Nas’s Hip Hop Is Dead has inspired a level of fear and introspection not recently seen in the discipline. Doomsayers cite record plummeting cultural influence in their arguments, but for proof that hip-hop lives, they need look no further than the rapper Hip Hop Harry, who single-handedly demonstrates the genre’s…

Miami hip-hop heads, you’ve been waitin’ and debatin’ for oh so long. Saturday it’s finally here — the local stop of the Rock the Bells tour, a day-long festival of so much non-bling-blingin’, non-booty-bass hip-hop, it hardly seems real. Okay, so the New York and California shows get the elusive,…

Rappers blogging is an odd trend that seems to have taken hold last year, right around the time white MC Sage Francis took exception to a MySpace posting. The entry in question had been penned by far superior white MC Serch, former member of 3rd Bass and then-host of VH1’s…

When anthropologists someday debate the exact moment when MTV became cool again, they’d do well to consider May 18-19, 2007 — specifically the 24 consecutive hours (from noon Friday to noon Saturday) the station inexplicably let the players from its sketch comedy show Human Giant take over the airwaves. Without…

Things have never been easy for platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated, neo-soul crooner Anthony Hamilton. Before briefly touching superstardom with his 2003 So So Def hit Comin’ from Where I’m From, Hamilton bounced from short-lived label to short-lived label. Hamilton, who honed his gritty chops singing in his Charlotte, North Carolina, church choir,…