You know I — thug ’em, fuck ’em, love ’em, leave ’em/’Cause I don’t fuckin’ need ’em…./I’m a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch. — Jay-Z, “Big Pimpin’” “Big Pimpin’?” snorts Lee Williams with a mixture of derision and incredulity at the mention of Jay-Z’s signature tune, whose…

For Scott Souther it’s been a long day in the office. As a booking agent with the Boston-area International Music Network, Souther is responsible for setting up the North American tours for Cuba’s most in-demand artists: the family of musicians known as the Buena Vista Social Club. He’s also just…

Arriving in Miami with his family as an eighteen-year-old punk rocker, Brook Dorsch fondly recalls the state of South Beach in the Eighties. “The Beach was my stomping ground,” he says. “The Dead Kennedys at the Cameo, Jane’s Addiction at Woody’s, Rat Bastard’s shows, Charlie Pickett, F. I can still…

“I knew he had something to do with my motherfuckin’ cousin gettin’ killed!” X-Con snarls into his cell phone. “I’m gonna get the motherfucker!” His back turned to Kulchur, X-Con drops the phone to his side and gazes out ominously at Biscayne Bay from behind 79th Street’s Crab House restaurant…

“Finally, after so many years, I’m making the kind of money and receiving the kind of accolades I deserve,” reports Detroit’s seminal techno DJ Derrick May. That should please him, right? So why isn’t he smiling? From this present vantage point — reclining with a glass of wine in a…

The Buena Vista Social Club’s wrinkled musical veterans may still be basking in critical hosannas and standing ovations as they continue their tours of the United States, Europe, and Japan, but back in Havana the cultural czars are turning downright bitchy. Two weeks ago Granma, the official newspaper of the…

“Is it too late on a Friday night to talk about Hegel?” That was the question put by celebrity author Tom Wolfe to the well-heeled crowd of several hundred gathered before him inside Overtown’s Ice Palace studios two weeks ago. In certain circles such a quip might have produced a…

Forget about smoke-filled backroom deals, angry convention-floor fights, or black-bandanna-clad anarchists running through the streets. Right now, on a sweltering August afternoon in mid-Miami Beach, the campaign trail is pretty uneventful. Alvaro Fernandez and his girlfriend, Patricia Bravo Segall, are working their way door to door up Alton Road, and…

“There’s more girls coming down here than ever before,” sighs the booker from a prominent South Beach modeling agency. “They all think they’re going to be models, but they just don’t have it. So now there’s all these bottom-feeder “agencies’ that get $300 to send these girls to a convention…

Hardly a week goes by in South Florida without a new dot-com opening an office, tossing up a splashy billboard, and then issuing a hyperbolic press release on the riches that lie ahead in Latin America. April’s NASDAQ crash appears to have done little to dim the fervor of local…

Pablo Herrera’s home in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suarez isn’t that dissimilar from those of his rap-producer counterparts in the States. A mixing board, synthesizer, speakers, and a scattering of CDs fill a table in one corner of his living room. Underneath lie crates of vinyl, every producer’s basic…

At first glance you might think you were still in Miami, perhaps amid the cameras on the set of the latest Jay-Z video. About 200 people are gathered on Thursday evening, June 22, in front of a hardscrabble building on a block that is vacant except for palm trees. The…

At first glance, poolside at South Beach’s tony National Hotel would seem an odd place to interview director Greg Harrison. His debut feature Groove is a loving portrait of his own mid-Nineties head-first dive into the guerrilla-style parties of San Francisco’s rave scene, a grimy spirit far removed from the…

Seems like the Eighties again. Prince is now responding to the title Prince. Maurice Ferre’s name is being bandied about in sentences that also contain the word mayor. Details magazine is ditching the frat-boy demographic and returning to its previous incarnation as the bible for boys who are straight but…

It may be hard to imagine these days, but there actually was a time when Coconut Grove was synonymous with the phrase “hippie mecca.” Long before CocoWalk reintroduced the sight of imperial China’s peasant-pulled taxi carts, prior to jet-setting celebs such as Madonna and Sylvester Stallone discovering the joys of…

The fashion world is a topic that seems to render otherwise eloquent individuals apoplectic. There’s just something about models — those mutant offspring of rarefied breeding — that leaves even the soberest of intellectuals at a loss for words. Even as adept a social critic as filmmaker Robert Altman, who…

Have you considered a night out at CocoWalk? That was the message last Wednesday from Miami Beach to South Florida’s kinder, as Beach commissioners voted 6-1 to bar those under age 21 from setting foot in their city’s nightclubs. Of course underage drinking itself had little to do with the…

It’s pop-quiz time. What do Anchorage, Alaska; Uncasville, Connecticut; and Wausau, Wisconsin; all have in common? Best keep your podunkville remarks to yourself: All three far-flung burgs will be graced with an imminent live concert from Havana’s Cubanismo, the sprawling son ensemble led by ace trumpeter Jesus Alemañy. Those are…

“To everyone who is here, if we would have had weapons, this would not have happened.” — Lazaro Gonzalez, addressing a crowd of supporters outside his house following the removal of Elian Now that el exilio has ended its attacks on Miami’s beleaguered tires, newspaper vending machines, and Dumpsters, the…

It’s been somewhat gratifying to page through the nation’s mainstream media this past week and discover editorials from St. Louis to Seattle, all filled with sober centrists uttering the same pronouncements on Miami’s body politic that Kulchur has been jumping up and down about for the past eighteen months. Namely…

The immortality predictions of Elian-crazed santeros aside, eventually Fidel Castro will pass on, and with him (notwithstanding the ascendancy of a Putin-style strongman) Cuban society as we presently know it. The precise form of this postrevolutionary landscape certainly is open for debate, but as a host of powerful South Floridian…