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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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American hip hop is as multilingual as America, with emcees mixing English together with any number of other languages. And pick a country in the world…
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In 1992, the rap-metal group Body Count released one of the more infamous songs that you’ve probably never heard. The song, "Cop Killer," generated a ton…
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Hip hop has always been fascinated with itself--one of the music’s unique and endearing qualities is its constant self-reflection and self-assessment.…
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In 1989, the first year that rap music was included as a category in the Grammy Awards, half of the winning duo boycotted the show altogether. The winning…
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A term that is gaining more popularity over the past few years is the Anthropocene. Originally confined to geology, use of the Anthropocene has picked up…
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Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1993, was a cultural force in the mid-90’s.It was the home of the Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, The Lox…
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Hip hop is a vast territory, and it’s often difficult to make declarative statements about it because a counterexample is usually just around the corner.…
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The phrase “can’t see me” is a well-worn trope in hip hop music. A search on the website genius.com—an encyclopedia of hip hop lyrics and annotations—for…
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We don’t often associate the Romantic period of literature and art with the sounds of factories or machines, but there’s a good case to be made that…
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Among the many critical perspectives that are useful in listening to and thinking about hip hop, two in particular are relevant to a lot of the music…