What do songs by artists like Jay-Z and Public Enemy have in common? They feature representations of ‘cop voice,’ a racialized way of speaking that police use to weaponize their voices around people of color, according to faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, associate professor of English at Binghamton...
Millionaire rapper Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z, has proved yet again why he is larger than life. He is embroiled in a contractual dispute over the US$204m (£159m) sale of his clothing brand to Iconix Brand Group a decade ago. In a twist that has now thrown the world of arbitration into a frenzy, Jay-Z recently...
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have developed an app to understand why some rhythms are more difficult to perform than others. They collected and analyzed a huge dataset of more than 100,000 people and found that changing rhythm is more difficult than playing a complex individual rhythm. The app challenges users to play Clapping...
Over the past decade, hip-hop music has become a world-wide phenomenon and, in 2017, surpassed rock as the biggest music genre in the United States. Up until now little has been known about how often, or in what context, tobacco and marijuana products and imagery appear in hip-hop music culture. In order to get a...
Artists lucky enough to find their song on ‘Today’s Top Hits’, a Spotify playlist with over 20 million followers, could see a boost in popularity worth between $116k and $163k in additional streaming revenue. Playlists also have a big influence on the success of new artists and new songs. Getting to the top of Spotify’s...
The new film “A Quiet Place” is an edge-of-your-seat tale about a family struggling to avoid being heard by monsters with hypersensitive ears. Conditioned by fear, they know the slightest noise will provoke a violent response – and almost certain death. Audiences have come out in droves to dip their toes into its quiet terror,...
If All I Was Was Black unveils Mavis Staples’ sixteenth studio album and third collaboration with Wilco frontman, Jeff Tweedy as producer. It features twelve tracks, some of which are covered below for their ability to cement a convincing narrative, these are in fact fraught times but hope is not lost when we have solidarity...
Since the inception of hip-hop culture, the DJ has been its cornerstone. The culture’s starting point is widely accepted as the birthday party Kool DJ Herc threw for his sister at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, The Bronx on August 11, 1973. Kool Herc’s selection spanned the funk genre, and using two copies of the same record,...
By the late 1950s foremost musicians like Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane explicitly introduced politics in their jazz, as the civil rights movement started gaining momentum in the US. Musician and author Gilad Atzmon explained it in a 2005 essay: Black Americans were calling for freedom, and jazz expressed it better than mere...
