As 50 Cent’s star keeps rising, the fallout from his ascendancy keeps growing. The Queensbridge rapper responsible for the year’s biggest album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, has just released his first DVD, The New Breed, an odds-and-sods collection featuring videos, a short film, and two behind-the-scenes documentaries (for “Wanksta”…
When I first moved here from Oakland, California, my boss lent me a sleeping bag (my furniture hadn’t arrived yet), a lawn chair to put it on, some paper plates and plastic utensils, and a copy of Joan Didion’s Miami. Not having a television to watch or a computer to…
The Bronx is hundreds of miles away from Little Louie Vega’s vantage point on the patio behind Miami Beach’s Panna Café, where he sits and enjoys a cup of coffee on this late March morning. He’s here under some duress: In three hours he has to rejoin his wife, the…
With all sorts of Eighties-birthed strains floating through the pop underground, it was only a matter of time before white noise, that misbegotten homage to the Velvet Underground propagated by the Jesus and Mary Chain, reappeared as an avant-garde tactic. Thank Dan “Manitoba” Snaith for hastening its return in the…
Over the past decade, Mystikal has had a surprisingly long and fruitful career for a rapper best known for maniacally catchy novelty hits like “Shake Ya Ass” and “Danger.” Part of the appeal, of course, lies in his distinctive voice, a wild and loud bark that sounds like someone yelling…
The Winter Music Conference spanned seven days, more than 200 “official” and “unofficial” parties, and several thousand people. By its end most of them had “hit a wall,” the inevitable result of drinking, drugging, and partying for a week with little or no sleep. But there were a handful of…
Three years ago, amid the sweltering heat, omnipresent 4/4 beats, and crowds rushing from nightclub to nightclub during that year’s Winter Music Conference, Mr. C found true love. “I said to her the night after we met, ‘Why don’t you meet me on the beach,'” he remembered. “She came down…
Over the past several years Los Angeles’s Chris Manak, better known as Peanut Butter Wolf, has established himself as one of the most intriguing personalities in hip-hop, one known for his impeccable taste in classic funk, rock, and rap breaks. Though he began his career in the mid-Nineties as a…
On a breezy Wednesday evening at the South Beach nightspot Tantra, DanceStar USA, the upstart Miami-based production company whose second annual American Dance Music Awards should be a highlight of this year’s eighteenth annual Winter Music Conference, was giving away so many free mojitos that you could literally walk around…
When Eminem was asked by XXL magazine last month why he signed Queensbridge rapper 50 Cent to his Shady Records, the hip-hop Elvis replied, “His life story sold me.” Admittedly, in an industry that values street credibility and hard-luck tales, 50 Cent has an impressive pedigree. His mother, a drug…
As a white French hip-hop producer, DJ Cam’s recordings have been alternately categorized by beat heads as trip-hop and downtempo, or acid jazz, anything other than the music to which he frequently and unashamedly pays homage. In fact his mid-Nineties albums like Mad Blunted Jazz mostly consisted of breaks already…
