Tosten Burks prefers No Shave Novembeard to Movember. There’s a slim line between a revival and revivalism. Take a mid-90’s MC and the producer for Jurassic 5 – a group that made a career on old-school homage – and it’s easy to be skeptical that the collaboration between SlimKid3 (of The Pharcyde) and DJ Nu-Mark […]

Tosten Burks is exempt from taking Detroit 101 because he passed the AP Detroit exam in high school. This is hip-hop that makes people shout out “this is hip-hop.” A posse cut whose participants actually sound like they’re all members of the same posse. Internal rhyme after internal rhyme of cocksure, gun-cock rhythm turns of […]

Tosten Burks also occasionally appears in 140 characters. And just like that, Dallas’s best young rappers take another step towards making people care again about Dallas rap. Snagging Black Milk for the beat is a statement of legitimacy, a claim that even though ADd+ have less than 2,000 followers on Twitter, you still better be […]

Tosten Burks has never worn a skinny red zip up sweatshirt, but he is a fan of a nice cardigan. Donald Glover is a comedian. Childish Gambino is a rapper. Glover has paved a dichotomy for himself in the entertainment industry, dividing his music career from his comic career. If there truly exists a chasm […]

Tosten Burks only used the word “swag” once in the writing of this article. Everyone knows the story by now: faux-rebellious suburban skate punks drop staggering amounts of staggeringly crude haunted house rap onto message boards and quickly skyrocket to the top of the Internet on the backs of indignant teens and intellectual Caucasians. It’s […]

This is the first contribution from Tosten Burks. It will not be the last. When you debut with (near) perfection, what happens next? This question is Nas’s career. No matter how highly you revere Stillmatic or any of his other post-Illmatic works, Nasir Jones’s legacy will always be a tale of an artist beating on […]