One of the most fundamental forms in hip hop, both metaphorically and physically, is the cypher. Dating back to the earliest days of hip hop, the cypher is the term used to describe a group of rappers or emcees, formed in a circle, delivering their rhymes in a frenzy of rhythm, improvisation and boisterous crowd participation. The cypher is both the primordial soup where new rhymes are born, and a coliseum where weak rhymes go to die. Recorded cyphers are more like mixtapes, but done well they

Veteran emcee Sadat X, well-known as a founding member of the group Brand Nubian, recently released Agua , his eleventh solo album. Sadat X is 47 years old, and the entire album displays a mastery of form that doesn’t break any new ground, but hits all the right notes.

Hip hop made for kids generally falls into two categories: bad and boring. These can and do overlap. The issue is mainly one of effort and integrity—we think kids’ music should be simple and easy, and so not much work is put into it. Hip hop with a younger audience in mind is also often an afterthought, a market worth enough to have a product, but not worth having a good product. Children deserve much better, and fortunately, there is better out there: a hip hop group called ‘The Dino 5’.

A critic of any art has two jobs. The first is to measure a work whether it's a song, a painting or whatever, and set some criteria. How does it work technically? How do the methods employed a advance the content of the piece? Is there a consistency between the narrative and the structure? The second job is then to take stock of the piece and how it exists in the world. Does it add or subtract meaning? Does the piece move forward an understanding of the world, or does it maintain the status quo?

This commentary originally aired on July 20, 2015. Our American identities are largely formed around the concept of work, both the noun and the verb, and as our national music, hip hop is no different.

The album "The Cold Vein" by the group Cannibal Ox is almost indescribable. Released in 2001, the album is produced by El-P, now well-known as half of the rap super-duo Run the Jewels; the music is dense and menacing, chordal and inorganic. Two emcees, Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, deliver what sounds like dispatches from the world on the other side of the singularity. What is this world? It is desperate and mechanical, flesh fused with metal, and always winter. The heart of the album is in the

The newest offering from lyricist Aesop Rock, titled The Impossible Kid , is his most cogent to date. While Aesop Rock has been long known for his enormous vocabulary and complicated rhyme structures, this album still delivers an overflow of imagery, but with a focus and precision that was only approached in his earlier efforts. Listening to Aesop Rock takes some amount of effort, in a kind of zen way—you have to learn to let go of trying to make sense of it, and let him speak. He writes a kind

The story is that James Dewitt Yancey had perfect pitch at two months old, and was spinning records in the Detroit parks as a toddler. Later, as a hip hop producer and emcee, Yancey, eventually known as J Dilla, would become one of those rare influences in the genre, seemingly having something to do with any new music coming out of either coast. Dilla died in 2006 at the age of 32 of complications from lupus, but the recent release of ‘The Diary’--a collection of songs featuring Dilla as both

A couple of weeks ago in Charlton, Massachusetts, a car pulled up to a group of teenagers. A man got out of the car and began rapping at the teenagers. They were asked if they, too, wanted to, quote, "spit some bars." The teenagers declined and the man got back in the car and left. It’s a weird and silly story, but it left me concerned for the teenagers: Why didn’t they have any bars to spit? The term ‘battle rap’ has been overused and ill-defined for a long time, but at its most basic a battle

The recent death of Malik Taylor, known more popularly as Phife Dawg, was marked by dozens of memorials and internet eulogies from all corners of hip hop. Phife was well-known for his role as a founding member of the seminal hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, alongside rapper Q-Tip and DJ Ali Shaheed Mohammed. Phife’s lyrics epitomize the playfulness of early-nineties New York hip hop—where Q-Tip often carried the conscious-rap banner, Phife was the prankster: funny, audacious and completely at