She's called Cardi B because her family nickname, Bacardi, couldn't get past the trademark defensebots on Instagram! Read the rest

Seth Kaufman sends his video for "Godot the Musical," saying: "It is, I venture, the funkiest promotional book video ever made. The script appears in my new book Metaphysical Graffiti: Rock 'n' Roll & the Meaning of Life. So I decided to shoot it as a video. It recasts Vladimir and Estragon as hype-men waiting for 'The Master G' to come and rap." Read the rest

From Eastside Long Beach Crip to rapper to celebrity chef, there's pretty much nothing the Dogg can't do. Today, the entertainer and Los Angeles icon Snoop Dogg received a long-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Read the rest

MC Frontalot (previously) is one of the OGs of nerdcore hiphop, bringing out huge crowds of fans for his music all over the world (I once caught him doing a show in North London at which a young man showed up in full Frontalot cosplay; I've also seen him perform for packed houses at Defcon). Read the rest

Nigerian rapper Falz created This Is Nigeria, a parody of This Is America that switched out lyrics and imagery for social ills in his country: machete-wielding gangs, codeine use, internet scammers, and much more. Read the rest

Since Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover debuted his single "This Is America" on last week's Saturday Night Live, the song and its accompanying video have raced around the internet, sparking analyses and arguments. Read the rest

Pharmadouchebro/Larval Trump Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in August and then sent to jail in September for putting a bounty on a lock of Hillary Clinton's hair. Read the rest

Sign Language Interpreter during Public Enemy performance

But as always, don't read the comments. Read the rest

These Japanese robots' performance of "Robot's Delight" -- an extended, braggadocios riff on the state of AI learning-through-imitation research, with break-dancing -- won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction. (via 4 Short Links) Read the rest

dj BC writes, "In 2006 I mixed a bunch of New Orleans artists with Wu Tang rappers to make the record 'Wu Orleans.' 11 years later, here's part two, with ten new songs. Free MP3 download of both albums here. A very limited run of vinyl with all 20 Wu Orleans songs on two records, and new art, is allegedly coming on record store day in April. Here's the video for 'Express Your Brain, Champ' with Ghostface Killah, Nicky Da B (via Diplo), Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and dj BC. Laissez les bon temps roulez!" Read the rest

Robbie Barrat is president and founder of their high school computer science club; they created Rapper-Neural-Network, a free software project that uses machine learning trained on a corpus of 6,000 Kanye West lines to autogenerate new rap songs. Read the rest

“He shocked my head out my goddamned mustache.” Reginald "Reggie" Noble, aka Redman, on First We Feast: “The Hot Ones,“ eating hot wings and answering “even hotter” questions. Such a weird premise for a show, but it totally works.

In this episode, right around 9 minutes in, the famed rapper talks about this one time he performed, took LSD, and got shocked with an electric cattle prod.

[via Kwame Opam]

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Today, Kraftwerk lost its vindictive, 19-year-long copyright suit against Sabrina Setlur, whose 1997 song "Nur mir" looped a drum sequence from Kraftwerk's 1977 "Metall auf Metall." Read the rest

Afrika Bambaataa concluded his inaugural three year term as the visiting scholar at Cornell's Hip Hop Collection by donating his personal library of 450 containers of 20,000 hand-annotated vinyl records, as well as other archival materials. Read the rest

“Straight Outta Compton.” A terrific read before listening to the original album or seeing the film.

In honor of his new film, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, Ice Cube revisits the titular song by reacting to the lyric interpretations of Rap Genius.

[YouTube, thanks Joe Sabia!]

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The video tackles Unilever's failure to clean up mercury contamination or compensate workers affected by its thermometer factory in Kodaikanal.