“Blowing Up The Spot With Mics, Not Their Bodies”
The seeds of Hip-hop have blown across the globe and sprouted in places where conditions are ripe: Oppression, disenfranchisment and untapped human potential. So it always makes me smile when the flowers of the rap diaspora return for the first time to hip-hop’s original soil. Last night, Palestinian Hip-Hop came home to New York. DAM […]
Happy New Year?
This item brought to my attention by ever vigilant media-watcher Reggie Dennis, who has been observing the mysterious dissapearance of certain prominent reporters and anchors during Rosh Hashanah: Shooting outside West Boca synagogue A 79-year-old man shot a fellow worshiper just outside a suburban Boca Raton synagogue Tuesday during an afternoon prayer service in observance […]
You Always Hurt The Ones You Love
“You bitch,” he said. I had just finished reading to my friend at Atlantic Records the review I had written about his group, Little Brother, in the Washington Post. “It’s a good review,” I said. “No, it isn’t. It’s negative.” “Are you kidding? I used the word ‘genius,’” I replied. “Yeah, but you ended negative. […]
Elvis Has Left The Building
When Vanilla Ice came out back in 1990, a few of us were sure that hip-hop was dead. “Well, that’s it,” I said, packing up my metaphorical office. “It was fun while it lasted.” There would be no room for Black hip-hop artists on the charts now — no matter how progressive, no matter how […]
The Bridge to Gretna
It is the ugliest incident of the entire New Orleans debacle. As the city descended into chaos and squalor in the days following the hurricane, 200 people from New Orleans — mostly Black — were told by police to cross the Greater New Orleans Bridge over the Mississippi River on foot. There, police told them, […]