By: Brian Berger

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

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Joshua Glenn

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

By: Tom Nealon

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

By: Alexis Madrigal

The game we played was the life he lived.

By: Brian Berger

Hip-hop lyrics bust through to literature.

By: Brian Berger

The musical redemption of a prodigal son.

By: Douglas Wolk

One of his production jobs was hilariously disrespectful.

By: Douglas Wolk

The greatest rapper of all time? That’s a contentious one. But if we rephrase it as “most quotable rapper,” then there’s a shoo-in: William Michael Griffin Jr., the god-on-the-mic better known as RAKIM (born 1968). […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The most enduring recording of SLICK RICK (Richard Walters, aka MC Ricky D and Rick the Ruler, born 1965) is probably his guest appearance on Doug E. Fresh’s “La Di Da Di” in 1985. But […]

By: Tom Nealon

If OL’ DIRTY BASTARD’s (Russell Tyrone Jones, 1968-2004) madness was a tumor pressing on his genius and making it dance, it also caused him excruciating pain. His anguished, wailing stabs at song remain some of […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo) and a one-man jazz “quintet” (Yesterday’s New Quintet), among other alter egos. Since 1993, he’s contributed to dozens of recordings, and his breed […]

By: Tom Nealon

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief) because of Middlebrow’s coopting efforts than TALIB KWELI (born 1975). Anointed the savior of hip hop after 1998’s brilliant Mos Def and Talib […]

By: Patrick Cates

DIZZEE RASCAL (born 1985) grew up in Bow, an East London ghetto of burnt-out mopeds, stabbings, pitbulls, and postcode turf wars between gangs of angry teenagers. After a prescient teacher gave him the know-how to […]