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: Tor Aarestad

Though Iggy Pop did Iggy first (and better), STIV BATORS (1949-90) did Iggy with a striver’s zeal in the right place and at the right time. The arrival of the Dead Boys in 1977 marked the […]

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 […]

By: Sarah Weinman

One of my favorite children’s books, the madcap Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), by SHEL SILVERSTEIN (1930-99), is about loneliness, friendship, and the perils of too much success — all of which turn […]

By: Katie Hennessey

“I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay/Watching the tide roll away/Oooh, I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay/Wastin’ time….” Time was one thing that OTIS REDDING (1941–67) didn’t have to waste. Posthumously […]

By: Douglas Wolk

JOHN ZORN (born 1953) has been the nexus of the musical avant-garde in New York for a couple of decades — an unbelievably prolific composer and performer and curator and label-dude whose early look-how-eclectic-I-am tendencies […]

By: Douglas Wolk

Pity Mohandas Dewese, d/b/a KOOL MOE DEE (born 1962): briefly one of the most popular rappers alive, he’s now mostly remembered for a feud with LL Cool J that the market effectively decided in LL’s […]

By: Tom Nealon

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the hard rhymer, gave us “My Uzi Weighs a Ton,” “Prophets of Rage,” and “Fight the Power,” not to mention Flavor Flav and the […]

By: Tom Nealon

It seems impossible that the various identities — Prince Rakeem, Bobby Digital, RZArecta, The Abbot, Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah — of rapper, producer, and film scorer RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, born 1969) form a coherent whole; […]

By: Jason Grote

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]