Tag Archives: hip-hop

Jenny Lewis first met David Cohn, a.k.a. Chicago rapper Serengeti, at a Berlin music festival in 2018. The two became fast friends, but their hectic schedules initially prevented them from working together. Once the pandemic took hold, that all changed: Their isolation became a catalyst for collaboration. Last spring, the …

I’m about to hang up my Zoom call with Juvenile when shock spreads across the rapper’s face. He needs to show me one last thing. “You know I gotta let you see these pieces,” he exclaims. Situated in his suburban St. Louis backyard, Juvenile grins with pride as he pans …

Prospect Park is pandemonium. In the past month, I’ve witnessed a group of high school kids put on boxing gloves and fight each other for fun next to a couple shooting wedding photos, all while a DJ playing a dancehall remix of Shai’s 1992 hit, “If I Ever Fall in …

Anderson .Paak gathers with friends as he reflects on racial injustice, police brutality, unemployment and COVID-19 in the new video for his protest song, “Lockdown.” The Dave Meyers-directed clip includes cameos from .Paak’s son Soul Rasheed, Jay Rock, Andra Day, Syd of the Internet, Sir, Dominic Fike and others. The …

In September 1978, soul producer extraordinaire Kenneth Gamble helped launch the Black Music Association, an advocacy group set on pushing the music industry to “recognize and celebrate the economic and cultural power of black music as well as those who made and promoted it.” “It was time for something new …

On Thursday, Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free — his longtime collaborator at TDE — announced the arrival of a new business endeavor. Their respective Instagrams feature the two announcing themselves as the founders of pgLang, a “service company,” along with three, cryptic posts and a link to the company’s website. …

If you’ve taken a look at the charts or turned on the radio at all this year, the story is blindingly clear: Roddy Ricch‘s “The Box” is 2020’s first dominant hit. Released at the tail-end of 2019 on Roddy’s debut album, Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, “The Box” took everyone …

Eminem‘s latest album,Music to Be Murdered By, at times leaned heavily on one of the rapper’s time-honored attributes: a dependence on shock value. In its two most attention-grabbing moments, he raps from the perspective of the Las Vegas gunman who killed 58 people in 2017 (“Darkness”), and throws in an …

“Eminem wants to sample our dad,” Catarina Spinetta told her siblings. It was a mid-October day and they were celebrating their sister Vera’s birthday. “We we were just surprised,” she adds. It all started in September 2019, when they were contacted by Eminem’s label, Shady Records, along with Peermusic and …

For a clumsy, fleeting moment, the punchline was the most potent tool in a rapper’s war chest. The “hashtag rap” era birthed, built, and sustained careers, allowing rappers as varied as Big Sean, Drake, Lil Wayne, Fabolous, and Ludacris to create hits built on the same formula. Performers would introduce …