If you’re a rapper and your last name is Battles, it’s pretty easy to hype yourself as a battle rap specialist. Whether that surname is your given name or a chosen alias, dropping the Battles name reminds the listener that you may be able bring another rapper down via verbal dexterity and intimidation. It would […]

Joshua Lerner is an invisible bully like The Gooch. In one of the many excellent anecdotes from Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, Ice-T tells what it was like to hear Melle Mel grab the mic in the early days of hip-hop in the Bronx. When Mel would take his turn, it would sound […]

Joshua Lerner is Mighty Narrow. I’ll be honest. I didn’t know exactly what to make of Rockie Fresh. A few weeks back, I caught his set at the Bottom Lounge here in Chicago, and I experienced a range of conflicting thoughts about the man and his music. I briefly met Rockie before the set and, […]

Joshua Lerner owns every Poor Righteous Teachers cassette. Today at school, I erased the dates of January from my dry-erase calendar and put in new ones for February. I thought about the 41 homicides we saw in Chicago last month, an 11-year record. Most think the murder rate will drop with the temperature as summer […]

Joshua Lerner is a writer, teacher, and DJ based in Chicago. “There is no rock music with walls around it.” Jay-Z, Decoded Remember how it went? In 2008, Jay-Z headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and Noel Gallagher made the shitty rock-ist (racist) move of whining to the press. His infamous line: “No, I’m not […]