Maybe the crowd, a crew of mostly sweet-faced, postpubescent hip(hop)sters, had a hard day at college. Maybe the acts’ bourbon-and-coke styles just happened not to coalesce as expected. Maybe it was just one of those Wednesdays. But Troubadour‘s billing last night of DaVinci, The 87 Stick Up Kids, Free the Robots, and Freddie Gibbs with
Remember 2007? Wiz Khalifa could’ve been the name of a magician for all most people knew, Kid Cudi really was a lonely stoner, and you still checked your MySpace. If you’d been friends on there with Brooklyn rapper Saigon, you’d know that his debut album, The Greatest Story Never Told, has been ready since the
People get antsy, if not downright angry, when they can’t easily categorize an artist. Gilbere Forte’ has those people close to crawling out of their skins. The Philadelphia-based rapper (singer, songwriter, producer) realizes this, devoting a post on his blog to the questions surrounding him. “Who am I? Where did I come from? What lane
Stalley is from Massillon, Ohio. If you know what to listen for, you can hear the small town talking in Lincoln Way Nights (Intelligent Trunk Music), his latest mixtape: There’s the hollow clanging of the wooden wind chimes on the front porch in “Assassin,” the bittersweet letter to his hometown/girlfriend in “Milq n’ Honey,” and
Despite the cheers that erupted from the antsy Key Club crowd, Kendrick Lamar walked onstage last night like the underdog fighter in a championship boxing match. Planting himself squarely in the center of the stage, he bowed his head, raised one fist and began the song he claims best explains him, “The Heart Pt. 2.”
Getting a stamp of approval from music snob ?uestlove, who has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of rare and radio-friendly cuts, is like getting a gold star. Bay Area rapper and producer Trackademicks, who’s part of a collective known as the “Honor Roll,” was heralded by The Roots’ drummer as being one of his favorite producers. Even
Leslie Hall looks like a life-sized strawberry Laffy Taffy. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking: If it weren’t so dirty, D4L’s kid-in-a-candy-shop rhyme “Laffy Taffy” would be a natural riff for the rapper “born to give the gift of jams.” Ames, Iowa, her hometown, isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of
Who’d think that a museum full of fossils four billion years old would host artists fresh from the underground? Yet Los Angeles’ Natural History Museum’s “First Fridays” series continues to juxtapose the two, making good on its claim of being an “authority on the ‘big picture’ of the planet, the natural, and the cultural world.”
Hipsters heart hip hop, especially when the artist in question is probably silently LOL’ing. Wallpaper., the electro-pop duo of producer/rapper/frontman Ricky Reed (aka UC Berkeley music composition graduate Eric Frederic) and drummer Arjun Singh, must be darlings of that community: They formed the group to satirize mainstream music and American pop culture. True to character—Reed,
Blaqstarr can drop big names—the Baltimore native toured with Diplo, produced tracks for Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and discovered the heir to M.I.A.’s musical throne, Rye Rye. The DJ is also credited for both songwriting and production on M.I.A.’s albums, Kala and MAYA. Yet Divine, Blaqstarr’s debut EP on M.I.A.’s label N.E.E.T., proves that