circulate, and promote their art. No longer are rappers constrained by traditional gatekeepers like record labels or radio stations who would dictate what could be released based upon marketability concerns alone rather than artistic merit itself. In this new era of creative freedom,...
That was until I rebelled in the summer of ’84. Grandmaster Flash. Kurtis Blow. The whole Roxanne thing. That’s what I got to hear when I began to turn the radio dial to WBLS-FM and a couple of other stations in ’84 and ’85. Of course, Run-D.M.C. Doug E. Fresh, Kool...
even as suburban mall rats and inner-city kids continue to snap up the album at a furious pace. He is the first white artist in the history of the music to be widely played on rap radio stations in black urban areas.
images and bringing them to the world via radio stations and formal album rollouts. now the artists themselves have the reins, and they are likely to find an audience through their own social-media platforms, or through an unconventional kingmaker like grandmaison. grandmaison, a white 35-year...
Plus more highs and lows from the world of rap, including a case for Ice-T as the best rapper-actor ever and some of the best radio freestyles out there right now
it’s bound to go straight to the top of the charts and make you a #1 hit on the radio. Klashnekoff so literally could not give a damn about that that he’ll flip you off to your face for even suggesting he go pop, and since there are so few people willing to be that ruggedly ...
At its very fabric, Radio and its quasi-title track (“I Can’t Live Without My Radio”) is about the genuine love a youngster has of rap music — the high its artist gets from hearing his favorite rappers’ music blast out of his boombox speakers at near-deafening levels, and the se...
This turnaround is especially dramatic because rap was first dismissed by white rock fans as the enemy--some strange bastard offspring of disco. Rock radio stations resisted it. Even critics outside New York sidestepped it, except for an occasional socially conscious record such as Grandmaster Fl...
Find a high school or college party in Memphis that did not have wall-to-wall youth pumping their arms in bicep curl fashion while hopping back and forth on one leg. At the tender age of 17, Emanuel Patterson (now 27) shook dj’s and local radio stations with an unexpected release of...
Queen released "We Will Rock You" and "We are the Champions" together as a single in 1977, and the two songs are typically played back-to-back on classic rock radio stations—alll of which seem to still play the combo every hour on the hour, 35 years after their release. The distinc...