If home is where you hang your hat then Silverlake is rapidly turning into the world’s largest hat rack. Over the past 12 months, it has become de rigueur in hipster courting rituals for male hipsters (homo habilus hipstericus) to trot out increasingly ridiculous pieces of vintage head-ware in an effort to woo the […]

Sometime after 50 arrived, the art of the narrative wandered into a blizzard of coke raps, artificial hood mythologizing and pandering simplicity. Complexity no longer moved units, and with sales sliding, Scarface xeroxes and ringtone rappers became the safe bets. You can’t blame the suits either. They’re just trying to save their jobs and besides, […]

  Hipsters do the darndest things. First, it was the Hamburgler stripes and the Madonnoteven close “leggings and then it was the fedoras and the American apparel “lame headbands.” Incidentally, they’re actually called “lame headbands,” you aren’t being ironic, you’re just being retarded. But I digress, you see a new trend has arisen out of […]

For Jews, Yom Kippur is the most solemn day of the year, a chance when we can reflect on the past 12 months, pay penance for our wrongdoings and sit in temple starving ourselves to death despite our stark agnosticism. It’s even less fun than it sounds. In fact, the only thing less fun than […]

Before I get besieged with the “why aren’t Slick Rick, Rakim, Kool G Rap, Nas, Ghostface, Pharoahe, etc. on your list” e-mails, remember this is a list of the most UNDERRATED rappers, not the best. As the title of the post states, this is highly subjective and very little scientific research has been done. In […]

This week marked the release of one of this year’s most anticipated rap albums, T.I. Vs. Tip., the follow-up to 2006’s T.I.’s hit King, a record that was best summarized by Ian Cohen in just four words: colossal waste of beats. So far, the buzz on T.I. Vs. Tip has been mostly negative, with its […]

While Jeff is being nursed back to reality in the decompression chamber, I thought I’d take some time away from my curator duties at floodwatchmusic.com to share a story with you. You see, back in the day, I used to catch terrible hell from my friends whenever the subject of the “greatest rapper ever” was […]

As promised in yesterday’s post, expect analysis in the next few days of what rappers came up big in the Internet straw poll and who got what Erick Sermon would charitably describe as “the bozack.” In the first installment, I present the 10 Greatest Rappers to not have an album make the Top 25 List […]

What you’ve been waiting for… Among the more popular business ideas of recent times has been James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds ( which also comes in book form). The one-line description is that so long as information is shared across a broad spectrum of people, large groups make better decisions than more isolated elites. Faith […]

Rest assured, Joey “Straight Bangin” and I are putting in work, trying to import the many ballots we received into spreadsheet form. Sadly, it takes a whole lot of time, so don’t expect a full list until at least late next week. All apologies. In the meantime, here’s a look at the next 25 that […]