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 in hip hop history. Here’s just five of the incredible releases from that year: Outkast, ATLiens A Tribe Called Quest, “Beats, Rhymes and Life” The Roots, “Iladelph Halflife” Busta Rhymes, “The Coming” Mobb Deep, “Hell on Earth” The sound of that year is

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 does it mean, beyond the obvious, and how are we to interpret it? Invisibility as a theme in African American art and literature can be traced back at least as early as Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man , which recounts the radicalization of its narrator,

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. Liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin complained that Romanticism led to the "melting away of the very notion of objective truth," which could conversely be a point in its favor. Where the old Romantics left off, much of hip hop has picked up, returning to the

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.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

Christmas music is a funny genre: descended from sacred music, it’s still capable of evoking some serious sentiments, but at the same time it’s fully saturated with commercialism, making our experience of Christmas music more Pavlovian than ecstatic.

The 2016 collection of poems by Chinaka Hodge titled ‘Dated Emcees’ overflows with hip hop. The culture is manifested in obvious ways, through poem titles like ‘the b side’, ‘small poems for big’ and ‘2pac couplets,’ but hip hop is not a gimmick or a writing device in these poems: it is the entire world.

For most of its existence, hip hop was a sample-based musical form. Any good origin story of hip hop reinforces this—from two turntables and a microphone an entire cosmos was born.

Hip hop is an oversized music; part of what makes it so great is the exaggeration, the outlandish claims by emcees of supernatural powers, ridiculous braggadocio and the pulp-like caricature of its villains. So it’s rare to find an artist who is skilled at making hip hop smaller, who can turn the arena filled with thousands of people into a room with just the emcee and you. On the 2016 ‘The Falling Season’, Masta Ace does just that through a beautifully crafted concept album that traces the path

Eminem’s now infamous freestyle castigating Donald Trump at the BET Hip Hop Awards raises one very important question: What the heck was that?