Content tagged 'Rap'

37 years ago today, the Sugarhill Gang released a single which generally considered the first rap song to successfully infiltrate the mainstream consciousness. Frankly, music hasn’t been the same since. Written predominantly by The Sugarhill Gang and Sylvia Robinson (we’ll explain the caveat in a moment), “Rapper’s Delight” was – believe it or not – recorded in a single take. Its origins can be traced to an evening when Blondie, Chic and the Clash played together at the Palladium on September 20 and 21, 1979. We’ll allow you a moment to sit in awe and consider what an absolutely incredible tri

Rap love stories don’t come much more famous than the one between Faith Evans and The Notorious B.I.G., but it was a romance that was cut all too short as a result of Biggie’s murder. It’s been 20 years since that fateful day, but it’s all still fresh in Evans’s mind, hence the release of THE KING & I, a 25-track effort that tells the Faith & Biggie story with the help of some previously-unreleased material from Biggie’s vault, along with guest appearances from – among others – Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss, Lil’ Cease, Lil’ Kim, Sheek Louch, Styles P, and Snoop Dogg. You may have already heard the a

Today we celebrate the birthday of famed songwriter Jerry Leiber, and if you don’t know several of the songs that this man penned with his longtime collaborator Mike Stoller, well, you oughta know, because they penned the soundtrack to Smokey Joe’s Café and, indeed, a good chunk of the rock and soul released in the 1950s. Born in Baltimore, Jerome “Jerry” Leiber first met Mike Stoller, who originally hailed from Long Island, in 1950. Both young men – along with their respective families – had made their way to Los Angeles: Leiber was a senior at Fairfax High, while Stoller was a freshman at Lo

2017 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of House of Pain’s self-titled debut, an album which made listeners jump around, jump up, jump up, and get down, and in celebration of the occasion, we've reissued both this classic release as well as the debut album from House of Pain frontman Everlast. House of Pain, HOUSE OF PAIN : Summed up beautifully by The Source, who asked readers to “imagine if LICENSED TO ILL wasn’t an upper middle class Jewish thing but rather a working class Irish thang.” The rapping of Everlast and Danny Boy O’Connor was combined with the scratching of DJ Lethal, who