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About a year ago, I got an early Christmas gift when my very good friend Donnie gave me a link to a blog full of the most random, dated R&B that I’ve never heard of in my life.  Unfortunately, that blog is now dead and gone, but I managed to salvage some of the best Read More

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ musings on “white music” and “black music” got me thinking about my relationship to music in general.  I grew up in a largely white suburb in Virginia Beach (though, my next door neighbors on both sides were brown folks), and went to largely white elementary, middle and high schools.  Indeed, church was the Read More

At Too Sense, One Drop explains his distaste for gangsta rap: The problem is, a lot of the time these kids don’t know any actual black people. They have no way of knowing what is truth and what is fantasy. Gangsta rap plays into all of the old stereotypes about blacks: that they’re violent, over-sexed, Read More

In yet another instance of fraudulent (and/or negligent) journalism, LA Times reporter Chuck Philips and Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin have been forced to recant claims made in an article on March 17 that implicated associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ in the 1994 shooting death of Tupac Shakur. Philips claimed the newspaper had obtained FBI Read More

Two weeks ago, on my way back to NYC after a brief visit home in Philly, I found myself sitting across the aisle from ?uestlove on the Amtrak train. I’m a huge Roots fan, so the fact that I didn’t get all Stan-ish is on the order of the miraculous. We spoke briefly, and he Read More

“What if there were no niggas, only master teachers?” Bilal and Georgia Anne Muldrow co-croon on the eighth track of Erykah Badu’s lastest disc, New Amerykah. Their reply to one another: “I’d stay ‘woke.” They go on asking the same question and offering the same answer for the first two minutes of the song, before Read More