Rap Music
A taste of what’s to come at Manhattan’s new space for multidisciplinary programming.
“Life has a soundtrack. And certain music is a soundtrack to a certain type of identity or feeling. 50 Cent, the Game, and those kinds of guys—they made us feel like our lives were worth nothing, basically.”
Guillaume de Machaut meets Bone Thugs-N-Harmony through black metal.
Artistic development, near-death experiences, and the power of persistence.
Painter Suzanne McClelland discusses visual acoustics, marginal language and musical references with poet Barry Schwabsky.
Musician and composer Robert Wyatt, renowned for his vocals and complex blends of pop, jazz, and world music, bridges the generation gap with the emerging “first lady of Arabic hip-hop” Shadia Mansour.
The handsome, CD-size book of lyrics accompanying Aesop Rock’s new EP Fast Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives is titled The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow, an apt caption for a rapper whose 1999 debut album Float became an underground classic so instantly that by his next album he would rap, “Dwarfed by the lights, bewildered by the fan base, bound by an idea but skeptical of the handshakes.”
As a jazz musician always looking for cutting-edge, exciting, and thoughtful collaborators to expand my concept of music with, I was instantly struck by rapper and producer El-P, aka Jaime Meline, when I met him last year.
Rap Poo-Bah and new media anti-tycoon Chuck D offers up his brand of economics in the land of virtual reality: free music. The politics of distribution and the poetics of rap set the music industry spinning.
“The only thing you can do to capture the essence of someone or somewhere or someplace, is to create artifice.”
An in-depth interview with “one of America’s most indispensable and independent thinkers,” bell hooks, by BOMB contributing editor Lawrence Chua.
“If the beats ain’t right, you ain’t right. But I can take a little bit of one thing and make it big. You can give me anything and I’ll know what to do with it.”
2 Black 2 Strong and his right hand man, Warchild, discuss racism in the media, growing up and getting out of the ghetto, and the symbolism behind the American flag.