The rapper Jay-Z recently told a reporter that Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, the film that opened on Nov. 2 depicting the dazzling rise and precipitous fall of the 70’s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, compelled him to write “a back story to the story.”Jay Z’s back story is released today in record stores as a Read More
Yesterday, with its lease expiring at midnight, the Save CBGB crowd might have begged for mercy, dragged the governor to the Bowery, or searched for a last-minute legal loophole. Instead, they staged a concert rally in Washington Square Park with a reunited Public Enemy, Blondie, the Bouncing Souls, and others.
In Read More
Way back in 1990, Our Year of the B-Boy, the soon-to-pass period when hip-hop was still golden and Slick Rick was considered a political prisoner, I went to get some cash out of an A.T.M. as my girlfriend waited in the car with Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’ ” playing on the tape deck. Read More
Friedrich Nietzsche, the Greil Marcus of his day, once noted, “There are two tragedies in a man’s life. The first is to have failed to have reached your goal; the second is to have reached it.” Arguments of eternal return aside, Nietzsche seemed to understand how the “world” of music is represented to the public. Read More
