“Perfection to D, is quite essential / He has to live up to his potential.”

He invented the breakbeat, a key element of hip-hop.

The “Master of Records” remains enigmatic despite his renown.

“OH BABY, YOU… YOU GOT WHAT I NEED!”

His brilliance is perpetually muffled.

Help send Death Boogie to the largest Arts Festival in the world!

How to find good hip-hop songs for your kids to listen to.

What is this winter’s best music video?

“I need to start writing pieces about other people’s problems.”

M.C.A.’s in the back because he’s skeezin’ with a whore? No more.

“Catch me at the flicks, Apollo rap Frederick Douglass”

Coyote wearing a giant clock, Loki with a fried chicken franchise.

Not criminal, but criminal-minded; chronicling, yet not committing.

“Everybody rappin’ but they don’t know how./You shoulda seen the boy rappin’ to the cow.”

The parataxic pyrotechnics of hip-hop’s Ishmael Reed.

Hip-hop lyrics bust through to literature.

One of his production jobs was hilariously disrespectful.

The greatest rapper of all time? That’s a contentious one. But if…

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor…

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo)…

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief)…

Pity Mohandas Dewese, d/b/a KOOL MOE DEE (born 1962): briefly one of…

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the…

It seems impossible that the various identities — Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital,…