I think that was something I heard when I was 7. It was from the first album “Black Sheep” by Tupac Shakur. There was this guy who was from the Midwest and he started performing with a group called The Hotties. He would always bring his girl with him and start rapping like, “Hey, baby, […]
“You a bar,” he says, “the way you walk with your feet in the air.” He’s talking about the way that you walk, he says, or the way you talk. The “hip-hop” of the word, he says, is “the language of the foot.” The “hip-hop” of the words is the way you feel. So it […]
In the words of this book, “It’s like watching an old Hollywood western.” Yes! There is also a great list here. How can you help? Like the Facebook page and follow me on Twitter to get more of this out there! Thanks for reading!! “What I need to know, from the bottom up is what’s […]
Kendrick Lamar, who, as we mentioned back in January, isn’t even considered “black” by some rap purists, but is a great rapper of the highest caliber, who’s earned all the praise from critics and fans alike. But as far as “best rap songs of the year,” he’s still the runner up, and there’s a clear […]
The beat in seconds (bpm) represents the time taken for one beat of a bar to complete. So, the tempo can be expressed as a ratio of milliseconds: the tempo is expressed in cycles (f = 1000 / a = 1000), in minutes: the tempo is expressed in seconds: as the ratio. The ratio of […]
Lil Durk or Mr. Lif). I want to be able to play those. My father was an amazing producer; to get me to that point to where I wanted to be when I was a kid was like getting my first stereo.” That’s what RZA had in mind when I asked him about his career […]
The earliest white rappers were white artists, such as Booker T. Washington and Boogie Down Productions (a duo from Washington, D.C.), who recorded their music before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1920, however, the Negro Leagues Baseball League became the first professional black team to be supported by professional white players. In the […]
In English, dew is a word that is used when referring to the water that contains the seeds of many herbs in the plant world. It is a synonym for watermelon. In Mexican Spanish the word dewa, also refers to watermelon-like flowers called tomatillos. In English, dew is used for watermelon when referring to the […]
It’s the ratio of the number of beats of music in an hour’s worth of recordings. So there are actually many measures on which the amount of time that has elapsed is not a measure of absolute time. (And the idea of “absolute” time is that we’re speaking in time units.) In music, the amount […]
This question should be obvious—because it’s obvious. The hardest rapper, the guy who has more than 20 studio albums, the guy who has to make the hardest rap music of this generation, is probably Kanye West. And he ain’t nobody. Does Kanye West have another album coming out? I didn’t hear about that, so I […]