nas
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Why These 10 Hip-Hop Tracks From 2019 Have Us Hype for 2020
There’s quite a bit of hip-hop cooking in the kitchen for 2020, in terms of scheduled and rumored releases. Full-length projects are expected from the holy trinity of contemporary rap greats—Drake, J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar—as well as albums that will excite the kids (Lil Uzi Vert, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie) and us old…
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Grammy Award-Winning Artist and Actor Louie 'Original Don Dada' Rankin, of Belly and Shottas, Dies in Car Crash
Louie Rankin, the Jamaican dancehall singer (known as the “Original Don Dada”) and film actor has died, following a tragic car crash in Ontario, Canada, TMZ reports. Rankin was a Jamaican native who grew up in Saint Thomas Parish and East Kingston and was living in Toronto at the time of his death. According to…
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VSB’s Absolute, Yet Debatable List of the 50 Greatest Rappers of All Time…Definitely, Maybe
You’ve probably seen a ton of lists circulating on social media lately ranking the 50 greatest rappers of all time. I don’t know who did the first one, but somehow Joe Budden—an extremely talented and gifted wordsmith—ended up in the No. 3 slot ahead of arguably, at minimum, 10 rappers easily better than him. Because…
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All Hail the Queen: Mary J. Blige to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2019 BET Awards
For the past three decades, Mary J. Blige has provided us with everlasting life through song like no artist before her. And to celebrate her various contributions to the entertainment industry, she’ll be honored with BET’s Lifetime Achievement Award later this month at the 19th annual BET Awards. According to BET, the 2019 BET Awards…
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Belly Is the 2nd Greatest Music Video of All Time Behind Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'
Let me be very clear, I love Belly. I love love it. When Mary J. Blige sang about “Real Love” in 1992, a whole ass six years before Belly would be released to the masses, she had no idea that she was singing my soul’s affinity for Hype Williams’ best music video ever. And what’s…
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The Great Race: The Hennessy x Pyer Moss Capsule Collection Honors a Black Champion Cyclist
Champion cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor may not be known to the masses, but he was a pioneer in his sport. He was one of the most recognizable athletes in the world at the turn of the 20th century, having earned seven world records by 1898. As The Root’s own Genetta Adams wrote in 2013: In…
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Call It Evolution, Not a Comeback: Kelis Covers Essence's Global Beauty Issue
“The only way you are really ever going to be truly content is if you are constantly evolving,” says Kelis in Essence magazine. And she knows a bit about evolution, first hitting our radar in the early aughts as a genre-defying singer-songwriter, and evolving in the years since into a chef, cookbook author and farmer.…
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10 Things I Already Know About You if You’re Listening to Nas’ New Album Nasir
Sometime in the ungodly hours after midnight—the hours when men get drunk and send “Hey Bighead, you up?” texts—one of the cinderblock pillars in the upper portion of hip-hop’s foundation released an album. Queens, N.Y., rapper Nas released the “Make America Great Again”-hat-wearing-Kanye West-produced album Nasir, and the internet was ablaze; the Queensbridge listening party…
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Speaking Out Against Domestic Violence on Black Women Is No Longer Taboo, but Doing Something About It Is
My first job, about a decade ago in Harlem, was interning at a shelter for domestic violence survivors. Most were lower-income black and Latina women. A colleague and I would organize these makeshift financial sessions, giving these women overviews about how to build credit, manage debt, apply for housing vouchers and the like. I regularly…
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Life Comes at You Fast and Your Faves Are Probably All Trash
When I woke up this morning, I planned on writing about (actually, I did write about) what was probably going through Nas’ mind as Kanye continued to go on his alienate-the-black-community Twitter spree. With albums set to release in June by Nas, Cudi, Pusha T and Teyana Taylor, I figured that none of them could…