Native from Bronx where she grew up in the 80′s and 90′s, Lisa Leone has been surrounded by the hip-hop rise community. With her passion for photography, the woman began to capture portraits of men and women who today are hip-hop iconic musicians. This touching series is actually the subject of an exhibition The Bronx Museum of the Arts till 11st of January. To discover.
To make the new video for “A Better Tomorrow,” a track that deals with issues of inequality and injustice, Wu-Tang Clan tapped into the outpouring of grief, incredulity, and anger in cities across America in the wake of Grand Jury decisions in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of the police.
The video, for the title track on Wu-Tang Clan’s newly released album, is composed of footage from the ongoing protests in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, some of it only a few days old at the time of the video’s release. Visuals and audio from the protests are interspersed with footage of President Obama speaking at the 2014 White House Tribal Nations Conference last week. In his speech, the president addressed the events in Ferguson and New York and said, “right now unfortunately we are seeing too many instances where people just do not have confidence that folks are being treated fairly.” In another segment of his speech used in the video he says, “it is incumbent upon all of us as Americans, regardless of race, region, faith, that we recognize this is an American problem and not just a black problem or a brown problem or a native American problem, this is an American problem. When anybody in this country is not being treated under the law, that’s a problem.”
The video concludes with a list of people who, like Brown and Garner, were unarmed when killed by police officers over the past several years. The band notes on its YouTube page, the video was created “in the hopes of inspiring change and promoting unity throughout the world.”
Childish Gambino CRUSHES it.
ma mannnn
Since 1988, over 19,000 rap songs have made reference to marijuana and cocaine. Far fewer have mentioned prescription drugs, Codeine and MDMA, though Sizzurp, that foul concoction of cough syrup, alcohol, soda, and Jolly Ranchers, seems to be having a resurgence. Meanwhile, rappers seem less interested in calling out specific alcohol brands today than they did in the mid 1990s.
These are some of the observations from Drug Slang in Hip Hop, a series of graphs that catalog drug references in rap lyrics between the late ‘80s through 2013. The charts break each drug into its various nicknames–i.e. cocaine, blow, piff, and eight ball–and show the “prevalence” of each name in a given year. (Prevalence is the number of songs with a specific drug reference divided by the total number of songs released that year.)
The graphs, which are based on a study of RapGenius lyrics, were commissioned by Project Know, an online resource for families and friends whose loved ones are struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. Mostly, it’s fascinating to see the spectrum of names for a single substance–and to speculate about the ebb and flow of their popularity. It’s striking, for example, to see the explosion in the number and overall volume of prescription drugs mentioned around 2006, and the rise of Adderall. “Along with the steep rise in various pain killers, including Percs, Lortab, and hydrocodone since the mid-2000s, Adderall’s popularity has surged,” the researchers have said.
It’s also interesting to see the rise and fall in popularity of certain alcohol brands, including a Patron spike starting in 2003, and the inexplicable durability of Hennessy.
This is fucking sick. Analysis of # of unique words used within a hip hop artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. WU TANG CLAN AINT NUTHIN TO FUCK WITH
Check it out here:
http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
