Shel Silverstein’s 1974 children’s collection, Where the Sidewalk Ends.
View More Inspired by Shel Silverstein: MidaZ the Beast, Mavi