Flavor Flav

The 18 Best Rapper Movies

Since the days of Wild Style and Krush Groove, rappers have put their music on hold and delved into the film world. A bunch of these efforts were pretty bad—remember Ice-T in Leprechaun in the Hood—while others were so bad they were good. Cam crying in Killa Season or KRS fleeing the sce ... More >>

Miles Davis (2) And Public Enemy (7) Go At It In SOTC's March Madness

​Sound of the City's search for the quintessential New York City musician enters Round Two this week, with battles in the Round of 32 daily. Keep up with all the action here. In round one of Sound Of The City's March Madness, jazzmaster Miles Davis dispatched Cyndi Lauper with tonally perfect blo ... More >>

Mariah Carey (10) Battles With Public Enemy (7) In SOTC's Search For The Ultimate New York Musician

​The Round of 64 for Sound of the City's own version of March Madness—in which you, the Sound of the City voting public, help determine the quintessential New York musician—finishes up this week, with the Round of 32 scheduled to kick off Monday. (The schedule and results so far are he ... More >>

Nine Culinary Ventures By Hip-Hop Artists

Today, excitable Long Island-raised rap firebrand Flavor Flav will open his House Of Flavor restaurant in Las Vegas. The restaurant—which will have fried chicken and something called a "red velvet waffle" on the menu—is Flav's second attempt to break into the food world, following the di ... More >>

Live: Portishead And Jeff Mangum Come Out Of The Shadows In Asbury Park

All Tomorrow's Parties: I'll Be Your Mirror Asbury Park, NJ September 30-October 2 Better than: Your favorite worn-out band tee. Timelessness isn't a foresight. Most experiences can't predict their own longevity, and as much as any creator strives to avoid miring his or her work in a dated exterio ... More >>

Radio Hits One: Reality TV Propels Aging Stars Back Into The Top 40

​ When I heard that Jennifer Lopez was leveraging her new position as an American Idol judge to launch her new single, premiering the video for "On The Floor" on one episode and performing the song on another, I rolled my eyes at what I thought was her hubris. It'd been less than two years sin ... More >>

The Five Best Moments On Yo! MTV Raps

MTV turns 30 on Monday. To celebrate, we're running a bunch of pieces on the channel, its legacy, and its future. ​ Debuting during the golden year of '88, Yo! MTV Raps revolutionized TV coverage of hip-hop music. Of course, hip-hop videos existed long before Yo! launched—Grandmaster Fl ... More >>

Screech Is a Juggalo

Juggal-uh-ohs will never dieYesterday, Charlie Sheen took to Twitter to confirm that the Access Hollywood creature would be hosting one night of this year's 12th annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Soonafter Sheen's four-million followers learned that Sheen is Down with the Clown, Psychopathic Records ... More >>

Rock-Critic Pop Quiz #10: Name The Hosts Of Yo! MTV Raps

​Recently our hackles were raised after a concerned Park Slope resident (or, as reports increasingly indicate, a gifted troll) sent out a petition hoping to keep a new club from playing the hip-hop music (gasp!) in yuppietacular Brooklyn. We could not imagine the anarchy if rap music ever hit ... More >>

Top 10 Rap-Related Reality-TV Moments

​"Reality rap" was once a phrase invoked by gangsta rappers to defend their music against moral outcry from the mainstream media and pesky suburban dwellers. These days, the term largely refers to the slew of emcees lining up to star in their own TV shows. While Boogie Down Productions associa ... More >>

The Week in Food Blogs: Navigating Awkward Restaurant Situations; Sampling Flava Flav's Chicken

This week in food blogs ... Eater posted its guide to navigating 10 different awkward restaurant situations. Grub Street revealed that a bar you can't find has closed. A Hamburger Today listed its favorite burgers in the city, including Bill's Bar and Burger's and Minetta Tavern's. Atlantic Food ... More >>

Download a Two-Part Tribute To Underappreciated Jay-Z Sidekick Memphis Bleek

Bleek, doing what he does best. Photo via MySpace​He's probably the best rap hypeman ever to do it, short of maybe Flavor Flav. He's clearly a loyal and self-deprecating friend. He puts more talented people's interests above his own, always. And yet, no one cares. Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek met i ... More >>

The Top Ten Best Worst Singing Rappers

​These days, there's nothing attention grabbing about rappers who sing, whether it's Andre 3000's amped squawk, an Auto-Tune-enabled Kanye West, or Lil Wayne's upcoming Riker's Island shower room spirituals. This week the canon sees new album additions from one-time Goodie Mob member Cee-Lo Gr ... More >>

Killer Instincts, Bad Knees

Helen Mirren will cut you, and other awesome old-people things, in Red

Mike Tyson's Top Ten Rap Cameos

​Reggie Rock Bythewood's One Night in Vegas, airing on ESPN tonight as part of the network's "30 for 30" documentary series, shines a light on the little known friendship and many parallels between tortured souls Mike Tyson and Tupac Shakur. The title of Bythewood's documentary is a reference ... More >>

FIGHT THE POWER

Public Enemy take over Central Park

The Heartbreaking Story of the Guy Who Invented the Vuvuzela

​By now, you know what a vuvuzela is: the crackhead, steroid-taking sibling of the diminutive kazoo that made its presence known to the universe at large during the World Cup, wherein, everyone at the World Cup had one, and were blowing their vuvuzelas. It sounds like hell. Of course, appropri ... More >>

Interview: Sleigh Bells Confirm That Treats Is Good For Exercise

Phil KnottDerek Miller and Alexis Krauss Sleigh Bells, the Brooklyn duo of former school teacher Alexis Krauss and former waiter/Poison The Well guitarist Derek Miller, have a rather apocalyptic presence, as we've previously noted. Hearing Treats for the first time, you might think this is somebody ... More >>

News Roundup: Kurt Cobain Turned Guitar Hero Zombie, Aziz Ansari Remixes Kanye and Jay-Z, and That New LCD Soundsystem Record Sounds Crazy

-Someone--presumably, Courtney Love--not only licensed the likeness of onetime living person Kurt Cobain to Guitar Hero 5, but also signed off making him an unlockable, playable character. The upshot? The horrendous video above, in which Cobain is helplessly piloted through Flavor Flav karaoke, Bi ... More >>

Coachella 2009, By The Numbers

David AtlasLeonard Cohen: hymnal, transcendant Clubs editor Stacey Anderson sojourned in Indio, California this past weekend for Coachella. She already covered the frantic play-by-play over at our Twitter, so we asked her to wrap-up the festival with a by-the-numbers guide to her three days in the ... More >>

The Diss-Track Family Tree

Who to insult, how, and why

Live: The Prodigy Wear White and Keep Moving at Roseland

The Prodigy Roseland Ballroom Thursday, March 26 None of the nu-rave hipster cachet of opener Busy P, a solid decade since an MTV spin, the half-decent new Invaders Must Die LP that couldn't crack Billboard's Top 50--just who exactly is Prodigy's American audience? A quick glance around the total ... More >>

VHI and Slick Rick, Together at Last at Hip-Hop Honors

The channel's cheerfully confounding tribute to rap's golden oldies

How Jamaica's Volatile Dancehall Scene Can Avoid a Biggie vs. Tupac Tragedy

Status Ain't Hood Does Summer Jam, Again

Dean Wareham's Rememories

Looking back at life in Luna and Galaxie 500

Chuck D's Presidential Ambitions

The BET Hip-Hop Awards: A Running Diary

Spaghetti Eastern

The Lordz, Brooklyn rap-rock's preeminent wiseguys, crank the bass and wax Soprano

The MTV Movie Awards: A Running Diary

Let the Eggplants Fly

In which the new music editor emerges from hiding to get clocked in the head

Radicals of the Moment

Public enemies tricoastal, and that doesn't even count the Balkan guys

'Spin' Sugar

Public Enemy, D.M.C., Lady Sovereign rock Spin magazine's 20th Anniversary party

Harmonies and Abysses

Across the sky sheet the impossible birds in a steady illiterate movement homewards

The Half-Life of Celebrity

Let them eat stars: Pop-culture vultures circle the flesh of the semi-rich and famous on VH1

Lowlight Reel

A richness of televisual embarrassments: The annual duds

White Freedom

The angstiest wigga alive exercises privilege, bears cross, rallies flock, begs forgiveness

Do-Gooders Do Good

The most commendable political compilation of a watershed year for official liberalism

Rap, Rage, REDvolution

As hip-hop emerges as an empowering voice for indigenous youth, mainstream rappers still objectify Indian country

Music

Dread Poets Society

Pop Goes the Composer

Eve Beglarian and Friends Explore an Audiovisual Vernacular

Hip-Hop Don’t Stop

Music

Flava Flav and the Mad Hatter

Hip-Hoperation: Mindcrime

Five Years and Eight Hours

Elastica Out of Control

You Go, Grrrl!

Video God Madness

Revenge of the Mad Rappers

When hip hoppers use violence to silence their critics