If you’ve listened to Fiend from his No Limit Days, then this latest mixtape will come as a surprise. Gone are his youthfully high-energy verses from his guest spots alongside Master P. Instead, we get International Jones, a gravelly-voiced veteran of the game that just wants to be dope and wear his kicks. His mixtape, [...]
Maybe it’s the Japanese characters drawn on the album cover. Or the slew of guest appearances. Or the brooding, grotesque but conscious lyrics. Whatever the reason, it is hard to tell the difference between Caligula’s Divine Madness and a mid-’90s Wu-Tang Clan project. Fifteen years ago, an artist from New Orleans producing an album like [...]
It’s pretty easy to make a hit these days: insert 808s, heavy bass, a catchy hook and a cute face. Mix well. Repeat 10 times and you have an album. The difficulty comes in finding a sound that breaks from the mold and enters into the realm of actual high quality. Only time will tell [...]
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and jail time makes the rapper grow legendary. Lil Wayne’s arrest and subsequent eight-month sentence launched a “Free Weezy” campaign and creepy fan sites where pre-teens send daily love letters to the incarcerated Hot Boy. For an artist that dropped whole albums-worth of material every 12 minutes over the [...]
Weed and hip-hop have a long history together. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic ushered in an era of marijuana appreciation that hip-hop has never quite gotten over. At the time, it was associated with Scarface Chic: weed, a house full of homies, expensive alcohol, half-naked women, more weed, and someone with a big, sexy gun. Hip-hop’s [...]
Juvenile’s Beast Mode sounds like the name of a summer blockbuster. And like an action-packed mega-hit movie, the album is heavy on big explosions and light on substance. The explosions come in the form of trunk-rattling bass and highpowered synths. Juvenile, who carved his name in hip-hop lore with a gritty debut album that put [...]
For hip-hop, a genre even more obsessed with being fresh than pop, six years can be an eternity. Mystikal spent one such eternity in jail on charges of sexual assault and extortion. He’s been away from a fan base that can sometimes forget its favorite acts as soon as the next hot newcomer hits the [...]
For three minutes during her set at Essence Fest last night, Mary J. Blige stood on stage holding her microphone out to the crowd and didn’t say a word. No, there weren’t technical difficulties and she didn’t forget her lyrics. Instead, a packed Superdome sang the entire “I’m Going Down” from beginning to end while [...]
24 hours after the Essence Fest crowd sat in anticipation of Janet Jackson’s appearance, a packed Superdome waited (and waited, and waited) patiently to see what Alicia Keys and her baby bump would look like in person. One week after a five-months-pregnant Keys shocked a national television audience by jumping on top of a piano [...]
Let’s get the formalities out of the way. Monica opened the main stage at the Louisiana Superdome with a show full of her hits, showing why, at one point in her career, she was vying for the R&B crown. Raphael Saadiq brought ’60s R&B back in all its white-suited, soulful glory. Charlie Wilson made everyone’s [...]
