Evan Nabavian will slap the taste out your mouth if you call him an old soul. Before I say anything about Mac Miller, let me disclose that I am white and I was four years old when Illmatic came out. I rapped under the name Judah The Maccabee for about two weeks before I realized […]

“Elevators” stays several hundred feet and rising in my mind fifteen summers later, on a sun-scrambled Labor Day weekend. I think it may have been exactly today when I snatched the cassette single at an obviously shuttered Sam Goody in Orange County. My parents had dragged my sister and I on some haute-haunted two-day trek […]

Dan Love has returned from the land of the chief rocka to reminisce on one of the most unsung. With the recent resurrection of Curtis and Otis by Messrs. West and Carter, I felt compelled to contact my daddy and remind him that things move in cycles. He managed to miss the Q-Tip reference – […]

Abe Beame feeds his Rottweilers gunpowder. And so for the second time in the first five songs on his first album, Biggie raps with himself. Only the magic moment that was rap in 1994 could a rookie release a two minute and 45 second phone conversation detailing his desire to defend himself from attackers plotting […]

Abe Beame loves your fucking attitude. Ready to Die. September 13th, 1994. It was game changing in the purest sense of that played out term.  You can’t discuss a single song without assessing it in the context of the album itself. Puffy and Biggie brought the big picture, a cinematic vision, one present in every […]