Tupac Shakur

Dear Mama: A Mother's Day Hip-Hop Playlist

This Sunday is Mother's Day. (Yes, we're sure. Yes, there's still time to get her something.) And what better way to thank the person who brought you into this world than with the gift of music? Few genres have dedicated as many songs to the importance of mothers and mother-figures as hip-hop, but i ... More >>

DJ Whoo Kid Thinks Snoop Dogg Should Have Been the New Pope

Editor's note: In Tweets is Watching, Phillip Mlynar asks local artists questions based solely on the contents of their Twitter timeline. Last week DJ Whoo Kid helped launch the video for A$AP Ferg's new track "40 Below," which also appears on his SXSW Social mixtape. When not granting assists to t ... More >>

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 >>

Smoke DZA on Old School Harlem Dust Smokers, The Canadian Border Patrol, And Whether 2Pac Is Alive In Cuba

Editor's note: In Tweets is Watching, Phillip Mlynar will ask local artists questions based solely on the contents of their Twitter timeline. Smoke DZA is the Kushed God. Calling Harlem home, the weed connoisseur rapper has cultivated a fine crop of fans and can boast an army of 65k faithful Twitte ... More >>

Rappers At Award Shows: A History Of Violence

This past weekend saw Rick Ross and Young Jeezy's long-simmering beef boiling over into fisticuffs as the rappers and their entourages went at each other at the BET Hip-Hop Honors Awards (and possibly broke a very expensive mirror in the process). That squabble wasn't a one-off though! Here's a prim ... More >>

Q&A: Dom Kennedy On The Yellow Album, Maybach Music Group Rumors, And Funkmaster Flex's Tupac Comments

Over the last few years, hip-hop artists who grew up in the hood but wanted to go beyond clichéd gangsterisms have been on the rise—Kendrick Lamar, Curren$y, A$AP Rocky, Big K.R.I.T. Hailing from Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood is Dom Kennedy, another subscriber to the school of thoug ... More >>

James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond Implicated Himself in 1994 Tupac Shakur Attack: Court Testimony

For nearly two decades, drug lord James Rosemond, a/k/a "Jimmy Henchman," denied accusations of his involvement in the near-fatal 1994 ambush of rap star Tupac Shakur at New York's Quad Recording Studios that marked a pivotal moment in American pop history. The attack on Tupac triggered a bicoastal ... More >>

Sexist, Anti-Labor (Anti-Human?) Robots Take Over Customer Service Duty At Area Airports

WNYC reported yesterday that five "avatars" are going to be taking up customer service duty at Port Authority airports. The above video is a demonstration of what one of these projected robots will do. They will not be interactive, nor holographic like Tupac, but rather be a kind of 2D video displ ... More >>

Tupac Shakur, the Los Angeles Times, and Why I'm Still Unemployed: A Personal History by Chuck Philips

Last week, a trial in Brooklyn started off with a strange twist. At the federal criminal trial of James Rosemond -- a/k/a Jimmy Henchman -- one of the first things Rosemond's attorney did was kick an unemployed journalist named Chuck Philips out of the courtroom by naming him a witness in the case. ... More >>

Tupac's Hologram Asks, "Remember The '90s?"

At what point does the nostalgia overwhelm the art?

Digital Underground

Back Forty Stages an Oyster Showdown. Slurpers Mark Calendar.

ChefMattRockWellfleets will try their damnedest.​ There have been numerous East Coast-West Coast feuds: Biggie vs. Tupac, David Chang's "Fig-Gate," and now a bicoastal oyster rivalry. The country's bivalve bookends will go head-to-head at Alphabet City's Back Forty on November 19 from 3 p.m. t ... More >>

From The Archives: Download The Village Voice's 1996 Tribute To The Late Tupac

The September 24, 1996 cover​ Today is the 15th anniversary of the death of Tupac Shakur, and in 1996 the Voice paid tribute to the late rapper by putting him on the cover of the September 24 issue (above) and running remembrances by dream hampton, Nelson George, Natasha Stovall, and Touré. A ... More >>

Dexter Isaac Says That He Shot Tupac Shakur At Quad Studios In 1994

​ Tomorrow would have been Tupac Shakur's 40th birthday, and a new revelation involving his life has come out: An associate of James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond has confessed to shooting Tupac Shakur at Quad Studios 17 years ago in a statement to AllHipHop.com. Dexter Isaac, who's currently serv ... More >>

Rap Made Me Do It: Ten Books I Read Because Of Hip-Hop

​When rappers reference items they consume--whether Cristal, Clarks Wallabees, or chronic--listeners seek them out, either out of curiosity or a desire to be like their heroes. And thanks to hip-hop's tendency to occasionally serve as an educated, sound-advice-giving older sibling, those refer ... More >>

Tupac Is (Probably) Not Alive And Living In New Zealand

Not a recent photo. ​Oh, those hacker kids, getting up to no good on a holiday weekend by reviving the hip-hop generation's own "Elvis Alive And Eating Giant Sandwiches Somewhere Far Away" myth. A hacker collective calling itself (sigh) The Lulz Boat got all up in PBS' web site over the weeken ... More >>

10 Music-Related Revelations From The FBI's File On Biggie's Murder

​The 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, b/k/a/ the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., remains unsolved. Last week, the case became both more transparent and more suspicious as the FBI opened up its files into an investigation about not just who shot Biggie Smalls, but also who helped orchestrate th ... More >>

Greg Nice Is for the Kids

An old-school MC warms himself in slightly trendier clothing

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 >>

The Ten Most Exploitative Posthumous Rap Projects

​Being a dead rap artist isn't much fun. Whether The Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, or J Dilla, death has never seemed to do much to alleviate the constant pressure on artists to muster up new recordings to satisfy the bulging posthumous rap retail market. (In the hip-hop world, possessing a heart t ... More >>

The Top Ten Rap Supergroups That Never Happened

Over the weekend, the rapper Sean Price took to Twitter to propose a collaboration album between his own Brooklyn-based Boot Camp Clik hip-hop crew and Staten Island's mighty Wu-Tang Clan. The idea has been received rapturously. But then again, theoretical hip-hop supergroups usually are. Rap's hi ... More >>

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

The Cool Kids

Letters: April 23 Edition

"They Put on Wigs, They Buy Dildos, They Put It in They Mouth"

"That's stuff we would have done in middle school. When you're dealing with degenerates on this level, it's something you have to deal with. Did we think it was a threat to Khaled's mother? Of course not. That's what these dudes do: They put on wigs, they buy dildos, they put it in they mouth, they ... More >>

Biggie's Small, in Notorious

Notorious B.I.G. made B.L.A.N.D.

Tiger, Paul McCartney and Diddy: Celeb Tabloid Roundup

DMX Has a Greatest-Hits Album

Weighting for Lefty

Solving for Malcolm X at a Brooklyn confab

'Freedom Writers'

Wild Wild West

Hyphy from the Bay Area restores Dionysian lost balance to hip-hop's lopsided map

Culture Clash

'86–'95: From Evangelicals to Trannies, the First Gulf War to Tupac Shakur

After Sebald

German Shepherding with the notorious W.G.

Thug Luvin'

Too Young to Understand

Tupac speaks from back when there seemed to be no choice

Black Jesuz

Tupac from Beyond the Grave, in His Own Words

Music

World War of Words

As Battles Turn Complicated, Murder Remains Bigger Than Hip-Hop

An Interview With Biggie & Tupac Director Nick Broomfield

The Untouchables

Gimme Shelter

Sundance's Real Deals

Hip-Hop Don’t Stop

Black Blueprint

Crack, Commerce, and Conscience

2Bad for 2Pac

Daddy Under the Gun

Publicly, Rap Mogul Won’t Beg; Quietly, He Pleads

Hip-Hop Don’t Stop

Diddily-Dee

Revenge of the Mad Rappers

When hip hoppers use violence to silence their critics