Ever since Trick Daddy and Trina darted across the national radar in 1999 with “Nann Nigga,” the debut single from Trick’s second album, www.thug.com, Slip-N-Slide has reigned as Florida’s number-one independent record label. A quick walk or drive through Trick’s hometown of Liberty City will show you why. Its rundown…
99 Jamz (WEDR-FM 99.1) likes to present itself as the ultimate party, a nonstop hip-hop and R&B throwdown. But the reality is quite different. Up in Hollywood at the Cox Communications building on a recent Friday, the small studio that is the nerve center for the top-rated urban music station…
On the 2000 album The Moon and Antarctica, Modest Mouse opens with “3rd Planet,” one of the great songs in recent American rock. Opening with a few solitary chords plucked by guest musician and lap steel guitarist Ben Blankenship, “3rd Planet” thrusts the listener into a melancholy world of self-doubt…
The Power Out sounds like a pastiche of different styles filtered through a uniquely singular voice. The all-woman band appropriates everything from Stereolab lounge on “Gone Under Sea” (where Verity Susman even sings in French like Laetitia Sadier) to Fifties-era choral music on the surprisingly expansive “The Valleys.” It is…
Colette Marino emerged from Chicago in the late Nineties as one-fourth of the house collective Superjane. What distinguished her from partners Lady D, DJ Heather, and Dayhota wasn’t her strong DJ skills, but her penchant for spinning records and singing at the same time. This is far from a gimmick;…
With Map of What Is Effortless, Telefon Tel Aviv marks a radical departure from the opaque ambience of its 2001 debut, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, toward a rich brew of soul and IDM electronics. Much of it, in fact, features the Loyola University Chamber Orchestra, which lends the proceedings a regal,…
To find evidence of Jay-Z’s far-reaching influence in club culture, all you need to do is look toward South Beach on a weekend night. Visit any hip-hop club on the Washington Avenue strip, or Opium Garden on Collins Avenue, and you’ll find people acting out one of the rapper’s videos:…
You won’t be seeing Roosevelt Franklin on MTV anytime soon. You probably won’t read about them in music magazines such as Spin, CMJ, or even XLR8R, although you may catch a perfunctory review of their album Something’s Gotta Give in URB. As for radio? Forget it: Your best bet is…
While most South Bitch DJs are resolutely earthbound in their advocacy of the good thug life, Richard “Q-Bert” Quitevis is from planet Mars, a UFO with lightning-quick hands. Since emerging from the Bay Area’s potent hip-hop scene in the early Nineties, Q-Bert has evolved from a dominant hip-hop DJ with…
Last November Pop Up Records issued its first release, an album by Summer Blanket titled Charm Wrestling. The album has a rare, fragile quality emphasized by its downbeat melodies and confessional verse, the work of Keith Michaud, who plays bass and guitar while singing on its nine tracks, and a…
Like their punk-rock brethren, “conscious” rappers are fond of making flat-earth statements about overthrowing the government and obtaining some form of abstract justice for the people. But it’s not Harlem rapper Immortal Technique’s ability to spew well-written calls to kill the pigs that makes him so deadly; instead it’s allegations…
On this breezy January afternoon, the Doubletree Surfcomber Hotel hardly looks like the future home of the inaugural Miami Music Multimedia Summit. The hotel entrance leads to a long outside corridor that is infamous around South Beach for being confusing and difficult to navigate; it leads to a pool area…
Based in Baltimore and run by producer Skiz “Spectre” Fernando, Wordsound is one of the strongholds for the electronic/dub/hip-hop crossover that germinated in mid-Eighties No Wave New York and has occasionally reared its head through sundry mutant genres like trip-hop and minimal techno. This latest volume by Crooklyn Dub Outernational…
When Ted Lucas, founder and impresario behind local rap giant Slip-N-Slide, wanted to announce his new distribution deal with Capitol Records after four platinum-studded years with Atlantic Records, he didn’t reach out to the Miami Herald or New Times. Instead he posted a statement on www.305hiphop.com, the year-old online magazine…
Here is a list of the year’s best music as chosen by our contributors to New Times. The numbers in parentheses reflect the number of votes each album received. Albums Radiohead, Hail to the Thief (Capitol) (8) White Stripes, Elephant (V2) (5) Four Tet, Rounds (Domino) (4) Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love…
It was like a searing fever dream. That’s the best way I can describe how Cat Power turned her performance at I/O last December 20 into sheer chaos. A large contingent of followers sat down in the middle of the floor, eager to hear every word, while everyone else milled…
South Beach’s famous Lincoln Road promenade, with its clean sidewalks, chic designer boutiques, and smartly dressed tourists, seems a long way from the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of Liberty City. But it is here in the offices of SoBe Entertainment, hidden away in a nondescript white office building a few doors down…
Revolver is Josh Menendez. Anyone who has partied, passed through, or passed out at the long-running Design District event has felt his presence. Sometimes you’ll see him standing at the doorway to the Soho Lounge, talking with the club’s staff. Other times he’s cueing up songs in the DJ booth…
If there’s any rapper that has been appointed the New South’s thug poet, it’s David Banner, a finance graduate from Southern University who used his major- label debut Mississippi: The Album to expound on everything from strip club politics to the plight of black people in one of the most…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. While rap music all but dominated the pop charts in 2003, it also yielded one of the lamest record crops (barring Outkast, God bless them) in recent memory. Even the ever-lovable Snoop Dogg was cranking out hip-pop bullshit…
Chan Marshall, who goes by the name of Cat Power, is mostly known as a media star, part of a dazzling but frequently maligned universe that includes Rufus Wainwright, Meshell Ndegeocello, and too many others to mention. It’s a category usually reserved for staunch individualists who confound audiences and critics…
Varick “Smitty” Smith doesn’t look like a ghostwriter. The baby-faced rapper has a smooth countenance that belies his 23 years; he could be your typical high school senior. Instead he’s writing verses for Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, filling the Bad Boy mogul’s mouth with outrageous playboy fantasies like “Your man…
