hip-hop
The Black Keys take Manhattan
“It’s the Akron curse: you’ve gotta get out to win,” Auerbach concludes. Will he leave too? “Thought about it. Thinking about it. The only thing keeping me there is my family.” At gigs, he makes a point of telling the crowd “we’re the Black Keys, from Akron, Ohio.”
Flash, one more time
With hindsight, making a mixtape of old school funk and hip-hop for Grandmaster Flash was a bad idea. “This is the wack part,” he tells me, a few seconds into Shack Up by Banbarra. “They’d be throwing water at the speakers if we played that part.”
Kanye v Fiddy
In September 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent released albums on the same day. Fiddy announced that he would retire from rapping if he sold fewer copies than his rival. But how stage-managed was the whole feud? In this report, broadcast on BBC World Service radio, I traced the history of ‘beef’ in hip-hop, [...]
