You’d think it would be difficult to tell who’s wearing blackface when you’re looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, but the guys in North Carolina hip-hop outfit Little Brother think they have a grip on the situation. On songs such as “Cheatin'” and reoccurring interludes, Little Brother MCs Phonte…

As Iraq burns, New Orleans drowns, and our president complacently plucks his guitar strings, the voice of Damian Marley blasts out of seemingly every other car stereo and club sound system in Miami: “To see the sufferation, sicken me/Them suit no fit me/To win election they trick we/And they don’t…

On my first day as a freshman in college in the mid-Nineties, I was greeted by the scent of patchouli, offers of LSD, and the sounds of the Grateful Dead. But by sophomore year, it was all Ecstacy, raves, and Josh Wink. It’s a testimony to his talent that producer/DJ…

Indie music: The appellation is problematic. For one, it doesn’t describe any particular sound. Rock and roll captures that genre’s ragged glory and sexual subtext, and hip-hop certainly points toward the rap world’s bouncing rhythms and alliterative wordplay. But indie music? Independent of what exactly? The mainstream’s corporate hegemony? The…

In the DJ booth during his weekly residency at Miami’s most famous club, the internationally recognized Space, house DJ/producer Oscar G began to get that feeling. It was 2002 and he was set to release what would become his biggest single to date, the gorgeously twisted “Dark Beat.” As he…

Being besieged with free promotional CDs would seem like an enviable problem. But in all honestly, it’s oftentimes more of a burden than a benefit. Everything from rain forest music to that Crazy Frog ringtone CD crosses my desk, and while Apollo Kid tries to give everything a shot, most…

Scott Herren (a.k.a. Prefuse 73) awoke one morning this past February to find that his new album, Surrounded by Silence, had been leaked to the Internet a full three months before its scheduled release. While this is an increasingly common phenomenon, it didn’t make the pill any easier to swallow…

Not to grandpa it, but it used to be that you had your emotionally distraught singer/songwriters on the left and your carefree electro/techno denizens on the right. Sure, every once in a while someone like Underworld would shake shit up, but in general it was the narcissist versus the hedonist,…

Turntablism — the late-Nineties hip-hop subgenre that showcased technical wizardry behind the ones and twos — was in many ways doomed from the beginning. It was too esoteric, too exclusive, and most turntablists prioritized difficult routines and out-of-print records that impressed only fellow practitioners, not audience members. But Arizona DJ…

Hurricane Katrina affects us all one way or another. The disaster is something much larger than any of us — collectively or individually — and we will never be able to gauge its complete impact. But if any city can begin to imagine what New Orleans is going through, it’s…

One of the great misconceptions of dance music mythology is that the DJ is an anonymous conduit of groove. This idea of celebrity subversion may appeal to the dance community’s vaguely socialist politics, but it simply isn’t true. There are dance-floor superstars, and in this upper stratosphere of big beats,…

There’s no better way to decompress from the celebrity overload of VMA week than to spend a little time investigating South Florida’s burgeoning indie scene. And out of all the bands that have emerged these past few years — and there seem to be more every day — none is…

On Late Registration Kanye West ventures into the sort of rough psychological waters few MCs dare to tread. Moments of self-doubt crop up, while thorny questions regarding personal integrity and undue entitlement seemingly threaten to capsize West’s platinum-plus career. But in the end no one — especially not the man…

I did not shoot Suge Knight. I did, however, meet the gangsta and has-been rap mogul just hours before he was shot in the early hours of this past Sunday morning. The meeting occurred at Ludacris’s star-studded “barbecue” at South Beach’s Hotel Victor. The party was a surprisingly intimate affair…

In 1992 Karrin Allyson was an unknown jazz singer from Nebraska. A dozen years and two Grammy nominations later, she is regarded as one of the most versatile and talented singers of her generation. Her vocal range is nearly unmatched in jazz circles, and her masterly inflection has drawn comparisons…

For a brief moment in the late Nineties it seemed as if the hip-hop revolution was at hand. The community was still reeling from the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, with many of the genre’s diehard fans turning away from the bling of mainstream hip-hop. Leading the revolt were two…

They might be the apex of pop glitz and video glam, but historically the VMAs haven’t really been an oasis of new, progressive sounds — and to be fair, award shows rarely are. But this year MTV is at least trying to be hip. The MTV2 award highlights new and…

Missy Elliott is one of the few artists whose videos are still considered events. From her introduction as the fly girl in Hype Williams’s 1997 fish-eyed masterpiece “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” to the buzzing mindfuck of 2002’s “Work It,” Elliott has repeatedly proven herself a master of the medium…

In clubland word travels in bits and pieces. “You done look like a god dime,” warbles Melissa, a talented R&B singer I’ve been trying to talk with for the past fifteen minutes. “WHAT?!?!” I holla back. Melissa and I are merely inches apart — so close that her large Afro…