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The first time we saw "African-American" rapper Siimba Liives Long he was splitting time between spitting bars in Ethiopia, walking with lions in South Africa and eating fire in Brooklyn, New York in his video for "Cocaine Bimbie." It wasn't all gimmicks; Siimba was born to Ethiopian ...

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. Oscar Grant.

This is what Christmas sounds like in Aloe Blacc's "Merry Christmas Mr. Brown," the lone original song from his 15-minute Christmas EP, which was released via an unlisted YouTube link posted to his social media accounts on Black ...

"When I see Police I'm Amadou Diallo/ Haunted by the bodies Sahara swallowed/ Did I flee Lampedusa to die over you? " asks the Togolese MC, MuRli on "Heathrow,' by the Limerick, Ireland-based trio, Rusangano Family. The song is a mix of immigrant emotions from a first-person perspective ...

"Stop acting like the Black movement is past tense" Paris snarls on "Lethal Warning Shot," the opening number from Pistol Politics, his new album. And the snarl is important — the snarl is the differentiating factor. The snarl is everything. Over the past quarter century, the Bay Area rapper has ...

Making a song about Friday can be a tricky proposition. On the one hand, there's the bar set by Johnny Kemp's 1987 smash, "Just Got Paid," a song so eternal that all these many years later, its groove, message and refrain still serve as the go-to soundtrack for getting ...

With the notion of authorship dispatched as silly and inconsequential, the way has been paved for even greater corporate influence over hip-hop.

Music's biggest stories are being truncated into listicles, click-through slideshows and GIF-friendly collections of microthoughts. This isn't an incredibly novel observation, but recent events are showing that that collective memory of consumers may be going the way of the dodo.

Earlier this month, the ...

There's this idea of Eminem as a reluctant celebrity turned recluse, who's holed himself up in his Detroit mansion with more money than he knows what to do with. In this scenario he strives to go about his life as his civilian alter ego, Marshall Mathers — taking care of ...

It's amazing that Goodie Mob's fifth album, Age Against the Machine, exists at all. As part of Atlanta's Dungeon Family, the quartet — comprised of Cee Lo Green, Big Gipp, Khujo and T-Mo — debuted as the more serious, more backwoods cousins of Outkast with 1995's Soul Food — an ...

Last week, late Monday night, Detroit rapper Big Sean used Funkmaster Flex of New York City's HOT 97.1 FM to release "Control (HOF)," a song which, as Sean announced via Twitter, won't be featured on his forthcoming sophomore album Hall of Fame, ostensibly due to sample clearance issues. ...

Magna Carta Holy Grail, Jay-Z's 12th solo album, begins with pure superhero heraldry. Though the first track, "Holy Grail," cedes much to Justin Timberlake's semi-pained rumination where the singer equates the love/hate game of celebrity to an unhealthy romantic relationship and mythical objects, the song itself is bombastic ...