And Corporations Keep Extracting Gold — Surely you’ve seen an ad for the Biggie Bag. Tell me this: If the Notorious B.I.G. never existed would Wendy’s have stumbled upon the precarious name of the Biggie Bag? No way. Not buying it. In fact, commerce is getting lax in what is and what isn’t considered public domain…

We Can Praise A Legend Without Slighting Another — In Dilla Time, the new book by Dan Charnas highlighting the genius of J Dilla, the writer proves that Dilla changed music by infusing a human element to sampling machines which were previously thought to be soulless. He also proves that Dilla created new time signatures, resulting in a more…

The Vegas Emcee Puts His Art On Cassettes For His Latest Release — The bass from ChiefDVB's latest outing, Arctic Emberz, is more apt to boom from a pyramid buried under Arctic Ice than a cassette. Cassette tapes conjure nostalgia for many. Hip Hop fans vividly remember Raekwon's purple tape. Arctic Emberz is an ocean blue tape, and the confidence needed to record…

Hip Hop Helps Make Pennies More Valuable — With the advent of Apple Pay, cryptocurrency, and our forever trustworthy debit cards, the amount of currency in circulation is drastically dwindling. Physical coins are becoming even more rare, and although emcees have been "spending hundreds since they had small faces," a few have been known to highlight Ben’s copper…

Hip Hop’s Marriage Between Form & Formlessness — “When we die hard, they’ll build a monument to honor us with, humongous effect in the world, we could have conquered it . . . " —Inspectah Deck Song structure in popular music is your typical suburban gated community, replete with identical homes, artificial grass, and straight edges. Hip Hop…

They say you don’t miss a good thing until it’s gone. Live performances have been wiped out completely, which means you won’t see your… — They say you don’t miss a good thing until it’s gone. Live performances have been wiped out completely, which means you won’t see your favorite emcee in concert any time soon. Yet if Keep Records has their say, the next best thing is a trio of songs conjured across this…

Six Degrees of Like Water For Chocolate — Six Degrees of Like Water For Chocolate “I feel Mexican, hip-hop is my garden . . . ” —Common Does that line pique your interests? Make you wanna jump out of your skin? Leave you speechless from its implication? These are the exact feelings the emcee wished to provoke. Within the realm of Hip Hop there are corridors—much like comedy—where nothing…

“Gaming is still social despite social distancing.” — “Gaming is still social despite social distancing.” Whoever invented the motto, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” surely never set foot in a modern-day casino, breeding grounds for germs. Yet these grand complexes of adult entertainment are primed for an epic rallying cry to help us deal with this crippling pandemic…

“Despite the media’s portrayal, we needed Coast II Coast to tell us that the East Coast/West Coast feud wasn’t real . . . ” — “Despite the media’s portrayal, we needed Coast II Coast to tell us that the East Coast/West Coast feud wasn’t real . . . ” The homies and I were already drinking as teens when Tha Alkaholiks came out, so you can’t say that their name influenced us to do bad…