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With his last few albums Jay-Z has really made the transition from being a famous rapper to becoming a full-fledged cultural icon. He’s even got his own hand symbol, like, um… Well, we can’t actually think of any people with their own instantly recognizable hand gestures (help us out commenters), but plenty of other celebrities [...]

Tracking the strange and winding paths that lead from the funk, R&B, pop and reggae hits of yesteryear to the hip hop hits of today can be fairly torturous (especially when dealing with indie producers who don’t have the money to afford rights to expensive samples). Thankfully, Luke Carr from our sister/big brother site The [...]

Funny how child rappers are pretty much universally mocked, but adult rappers with small or young prefixes in their names (Young, Yung, Lil, Short, etc.) are often very successful. Maybe this is because if we saw our hip hop stars as kids we’d never be able to even pretend to believe their stories of hardship [...]

If there’s one thing that pushes the spectacle of a crazy music video for an awesome song into the canon of great pop culture it must be the celebrity cameo. The simple fact of having a contemporaneous superstar alongside a given musical artist gives the video that extra time capsule value as an artifact for [...]

As you may have heard, hip hop’s reigning king, Lil’ Wayne, has announced that his next album – to be titled Rebirth – will feature only rock music. For many this is cause for concern, as the rap-rock hybrid is usually a dicey bet (see Mos Def’s Black Jack Johnson, Ice-T’s Body Count and the [...]

And so it begins, the tidal wave of year-end lists approaches, and for Listicles’ first observance of this seasonal web-data migration we look at a list of the Top 40 Music Videos of 2008 from those totemic (sometimes tyrannical) arbiters of indie-alternative musical taste, Pitchfork.
Fittingly, they pick a mix of indie, dance and semi-mainstream fare [...]

Some time ago (two weeks, or 10 list-years) we posted a humble list of 5 great black and white music videos. Subsequently, we (I) have discovered that there are many more than we originally thought, several of which deserve to be memorialized in a list. So behold, Listicles’ second list of 5 Great Black and [...]