Gucci Mane

Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield Is No Longer Languishing in Grief

Still salty, less wounded

How Jazz Trio BadBadNotGood and Odd Future Became Unlikely Pals

The hip-hop-inspired jazz trio BadBadNotGood are in a car driving to a show in Vermont while bumping the new My Bloody Valentine album. Comprised of keys player Matthew Tavares, bass man Chester Hansen and drummer Alexander Sowinski (who likes to sport a pig mask while playing out), the Toronto-base ... More >>

Pazz & Jop: Riff Raff Is Keeping It Surreal

He's believable as a hip-hop star because nothing he says is true

Twitter Has Ruined the Art of the Musician Feud

Remember when musician fights used to be interesting--or at least memorable for more than two minutes? It's hard to imagine as we expend Twitter scrolling energy on Azealia Banks v. Angel Haze, Gaga vs. the Osbournes, Deadmau5 vs. Madonna, and the rest of the noise. Yet unbelievably, there was a tim ... More >>

Waka Flocka Flame - Irving Plaza - 10/9/2012

By Drew Millard Better Than: Watching Waka Flocka shop for shoes. Gucci Mane came onstage at Irving Plaza last night. GUCCI MANE CAME ONSTAGE. AT IRVING PLAZA. LAST NIGHT. I don't know another way to stress the importance of seeing Gucci Mane come out onstage at this point other than making th ... More >>

James Franco Vanessa Hudgens Ashley Benson vs. Asia Argento Charlotte Gainsbourg François Cluzet : Threesomes at the Toronto Film Festival

This is a blog post about two movies that were screened for the press within the first 24 hours of the Toronto Film Festival, both of which feature three-way sex scenes. In Spring Breakers, characters played by James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson "do it" in a swimming pool; in Do Not Dis ... More >>

Riff Raff+Mayhem Lauren+WC Kids+Farrington G

Live: AraabMuzik Bridges The Gap Between Old And New At East River Park

Araabmuzik w/Flosstradamus, Teengirl Fantasy, Nick Hook East River Park Monday, August 20 Better than: Drinking Red Bull to get through just about anything else. Watching the Manhattan-by-night sightseeing cruises pass behind East River Park's Summerstage during last night's Araabmuzik-headlined s ... More >>

A Brief Primer On Riff Raff, The (Really Good) Houston Rapper Who Will Be Portrayed On Screen By James Franco

If Noz and The Onion collaborated, they might come up with a scenario like this one: Gucci Mane and Selena Gomez star in a Harmony Korine-directed film alongside James Franco, whose character is loosely based on the little-known YouTube rapper Riff Raff. But, of course, this is the era of trollgaze, ... More >>

CAN'T DENY IT

Fab takes the funeral service 
to Long Island's NYCB Theatre

The Top Ten Failed First Singles Off The Game's The R.E.D. Album

​This list began as a joke, but the longer I contemplated it, the more depressing its basic concept became. Consider: not only could I easily string together ten of Game's fruitless attempts to force label executives to release The R.E.D. Album, his followup to 2008's LAX; I had to make decisi ... More >>

Five Questions To Ask At Ben Westhoff's Dirty South Reading

​Tonight, Voice contributor and hip-hop sommelier Ben Westhoff will read from Dirty South, his look at the populist rise of rap music from the southern states, at Williamsburg's Book Thug Nation. The book focuses on the bigger names to have emerged from the south, with chapters based around Bi ... More >>

Mike Bigga Lets Loose

The Atlanta MC's Pl3dge is an exhilarating, politically charged ride

Week in Review: Top Train-Wreck Bloggers

Presenting... burger-core. Pic by Puja Patel.​In the week we spent holed up in Sound of the City headquarters preparing Pazz & Jop results, we still found time to report back from shows by former Talking Heads members Tom Tom Club, former Deee-Lite member, Lady Miss Kier, former the Pack membe ... More >>

Hear Indie Muppet Dom's Improbable Collaboration With Gucci Mane, "Living In America (Remix)"

​Because we are still amazed when successful rappers team up with flavor-of-the-month indie people. Because we always wonder what phone call made this happen. Because we always play fantasy football about exactly which party is benefitting most from this relationship. Because we always want to ... More >>

SOTC Nightlife Awards: The Best Parties of 2010, Featuring Q-Tip, Let's Play House, Jelly NYC, and More

The crowd at Let's Play House, our favorite wandering house party. Photo by John Barclay.​Before we sink into holiday hibernation, we thought we'd take a moment to reflect on our exploits, and present to you our very own 2010 SOTC Nightlife Awards. Below, our fourth installment examines the ye ... More >>

Best Of NYC: Worrying About Nicki Minaj

Poppin' it so crazy kooky

Live: Mike Posner Serenades A Roomful Of Screaming, Brawling Ladies At Irving Plaza

A bout of roadie-assisted crowd-surfing, and why not. Pics by Rob, more below.​Mike Posner/Far East Movement Irving Plaza Tuesday, October 12 Better than: Going to Duke Within five minutes of Mike Posner taking the stage, a full-scale omnidirectional brawl between at least eight remarkably p ... More >>

Waka Flocka Flame Is Yelling at You for a Reason

Why Flockaveli is hard to listen to and even harder to not listen to

Week In Review: "You Died! Luckily This Is Just A Video Game."

​In a week wherein we bid adieu to both Fat Beats and Paste magazine, we needed something to fill the void, be that the Das Racist video game or, far less pleasantly, a glowering, shirtless Rick Ross. Good thing this one's over with.

Gucci Mane, DMC, Andrew W.K., Cool Kids, Big Freedia, Tim Harrington, And Doug E. Fresh Played The Last Jelly Pool Party, Possibly Ever

And so it ends, the fifth and most calamitous season of Jelly Pool Parties, with a finale abruptly canceled and grudgingly reinstated, in the end overloaded with a semi-secret parade of random-ass rappers, semi-secretly headlined by your friend and mine Gucci Mane. Never has the line "I don't wear ... More >>

Rock The Bells, New Orleans Bounce, And Michael Jackson Headline Your Weekend In Nightlife

​We're going to recommend you avoid Manhattan this weekend. Thanks to NYU and Columbia, every 20-year-old within a ten-mile radius will either be moving back into their dorms or celebrating the end of summer with one last cityside hurrah. Instead, take Friday night off and keep yourself in the ... More >>

Big Boi Is Not Too Artsy

After endless clashes and delays, the OutKast rapper's triumphant solo album emerges at last

Download These Are Powers' Game-Changing New Club Banger (!), "Anything Above Nothing"

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing new and emerging MP3s from local talent. ​It's been generally impossible to keep up with the ever-changing moods of tireless, futurist dance trio These Are Powers. In roughly six releases over four years, they've dabbled in don't-call-us-No ... More >>

A People's History of Summer Jam 2010

Drake debuts, Trey Songz gyrates, and DJ Khaled wins at the hip-hop event of the year

Gucci Mane Is A Free Man

​Even as fellow famous incarcerated rapper Lil Wayne faces disciplinary action today at Rikers for violating prison rules regarding possession of unauthorized electronics, Atlanta's Gucci Mane strolled out the front door of Georgia's Fulton County Jail this morning, a free man. Outside the jai ... More >>

Little Brother's Retirement Party

Yes, these hip-hop shape-shifters are breaking up. Don't get sentimental about it.

A Fine Read: Tom Breihan Breaks Down The Perilous Economic State Of Hip-Hop For Pitchfork

​Here we have a week's worth of Status Ain't Hood manifestos distilled into one comprehensive look at what's driving and imperiling hip-hop in 2010: plummeting sales, rising regionalism, mixtapes, live shows, the benefits (Gucci Mane) and detriments (Charles Hamilton) of the Internet, etc. An ... More >>

American Idol Season 9, R&B Week: Usher Clowns Tim Urban; Crystal Bowersox Teaches Typing

Michael Lynche goes India.Arie. Photo by Michael Becker / FOX. ​It's not always this way, but American Idol viewers had plenty of reason to fear the living hell out of soul/R&B week in this, the whitest Idol year in memory. Most of the remaining contestants this year look and act like they bel ... More >>

Gucci Mane Is Eating Really Well In Prison, If The Cover Of His Upcoming Burrrprint 2 Mixtape Is Any Indication

​From Rap Radar comes news of the next Gucci missive, out April 13, which promises to be anot--man look at that spread! Three bottles! Such tastefully arranged carrots! And I hear Fulton County Jail's lobster is excellent! Tough TV-viewing angles though. Some PR info on this eagerly awaited se ... More >>

So Was Lil Wayne's Rebirth a Modest Success Or a Total Commercial Failure? Maura Johnston Reads the Charts

"Billboard's 'Tastemakers' chart is the one we should all paying attention to, don't you think?"​This week's Billboard 200 is headed once again by Lady Antebellum, the milquetoast country trio whose second album Need You Now moved 481,000 copies in its debut week, and 209,000 copies in the sal ... More >>

Jay-Z's 'Empire' Strikes Back at Last

His first #1 song is his first Pazz & Jop chart-topper as well. Go Yankees.

Michael Jackson and Hip-Hop

Guess which one of those things didn't die this year

Ke$ha Takes Out Susan Boyle (Finally!), Claims the #1 Spot

​It took six weeks and over 3 million records sold, but Susan Boyle has finally bowed out of the #1 spot. Please welcome your new chart overlord, Ke$ha. Her Animal moved a modest 152,000 copies, good enough to rule an early January slate. In pointed contrast to Boyle's defiantly non-tech savvy ... More >>

Diplo's Free Gucci Remix Record Is Out Today

​It'd be pretty unsportsmanlike for us not to note the emergence of Diplo's long-speculated-about Gucci Mane remix mixtape, given that we ran a whole long thinkpiece pegged to its release back in December. So: actual passion or vacant spin? Street movement "free," or hood cliche "free"? For th ... More >>

Both Michael Stipe and Terence Koh Were at Salem's Glasslands Show Last Night

The deathgaze, Gucci Mane-remixing, mystery-goth act Salem played Glasslands last night and found themselves experiencing the classically weird New York experience of playing in front of representatives of every major media outlet in the city, plus artist Terence Koh (who's photographed the band b ... More >>

The 1000TimesYes Top 100: The Top 100 2009 Records Of A Guy Who Listened To More Records Than You

You know, we actually have other shots of Chris, he just won't let us use them. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.​As a guy who plausibly could claim he listened to more music than anyone in the last year short of Robert Christgau, 1000TimesYes's Christopher R. Weingarten seemed like the ideal guy to as ... More >>

Hey, Gucci Mane's The State Vs. Radric Davis Is #10 in the Country!

​He's no Susan Boyle (#1 for the third straight world beating week, for a grand old-people-still-buy-records total of 1.8 million copies of I Dreamed a Dream sold), but Gucci Mane does have his first top ten record. He sold 90,000--not quite Jadakiss numbers, but better than being the Clipse, ... More >>

Go Ham or Die Trying: Pill's Calm Path to Mixtape Stardom

Haha: Impose Picks The "Best New Music of 2009"

On Monday, our home slices over at Impose unveiled their year-end 50 favorite acts of 2009. It's a uniquely varied list of familiar blog-sprayed faces (Animal Collective, Fever Ray, Black Lips, Dan Deacon, Black Dice), mixtape rappers (Gucci Mane, Freddie Gibbs, Drake), relative unknowns (Nisennen ... More >>

Free Gucci, Fuck Diplo, and the History of "Free _____"

​Gucci Mane's new album, The State vs. Radric Davis is in stores today, but the insanely prolific, remarkably consistent Atlanta rapper has been in jail since November 12th. This is Gucci's second stint in jail for a parole violation this year. Both sentences stem from a 2005 incident in which ... More >>

Rakim's Second Coming

The God MC confronts a hip-hop landscape far different from the one he once ruled

Diplo on the New M.I.A. Record: "It's Like Gucci Mane Meets Animal Collective"

​With the caveat that humans are perfectly capable of misdescribing things and/or are prone to making wild statements that can promise far, far, more than they can deliver, here is Diplo on M.I.A.'s theoretical new record, which he is producing: "Been in the studio with M.I.A. working on her n ... More >>

This Week's Voice: Gucci Mane, Def Jam's 25th, Say Anything, Bill Simmons, Roger Corman at Anthology, and More

He's got more check than a Czechoslavian. Photo by Zacke Wolfe.​In this week's Village Voice, Rob Harvilla goes abroad with Gucci Mane's Cold War mixtape trilogy: "Funny voices aside, The Cold War isn't a particularly conceptual affair, instead favoring a breathtakingly monochromatic wash of b ... More >>

Eminem Can Still Rap, World. (So Can Black Thought.)

Every year, the BET Hip-Hop Awards--the 2009 edition of which aired last night--round up three or four different rapper cyphers, taped off-site and with somewhat counterintuitive gangs of MCs going in with what are ostensibly freestyles. Last year, Jadakiss, Fabolous, Juelz Santana, and Ace Hood t ... More >>

Gucci Mane Goes Abroad

An ascendant Southern rapper tries out a few impressions

This Week in the Voice

​James Lieber's January "What Cooked the World's Economy?" which explained the financial meltdown we still suffer from, is one of our most-read and -emailed stories. Now the awesome follow-up: "We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?" Lieber fi ... More >>

Free Cocaine Blunts

​And so, in a now depressingly familiar industry story, the internet's foremost Gucci Mane proponent (give or take these guys) is being forced to apologize, grovel, and remove said rapper's track from his website. By, it should be said, the exact and precise people in whose interest it is to h ... More >>

Track 18 Wins Again

Major-label hip-hop records in burying-best-tracks shocker!