Rap and slang are as inextricable as Rush Limbaugh and dittoheads; cholula and antacids. Slang is regional and national, different lexicons in almost every county. As “Blue Mamba,” Trey Kirby suggested, you could listen to Cash Money 1998-2002 and come up with a hundred of these. We gathered a crack team of rap mimes to […]

Sometimes your mission finds you. For Daniel Sewell, a Black-Filipino kid from Linwood, Detroit, his career was never a choice. Danny never learned how to rap, words came together in his head even at elementary school age. Borrowing the name of his favorite Reservoir Dogs character, Danny Brown found joy ripping into the twisted corners […]

Abe Beame is talking square biz. It’s hard to keep up with the internet in 2011. Both music and its criticism changes faster than truths can even be registered. By the time you figure out what’s happening, the herd has already moved on. So it should come as no surprise that since I started writing […]

Douglas Martin listened to 1,498 records this year. By a rough estimate. A bunch of great indie labels released music this year. If I paid tribute to them all, it would feature over 100 albums with a word count that rivals The Iliad. Sub Pop, Matador, Merge, Domino, 4AD, Slumberland, Captured Tracks, Woodsist, In the […]

Abe Beame hacked the email of a culture writer from GQ to bring you this from September’s issue. Sean “Jay-Z” Carter: I remember it was like four o’clock in the morning. I was in Hawaii like a year ago and I get this wild text from Kanye, I still have it in my phone, hold […]

Whether or not you enjoy Death Grips depends on what you want out of your music. If you’re searching to replicate the disorientation of a drill sergeant screaming seig heils at you while you attempt to asphyxiate yourself with a plastic bag, this will be your favorite rap group of all-time. If not, they exist […]

Fast and dirty. Like no other band of their generation, The White Stripes understood that’s the point of rock and roll. No need to belabor a eulogy on Jack and Meg’s medicine show.  Raw they gave it to you. Guitars that twitched like the electrocuted and damned. Drums that kept a steady pulse and knew […]

Douglas Martin’s favorite Hemingway book is “The Sun Also Rises.”  Twenty-one years ago, Chris Lombardi had the same idea many young and enterprising music lovers have had: he would form his own record label. Whether he was deeply enthralled with Spanish culture or just stoned and eating Frosted Flakes while watching the episode of Looney […]

  Eat your heart out Christgau! Reviewing Madlib albums in the traditional sense feels like a waste of time these days. There’s no point in trying to figure out a particular record’s inner logic: it’s probably just the result of Madlib’s particular listening patterns on any given week. In fact, Madlib’s output is single-handedly redefining […]

A former associate editor at Stylus, Derek Miller currently contributes to Resident Advisor. While he does reside in the northern country, he should not be confused with this febrile impostor. You’re tired of reading about this one. I understand. Like many of you, I feel like I burned out on this before I’d really heard […]