June 8, 2016
What Life Is All About
Just finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Here are four things the sordid, elegant, contemplative, coke-infused pages of this wonderful book made me want to do: […]
June 6, 2016
The Data Mine of Rap
The Raplyzer is a computer program that automatically analyzes rhymes from rap lyrics and ranks rappers according to their Rhyme Factor. Created by Eric Malmi, a doctoral student in Computer […]
March 30, 2016
Phife’s Islands
The third death of A Tribe Called Quest occurred last week with the passing of Phife Dawg. The first death came after The Love Movement, when the group broke up; […]
December 4, 2015
Slang Cinema: On Camp Lo and Ski Beatz
If you were a hip hop head in the late 1990s, then you probably remember the exact spot on earth you were standing when you first heard Camp Lo’s first […]
November 9, 2015
Enough Beauty to Ruin Your Day: From Ella to Dilla
Technically, I don’t understand jazz. Emotionally, I feel the power of Louis Armstrong, Wayne Shorter, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Brian Blade, Miles Davis, and others. I do not […]
August 14, 2015
Rap Athenas: From Juvenile’s “Ha” to A$AP Rocky’s “Peso”
There are two hip hop videos that remind me of the birth of Athena. The goddess leaped out, full-grown and armor-clad, from Zeus’s skull. It is an unexpected ending to […]
June 12, 2015
The Low Pass Theory, Part 2
Beyond the dense childhood memories of musical sound sieved through cinder block, another archetypal memory carried by a number of hip hop producers and artists—including KRS-ONE, the RZA, as well […]
December 13, 2013
To Review or not to Review
Should reviewers write negative reviews, or pass over books they don’t like in silence? Should they make a point only to write positive reviews? Should they review writers they know? […]
November 28, 2013
Happy Birthday to “Midnight”
A few weeks ago, an important literary event went unnoticed in the literary world: Midnight Marauders turned twenty. Midnight, the third album of legendary hip hop group A Tribe Called […]
October 11, 2013
Skyscrapers of Light
In 1938, Westinghouse buried a time capsule in a section of Queens described as a “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. The time capsule was supposed to contain a […]
June 29, 2010
A Hot Little Poem
It’s hot in New York. I mean, really, really hot. Do The Right Thing hot. Drag your mattress out on the fire escape to sleep hot. Crack open a fire […]
March 12, 2010
New York Minutes
I’ve been in New York City all week. Unlike my quietly paced life in St. Louis, my days in New York mimic the rhythm of the city’s pedestrians: full tilt, […]