Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music you missed”. It’s easy to become insecure-- the absence of familiar names on the list cou

New American Songbook: 'The Miseducation Of Eunice Waymon'

Dec 17th, 2018 2m 50s

Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a cultural malady of the same sort as the uselessly iterative paintings of Thomas Kincaid, or the

New American Songbook: Mick Jenkins' 'Pieces Of A Man'

Dec 3rd, 2018 1m 54s

Chicago emcee Mick Jenkins has been at the top of my favorite list since his debut release, "Water[s]." He’s a highly competent rapper and musician, but more importantly, he’s a fantastic writer. His latest release, called "Pieces of a Man," is

Vince Staples, 'FM!' | NAS

Nov 19th, 2018 2m 5s

The new album from Vince Staples, ‘FM!’, picks up pretty much where he left off three albums ago with ‘Summertime ‘06’. Back then, summer was a malevolent season, at times even Lovecraftian--the heat of the season was an alien occupation, inspi

New American Songbook: 'The Hate U Give' Falls Short

Nov 5th, 2018 1m 56s

The debut novel from Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give , takes its title from an extemporaneous monologue delivered by rap icon Tupac Shakur. In it, he expands his interpretation of gangsta rap’s main trope: the criminal and revolutionary identity

Hip Hop From A Different Angle | NAS

Oct 22nd, 2018 2m 34s

The Chicago emcee Noname says that she writes lullaby raps, but maybe that’s a Midwest-humble way of saying that her music is deadly, just at a lower volume. Her first album, Telefone , played like a summer afternoon hanging out with your best

NAS | 'Black Star' At Twenty

Oct 8th, 2018 2m 39s

Twenty years ago, Talib Kweli and Mos Def released ‘Black Star’, an album that was as much monumental celebration of everything hip hop as it was a signal achievement of an era on its way out. That era, the Golden Age of hip hop, gets dated fro

New American Songbook: Quantum Imagery In Latest From Homeboy Sandman

Sep 24th, 2018 1m 53s

The philosopher Timothy Morton has observed that poetic imagery, like light, is delivered in discrete, quantized packets, one after the other after the other. There are convenient coincidences along with this: our eyes see at a certain number o

New American Songbook: Nu Africa

Sep 10th, 2018 2m 47s

The West, and America specifically, has a long-standing problem of confusing the vast and diverse continent of Africa for a homogeneous country called Africa. There are, of course, reasons for this, many of them racist, but some are more litera

New American Songbook | Brand Expansion

Aug 27th, 2018 1m 47s

The emcee Action Bronson recently released a cookbook — I can’t say the real title in polite company, but let’s just say that it’s the less kid-friendly version of “Holy moly, that’s delicious.” While Bronson makes his figurative bread and butt

New American Songbook: 'Spa 700'

Aug 13th, 2018 2m 30s

There’s a moment in ‘Spa 700’ where you find your bearings, just barely: the tempo solidifies, a melody emerges and stanzas form. Then you realize that only four minutes have passed since the beginning of this fourteen-minute release from Phill

New American Songbook: Pigeon

Jul 30th, 2018 2m 30s

There are cloth mesh barriers lining the steel girders underneath the railroad bridge in downtown Wichita. The bridge, nicknamed the ‘pigeon bridge’, was a home to a roost of the birds--a few weeks before the mesh went up, live traps were place

The Hip Hop Way | New American Songbook

Jul 16th, 2018 12m 46s

"The Hip Hop Way" originally aired December 16, 2016. There’s a scene in the 1997 documentary "Rhyme and Reason" where the emcee Taz demonstrates how to hand someone a hat. It isn’t enough to merely give someone a hat, he explains, you have to

New American Songbook: GZA's 'Liquid Science'

Jul 2nd, 2018 1m 35s

Scientific concepts have long existed in hip hop music, sometimes expressed in the mathematics of Five Percenter ideology, or in more procedural ways, like referring to the recording studio as a laboratory, suggesting the crafting of music is a

Femdot's Delacreme 2 | NAS

Jun 18th, 2018 2m 16s

I’ve been really impressed with the hip hop coming out of Chicago lately--emcees like Mick Jenkins, Noname and of course Chance the Rapper have developed a wonderful and distinct sound and emotional range that feels rare in contemporary hip hop

New American Songbook: 'This Is America'

May 22nd, 2018 1m 40s

In 1992, the rap-metal group Body Count released one of the more infamous songs that you’ve probably never heard. The song, "Cop Killer," generated a ton of controversy--even then-President Bush chimed in--and it was eventually removed from the

New American Songbook: High Hip Hop

May 7th, 2018 1m 51s

Hip hop has always been fascinated with itself--one of the music’s unique and endearing qualities is its constant self-reflection and self-assessment. This is great for true fans--there’s nothing an enthusiast loves more than to constantly talk

New American Songbook: The Pulitzer

Apr 23rd, 2018 2m 46s

In 1989, the first year that rap music was included as a category in the Grammy Awards, half of the winning duo boycotted the show altogether. The winning act, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, felt slighted by the exclusion of the category f

New American Songbook: Anthropocene

Apr 9th, 2018 2m 46s

A term that is gaining more popularity over the past few years is the Anthropocene.

Remembering Craig Mack | New American Songbook

Mar 26th, 2018 2m 51s

Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1993, was a cultural force in the mid-90’s.

Hip Hop History: 1996 | New American Songbook

Mar 12th, 2018 1m 48s

Hip hop is a vast territory, and it’s often difficult to make declarative statements about it because a counterexample is usually just around the corner. However, there are clear facts, and one of them is that 1996 was one of the greatest years

'Can't See Me' | New American Songbook

Feb 26th, 2018 1m 24s

The phrase “can’t see me” is a well-worn trope in hip hop music. A search on the website genius.com —an encyclopedia of hip hop lyrics and annotations—for the phrase brings up thousands of hits spanning the entire history of hip hop. But what d

New American Songbook: Romanticism

Feb 12th, 2018 1m 47s

We don’t often associate the Romantic period of literature and art with the sounds of factories or machines, but there’s a good case to be made that despite our insistence on realism and modernism, we’ve never really left Romanticism behind. Li

Afro-Pessimism And Afrofuturism | NAS

Jan 29th, 2018 1m 52s

Among the many critical perspectives that are useful in listening to and thinking about hip hop, two in particular are relevant to a lot of the music being produced recently: Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism.