Gawker recently ran a piece chastising the media for frequently calling black singers rappers. It’s been a pet peeve of ours for a while, and the writer rightly calls out the mistake for what it is: lazy and racist. And it certainly is both of those. But here’s the thing: It’s also partly the expected result of R&B swagger-jacking rap for more than two decades. It probably started with Janet Jackson’s 1986 album Control, which made subtle nods to hip-hop production and even featured some pseudo-rapping. ...

There are plenty of reasons hip hop is sucking a whole lot less in 2012, from the obvious (Kendrick's good kid, m.A.A.d. city, Nas' Life ...

One of the things you'll notice about these songs featuring Skylar Grey is that they're all horrible, and not just in the sense that they're ...

A little-known fact about me: I love tattoos. So much so that I decided to get a shit-ton of them strewn across by body during ...

It took all of about 15 minutes after the cover of this year's Freshman Issue hit the Internets the other day for someone to point ...

Everybody’s nobody, word to XV. We “grind,” “hustle” and “aspire” to be something that ultimately is a carbon copy of an existing format, all while deriding ...

I’m kind of glad this issue is finally over, believe it or not. I love it to death. It’s a great issue, and I stand ...

So it would appear that Yung L.A. has a mixtape (or project of some sort) called Tattoos and Jewelry coming out March 15th and I'm ...

For what it’s worth, rappers tend to complain just a little too much. Don’t get me wrong; it’s easy to get caught up in the rapture ...