Jazz and hip hop have always been a natural fit, although sometimes a kitschy one. Hip hop has always taken notice of jazz music, most obviously through prolific sampling, but jazz also comes up in the deep history of hip hop: the Notorious B.I.G. reportedly learned his flow, his style of rapping, by first learning bebop riffs and scat syllables from an older jazz musician. Jazz has tried its hand at hip hop, although the sound was at times more earnest than it was actually good. I might make a

Somewhere in the vast pantheon of alternate universes and parallel worlds, there is an earth, much like ours, where Shaquille O’Neal is one of the greatest rappers of all time who for a brief period dabbled in basketball. It’s a world a little bit more ridiculous than our own, but nice in its own ways, gentler maybe, more enthusiastic. One of the greatest failings of modern science is that we can’t travel to this world, but we do have our own Emcee Shaq, and while he doesn’t quite reach parallel