Hip-hop

On the fifth day of Nicki Minaj’s intense fixation on Megan Thee Stallion following a jab the “Savage” rapper likely threw Minaj’s way on her latest track, Minaj invoked Rihanna to claim that Megan tried to force sympathy for herself as a victim of violence. She also refuted that she has encouraged her fans to approach or desecrate the gravesite of Megan’s late mother. The Texas cemetery where she’s buried has reportedly enhanced security and informed local police of the risk it faces as Nicki Minaj fans may have…

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie has announced a world tour set to begin this spring featuring openers NLE Choppa, Fridayy, Luh Tyler, Dess Dior, and Byron Messia at select dates. The Better Off Alone tour, named after an upcoming album of the same name, will kick off in Auckland, New Zealand on April 10 and will head through Europe and the U.S. before wrapping up in Vancouver on Sept. 20. The U.S. general on sale will go live on Feb. 2. Citi cardmembers will have access to a presale for U.S. dates starting Jan. 30 at 10…

Nicki Minaj has dropped new song “Big Foot.” The diss track arrives following a dust-up between her and Megan Thee Stallion following the latter’s release of “Hiss” on Friday. On Minaj’s new track, she goes in for the kill, straight-up naming Megan in the first verse. “This little beggin’ whore talkin’ ’bout Megan’s law/For a free beat, you can hit Megan raw,” Minaj spits. “If you a ghost writer, Pardi in Megan jaw/Shots thrown but I still ain’t let Megan score.” The song culminates in a spoken word warning. “But…

It’s an afternoon in July 2023, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams is in his element. Standing at a podium at the foot of the marble staircase in New York’s City Hall, the Mayor is flanked by staffers, supporters, and hip-hop stars including Eric B. (of Eric B. and Rakim fame), rapper and reality TV star Peter Gunz, and “The Blastmaster” KRS-One. The occasion is the announcement of a series of concerts to celebrate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary across New York’s five boroughs. Aiming to look the part of “Hip-Hop Mayor,”…

The double standard is almost as old as hip-hop itself. A decorated filmmaker gets laurels for his or her latest bullet-laden gangster movie. A rock or country star is proclaimed a songwriting genius for violent tales of man’s inhumanity to man. But rappers are held to a different standard, their every line held up as some kind of documentary evidence of an artist’s criminal intent. Sometimes, those lyrics are even used in courtrooms by prosecutors eager to take advantage of the public’s built-in prejudices and…

Twitter recently lost one of its premier chaos agents: Jaboukie Young-White, the ace comic responsible for maybe the best single act of trolling in the hellsite’s history. The Illinois native attracted a large social media following in the 2010s thanks to his Instagram posts and tweets brimming with sardonic wit and diablerie. He was branded “gloriously extra” (BuzzFeed’s words), featured on Rolling Stone’s 25 Under 25 list, wrote for Big Mouth and American Vandal, and spent a few years as a Daily Show…

Legendary mixtape platform DatPiff has uploaded the entirety of its over 366,420-project catalog to the internet archive. Last March, the service which calls itself “The Authority In Mixtapes” experienced a server crash that put their canonical library of free music in peril. A month later, the site relaunched with a page announcing plans for “evolving beyond our website and app” to “continue to make the library accessible!” And now, almost a year later, their 50 TB cache of mixtapes and free albums from the likes of…

New year, new music from Playboi Carti. On Jan. 1, the rap star released “Backr00ms,” his newest collaboration with rap colleague Travis Scott. In their decidedly lo-fi video, Carti and Scott take turns rapping in a garage near an SUV tank, with scenes of Carti showering a dancer with money inside a drab office space spliced throughout.  The chorus goes: “In the middle of the field, throw me a bomb, I’m throwin’ that bih like a quarterback/Standin’ in the field, holdin’ a bomb, throwin’ that ho like a…

When the trio known as grouptherapy. takes the stage at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, the crowd is compact yet energized. It’s a Sunday night in the fall, and this is the smallest crowd the group has seen so far on their debut tour with the rapper Tobi Lou to promote their own album, I Was Mature for My Age but I Was Still a Child. Compared with their other East Coast shows, in places like Philadelphia and Boston, New Haven is Sean Astin in Rudy: small in size but large in heart and energy. The crowd never…

T here are several ways to soundtrack a journey back from hell. On a Wednesday afternoon in late November, Jorge Pabón lifts himself out of his wheelchair, props himself up, and scrolls through his iTunes until the right song hits him. “Órale!” he exclaims, as the chugging guitar riffs of “Disposable Heroes,” Metallica’s adrenaline-pumping war epic, fill his own personal purgatory: the unassuming physical therapy gym inside New Franklin Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Queens, New York. He clasps his…