I’ll make this quick because I’m hearing things that suggest I’ve worn out my welcome at this particular Dunkin Donuts like, “This guy needs to buy more than two munchkins every hour to use our WiFi” and “Why the fuck does he think it’s OK to take his shoes off?” Fall is a bullshit season, […]

Evan Nabavian first saw the man in the cape. My favorite kind of R&B is the kind that borrows liberally from hip-hop. Obvious bias there when you consider that I eat out of a Boot Camp Clikk lunchbox, but hear me out. Just as rappers relinquish some thuggery and soften up for the single, R&B […]

Evan Nabavian invented grape Kool-Aid. The other day my boss said something like, “Let’s review your report tomorrow?” “Bong bong,” I said. A pause. “Indeed.” Read any RZA interview in the past ten years and you’ll get the “Wu-Tang Forever” spiel about the influence of the Wu in the world today. Drake echoed those sentiments […]

Evan Nabavian’s favorite Ghost is Dennis Coles. Rap fans’ years of bellyaching about radio pandering left them bereft of rappers who can rap well and make songs with real musicality. The infighting created an ideological divide between rappers with skill and rappers with style (oversimplifying, of course) where hooks and catchiness fell in the latter […]

Evan Nabavian gave Frasier Crane most of his psychiatric tutelage. Fat Beats was cool for me because it was a place where the music files on my computer existed in real life and names like Marco Polo and Blu & Exile didn’t elicit the blank stares they got back at my dorm. It was a […]

Evan Nabavian founded Zagat. Some six years ago, the bros and I convened at the now-shuttered Scobee diner in Little Neck, Queens for our last meal together before heading our separate ways for college. Of the six bros, three would head upstate to cow country, one to Wisconsin, and one to Harlem. Me? I would […]

Evan Nabavian wrote this in Pac blood. 2Pac isn’t exactly the rap martyr du jour right now. Yes, he is rap’s greatest firebrand and any rapper-cum-revolutionary owes him a debt of gratitude, but direct emulation of his style and sound is rare outside of Freddie Gibbs. Popular rap styles change with the seasons and it’s […]

Evan Nabavian sold more powder than Johnson and Johnson. Inviting your friends over to remix Biggie songs is a really dumb idea unless you’re DJ House Shoes and your friends are today’s eminent left field rap producers. Shoes sent Biggie Smalls acapellas to his buddies and came back with a pack of experimental remixes, a […]

French Montana paid Evan Nabavian for this post in bottles of Tej. Sometimes the most effective singers aren’t singers. Outside of Biz Markie, ODB, Ja Rule, and Lil Wayne, I’ll cite “Stay Schemin” where French Montana goon-croons a hook that logically should have been sung by Drake or any given R&B princeling. But maybe the […]

Evan Nabavian knows the real secret of the Flaming Moe. If you’re a rapper trying to be famous, you face a grueling existence. After you drop your groundbreaking mixtape, you smile and joke your way through daily press appearances, release songs according to a regimented promo schedule, dutifully avoid having a Charles Hamilton moment, and […]