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Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music…
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Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a…
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This year marks the 55th anniversary of the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail."In 1963, King’s Southern Christian…
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There were plenty of great hip hop albums in 2017, but one series in particular stands out as a perfect way to end the year. The three-album series,…
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Christmas music is a funny genre: descended from sacred music, it’s still capable of evoking some serious sentiments, but at the same time it’s fully…
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The 2016 collection of poems by Chinaka Hodge titled ‘Dated Emcees’ overflows with hip hop. The culture is manifested in obvious ways, through poem titles…
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For most of its existence, hip hop was a sample-based musical form. Any good origin story of hip hop reinforces this—from two turntables and a microphone…
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Hip hop is an oversized music; part of what makes it so great is the exaggeration, the outlandish claims by emcees of supernatural powers, ridiculous…
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Eminem’s now infamous freestyle castigating Donald Trump at the BET Hip Hop Awards raises one very important question: What the heck was that?I’ve watched…
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The recent shooting in Las Vegas was followed by the usual crop of Facebook and Twitter posts decrying either gun violence or gun control, splitting…
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The 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta incorporated ‘designated protest zones’--later more commonly known as ‘free speech zones’--as a way to…
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Just over twenty years ago, in 1996, 300 mostly African men, women and children occupied churches in Paris to protest deportations. These people, who…