Getty Images I imagine the hot sauce committee to be a studious and dour group, as dispassionate in their judgment of peppers and spices as the academy is of Red Peter the talking ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” Which is to say, that if the Beastie Boys are not quite the heir…
At the New York release party for Eprhyme’s first CD a few years ago, the audience was an unusual blend of angel-headed Jewish hipsters bopping along to neo-Hasidic hip-hop, along with a smaller African-American crowd which was there to check out the new record drop. Eprhyme straddled two communities — the New-Jew one, and the…
Yoseph Robinson, a 34-year-old Jamaican-born hip-hop artist and record executive who converted to Orthodox Judaism, was shot to death yesterday at a kosher liquor store in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. According to eyewitness accounts, Robinson, who was on duty as a store clerk at the time, was fatally shot in the chest and arms…
One of hip-hop’s great strengths, and, frustratingly, part of what makes the art form so much of a generational divider, is the way in which the pursuit of both profundity and vulgarity are so brazenly juxtaposed against one another. The strength of poetic images and complex ideas in great hip-hop lyrics are almost universally embedded…
In “The Land of No Hop” the rapper Sagol 59 (Khen Rotem) lays out evidence to justify his belief that despite a number of successful Israeli hip hop groups, the genre has not yet been born in Israel. His reasons range from the fact that the most popular radio station is owned by the government…
Okay, I’m not sure anyone’s actually said that — and now nobody’s going to be able to say it, because we have ironclad evidence to the contrary. TMZ.com reports that the rapper Pharrell — who collaborated with Snoop Dogg on the hit single “Drop It Like It’s Hot” — “was driving around Miami when he…
CORRECTION: In the print version of this story, the Palestinian group DAM was mistakenly identified. The members are from Lod, Israel. If the only rap you’ve heard is of the gangsta variety, and the only MCs you recognize are those whose mug shots you’ve seen on television, you’re not likely to think of hip hop…
Yitzchak Jordan can’t seem to blend in. In the Baltimore Baptist church he occasionally attended as a child, his passion for Judaism was an oddity. Now a convert to Judaism, the African American rapper known as Y-Love feels at home in the Hasidic community of Brooklyn’s Flatbush area, but his dark skin and leftwing politics…
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