After Duane “Keefe D” Davis was recently convicted of Tupac Shakur’s murder after 30 years, the glare of the hip-hop world turned to LA, where Biggie’s murder is still unsolved 29 years later. Their deaths were first linked as part of a coastal war, but that was an oversell. Over time, literature, incalculable YouTube interviews, and documentary exposes whittled down the truth: the music icons were collateral damage in a war between Diddy and Suge Knight, two violent egomaniac bosses with an excess of money, power, and gang ties.

Tupac and Biggie’s fracture wouldn’t have gone as far as it did if the men steering their careers were focused on resolution over destruction. All we’re left to do is ponder how tragic and needless it all was while wondering if Biggie’s family will ever get to experience being as “elated and relieved” as Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur says the family is post-conviction. Unfortunately, convicting someone for Biggie’s murder isn’t as simple as having someone continuously self-incriminate themselves in front of the world.

There are two major theories about who killed Biggie on March 9th; both implicate Suge Knight, who knows better than to get on Vlad talking about it. Below I break down both theories, the supposed evidence behind them, and the logistical (and financial) obstacles in the way of prosecution and conviction.

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Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for ‘“fair use’” for purposes such as criticism and commentary.

YouTube Trap Lore Ross is getting a rude awakening in LA while covering Lil Durk’s federal Murder for Hire trial. The British YouTuber is infamous for “documenting” gang violence in America and his native UK via videos compiled from headlines, tweets, Reddit threads, and rap lyrics. He’s done extensive coverage about Lil Durk and King Von “vs.” NBA YoungBoy and Quando Rondo, the fracture said to be at the root of Lul Pab’s murder in LA. Pab, Rondo’s cousin, was killed in LA in 2021. Federal prosecutors believe Durk orchestrated the murder as revenge for Rondo’s friend Lul Timm allegedly fatally shooting Durk’s friend and artist King Von in September 2020.

Ross’ work helped fuel the beef on social media, where Youngboy fans taunted Durk to “slide for Von” after his death. He made money scandalously covering the beef for years, so of course he’d be present to capitalize on its conclusion.

His on-site reporting has been eventful for all the wrong reasons. Earlier this week, people on Durk’s team confronted him about a tweet he made noting, “Durk just blamed EVERYTHING on Vonni.” In reality, Durk’s defense team claimed that their client did not know of a murder plot against Pab, and OTF Vonnie, Durk’s former manager who pled guilty to coordinating the murder, did it alone. Vonnie already admitted to flying people out from Chicago and obtaining the weapons for the murder; this is not new information to the feds. Durk and his lawyers are saying “we don’t know what Vonnie’s talking about; he orchestrated all that himself,” as a defendant would be expected to.

As Shawn Setaro wrote this week, “This is about as standard as a criminal defense gets. In every criminal trial that this writer has witnessed that has involved cooperating witnesses, their credibility is always attacked.” But because Ross has no experience with court reporting, he processed Durk’s basic defense as a “WTF” moment and, knowingly or not, set off social media’s latest round of snitch deliberation (the only time in life you’ll see the word “civilian”).

Intermission:

Rap fans labeling an artist “a rat” feels like a wing of cancel culture born from vicarious living through so-called gangsta rap. Social media users love “gettin’ someone outta here” and putting someone on the figurative “summer jam screen.” The snitch fixation is the same drag for those longing to flaunt their awareness of street culture to feel cool. A wide margin of the people obsessed with who “snitched” (such as Ross and DJ Vlad) have zero experience in the streets. But, increasingly, fans have shaped their fandom to emulate the supposed bylaws of the underworld their faves rap about. Listening to 21 Savage condemn “Snitches & Rats” isn’t just a pastime; it’s an initiation. It’s not enough to glaze street artists who “live their raps,”; you also have to hate rats like your favorite artist. And that’s why anytime there’s a scant chance that an artist implicated the next man in a crime, the rat emojis fly. It’s the corniest example of our cultural predisposition to dispose of people.

Back to the piece:

Try as they did, no one’s been able to dispose of Ross’ presence at the Durk trial. He’s had numerous incidents with people in and out of court regarding his coverage. Journalists are supposed to avoid being the center of the story. We document events; we don’t manufacture them. But a media personality can’t wait to make something about them. He claimed on Wednesday that “I might take a break from tweeting. Durks team acting very unprofessional. Screaming ‘DELETE THE TWEET’ in my face outside the court room leading to court Marshall’s having to step in. Very disappointing and intimidating conduct towards the press in this case.” But he continued live tweeting the trial. In another tweet, he claimed, “I might be the only person telling the truth out there,” ignoring the work of onsite reporters like Michael Blackshire, Jaelani Turner-Williams and Twitter user youvegtMel, who’ve been posting unbiased accounts while Ross is interjecting commentary and emojis.

Ross claimed he felt intimidated in court by Kanye West staring at him. At some point on Thursday, Ross made another video claiming that people erroneously fingered him as the person who took a photo of government witness OTF Jam with Meta glasses. The clip’s overlay text read, “I got snitched on and harassed out Durk’s trial. He got cooked and they’re big mad threatening me” — no respectable reporter would be using the word “cooked” about a defendant in an ongoing trial.

During the clip, he panned his camera over to a group of a dozen or so Black men calling him everything but a child of God. When he said that “they were snitchin’ on me,” someone screamed, “you snitchin!” Another clip from outside the trial shows what seemed to be another angle of Ross’ original video, with streamer Big Loaaf calling Ross out for his coverage. Early today, he got into it with streamer FinessFave, who accosted him and called him a “culture vulture,” asking him why he was covering Chicago street politics from the UK. Ross, behind his two mammoth security guards, sheepishly stared into his phone. Were they trying to get content, just like Ross was? Probably. But they weren’t wrong to call him out for unethical coverage.

Ross also tweeted, “Someone came up to me INSIDE the courtroom and said they’ll ’smack me in my big Jew nose’.” Amid the dustups, Ross made a defiant clip noting, “You want to come and try and intimidate me on courthouse grounds on a federal building--I’m probably going to work with whoever I’ve got to work with to make sure that you go and meet Durk. You’re going to be meeting Durk soon if that’s really how you want to go about it.”

Ross has realized that it’s easy to make videos incriminating and contributing to the criminalization of young Black men from the safety of his home, but not easy to walk amongst the people affected by his coverage. He used to do comedy and food reviews on YouTube. He only leaned into his salacious street coverage in 2019 because it was lucrative. And his profit-over-integrity mindset resulted in coverage so exploitative that people are threatening to assault him in court.

His “Durk put everything on Vonnie” gaffe was bad enough, especially because he didn’t clarify or apologize after going viral. But he then spent the rest of the week dodging criticism — and threats— from people who hate him.

With a dearth of legacy media willing to spend on court reporting, recent big-time trials have been overrun with influencers and content creators setting the narrative for viewers, covering cases like they’re sporting events and putting themselves in the middle of the story. Readers deserve unbiased coverage from reporters who state the facts without bias or agenda. And Lul Pab’s family deserves to feel like the trial is being covered with the grace and solemnity that a loss of life deserves. Ross hasn’t done that.

Other Thoughts

Game is baiting Kendrick Lamar into a beef. He made an Instagram post using the “using your head” GIF when rapper and content creator Knox Hill suggested that his “LA Monster” song had bait bars for Kendrick. Game has a consistent pattern of falling out with people who were once allies: 50 Cent, Eminem, Dre, and now Kendrick. It’s like he’s going to force headlines off a friend’s name, one way or the other. If you don’t give him a feature, then he’ll try to diss you to get the attention. It’s a really lame way to operate, especially at 47.

Dr. Dre says he uses generative AI in his music. I’m about to write at length about this, but I’ll just say it’s actually not surprising if you consider his longtime creative process.

Stove God Cooks is dropping an album and wants a Roc chain. He claimed on his story that he reached an agreement with Babygrande CEO Chuck Wilson that allows him to drop a new album. Elsewhere, he told Joe Budden that he sent Jay-Z a verse and only wants a Roc chain in exchange. This feels like it’s about to be the rapper version of the $500,000 or dinner with Jay-Z convo.

RIP to New Orleans rapper Wacko. The New Orleans artist who was on “Nolia Clap” recently died under allegedly controversial circumstances. Someone named Troy Smith on Facebook, claiming to be Wacko’s friend, says he went to the hospital with chest pains, received the antipsychotic medicine Thorazine (???), and then had a seizure. Smith claims that 10 minutes after that, he passed. This seems really fishy if true; I hope there’s a full investigation.

Right-wing Commentator and Ye lackey Milo detained by ICE. It’s insane how self-sacrificial people are willing to be in the name of hate. This man has been an unabashed Trump supporter for years, and none of that saved him when it was time to be detained and deported. This tracks with all the other racists and bigots who voted for him twice, only for his policies to ruin their quality of life.

1. Spoilers ahead if you didn’t finish The Wire.

2. If you think defunding the police or abolition is pie in the sky, this piece isn’t for you. You probably won’t agree with anything here, so I’d prefer not to see your critiques.

Baltimore Police Major Ronald “Bunny” Colvin is at the end of his rope during season three of The Wire. He’s annoyed that his careerist superiors are fixated on stat-juking and his underlings view Baltimore citizens as adversaries instead of people to “protect and serve.” That brutality fuels bubbling tension at a community meeting he’s attending. He walks up to speak toward the end of the meeting, grounding the room with his pragmatism:

“I know what’s goin’ on in your neighborhoods; I see it every day. Ma’am, it pains me that you cannot enter your own front door in safety and with dignity. But, truth is, I can’t promise you it’s gonna get any better. We can’t lock up the thousands out there on the corners. There’d be no place to put ’em even if we could. We show you charts and statistics like they mean somethin’. But you’re goin’ back to your home tonight, we gonna be in our patrol cars, and them boys still gonna be out there on them corners, deep in the game. This is the world we got, people, and it’s about time all of us had the good sense to at least admit that much.”

Salient points. An attendee asks him, “What’s the answer?”

“Well, I’m not sure…but whatever it is, it can’t be a lie.” That’s as close as the HBO classic explicitly gets to broaching the idea that the police system is beyond saving. And even then, Colvin, one of the show’s voices of reason, never considers an alternative to the police system, much less abolition. Even his Season 3 “free zones,” where the drug trade was decriminalized, were intended to free up his district to do “real police work” on more serious cases.

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Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for ‘“fair use’” for purposes such as criticism and commentary.

The first week of the Duane “Keefe D” Davis trial for the murder of Tupac Shakur has been momentous. The biggest reveal for me is former FBI Agent Wade Lee’s testimony that Davis told him in the late ‘90s that he heard Suge Knight and Reggie Wright killed Tupac, meaning the feds have two different proffers from Davis stating two different theories about the rapper’s murder. He was charged with the murder after repeatedly telling a story he also told former LAPD officials Daryn Dupree (who testified Wednesday) and Greg Kading in the late ‘00s: he handed a .40 caliber to the person who shot Tupac from the back of a white Cadillac. He claimed that he received the gun from late Harlem drug dealer Eric “Von” Zip, and that he and fellow Southside Crips were fulfilling an open hit that Diddy allegedly ordered on Tupac and Suge Knight. Those claims formed the basis of the 2016 Murder Rap documentary.

People may feel like Davis’ repeated public assertions of the Murder Rap theory sank him (it was certainly enough to get him charged), but who knows. In the court of law, the burden of proof to convict someone is, supposedly, more stringent than solely believing an interview. Music manager Kal Dawson went on DJ Vlad and claimed that he was in the car when 50 Cent got shot in 2000. 50 called cap on it, but a lot of people would have believed him if he hadn’t.

Davis’ lawyer Michael Sanft pointed out that, to this point, the prosecution has yet to provide any evidence of where Davis was on September 7th, 1996: no ticket from the Tyson fight, hotel or bank records, or testimony from anyone saying they saw him there. And Davis is saying that the state’s prime evidence, his would-be confessions, were just him bullshittin’. What will the jury believe? So far, it feels like the verdict is damn near about to come down to vibes.

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The day before Lee and Dupree’s testimony, former Death Row affiliate Mob James gave a spirited testimony where he repeatedly reminded everyone that he was being forced to speak and didn’t want to snitch on Davis. He evaded several questions and got touchy with Davis’ lawyer. Apparently, he overlooked that Davis’ defense team wouldn’t ask him anything that would damage their client. Before him, former Death Row Records general manager and security director Reggie Wright spoke.

In the middle of online errands, a lightbulb flashed. I realized how familiar this exchange felt. I don’t watch court trials often, but I’ve seen some DJ Vlad interviews. The Keefe D trial is like a special edition Vladcast featuring Sanft and Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo as guest hosts. Would this trial even be happening without the self-snitching industrial complex that Vlad dominates? Davis told Vlad the Murder Rap theory in 2019. Vlad also talked to Wright, James, and Kading, as well as a slew of other people in the Death Row orbit, asking many of the same questions as the trial’s legal professionals.

During Mob James’ testimony, he implored the court that he’s a 61-year-old grandfather trying to teach his grandkids the right way, and didn’t want them to hear about his old gang life via his testimony. But he had no problem answering some of the same questions for Vlad in numerous interviews. The only difference is that Davis’ freedom was on the line this time.

DiGiacomo’s tone and line of questioning mirrored Vlad, the Zionist culture vulture (who has no qualms with Iran being bombed). His channel and offshoots like Art of Dialogue are a morass of Black death culture, where robberies, gang ties, and all the other (literal) hits are on one stage for his viewers’ morbid curiosities. I texted this observation to journalist Jeff Weiss, who’s covering the trial, after I saw the headline of his 2Pac Trial: Hell is Other People’s Podcasts piece. After years of watching Vlad do his best First 48 conversation under the guise of cultural preservation, we were on the same page. With 6.4 million+ YouTube subscribers, Vlad fancies himself an integral media personality. But his interviews aren’t conversations; they’re pure extraction. If you’re not a Vlad regular who he shoots the shit with, your interview will sound like you’re talking to a prosecutor in a cold white room. He operates with a bland, clinical tone, doggedly digging for every sordid detail of his guest’s life-altering trauma.

For Vlad, an interview is only worth its viral potential. And sensationalism is his easiest path there. When Chicago rapper Rico Recklezz told Vlad that some people shot up his mother’s house, Vlad asked if they were arrested or retaliated against. Rico, a known drill rapper, turned his head to the side and gave a “What do you think?” expression. I immediately picked up what he was putting down. But Vlad, with the voracity of a vampire at dusk, prodded Rico to tell him that the men are no longer with us so he could title the snippet “Rico Recklezz on Mom’s House Getting Shot Up, Men Who Did It are Dead.” A DA can’t prosecute a facial expression, and Vlad can’t package ambiguity. They both need it on record.

That’s why other people who’ve been there and done that are passing on talking to Vlad and interviewers like him. Yesterday, Atlanta podcaster Big Bank Black, who was also in the streets before transitioning to the hip-hop industry, laughingly expressed his discontent with doing podcasts: “These podcast niggas [will] get a nigga a hundred years. Them bitchass niggas want a nigga to go out like Keefe D.” This comes after former BMF kingpin Big Meech publicly stated that he has no plans to go on Vlad’s channel. “I love Vlad as a DJ, I used to buy his mixtapes…but an interview on Vlad? No, because that’s just not the type of platform I need to be on or see myself on.” After coming home from serving 20 years in prison, I don’t blame him. He’s been interrogated enough in his life.

Other Thoughts

This week, I debuted in ‘The Guardian.’ I wrote about the “Woke 1” discourse, which was infuriating to me because I saw everyone running with a term that conservatives co-opted and reducing a hundreds-of-years-long resistance movement into a finite time period. As I said in the piece, “The truest advocates are still on the frontlines, even if the masses have decided it’s no longer trendy.” Most of the liberals replying to the piece on social media and using that coinage don’t care about our genuine liberation anyway; their centrism proves as much. Anyway, take a look if you haven’t.

Another month, another R&B/genre controversy. This time, Ravyn Lenae sparked the discourse during a press run for her Blue Island album. After her FADER interview lit the flame, she told journalist Sid Madden for VIBE that, “Whenever we do talk about R&B, we’re not talking about sonically what’s happening. It’s purely racial. And I think that’s the bigger conversation that people like to avoid.” People tend to automatically conflate these types of conversations with artists contending that they’re bigger than hip-hop or R&B. Their wording often doesn’t help their cause. What it’s coming down to is that (most of) the artists who broach this talking point don’t resent their genre; they resent the industry depriving them of “pop music” opportunities because they’re Black artists. They don’t get the festivals or playlisting or radio slots that their white peers get. The anger just ends up misplaced and miscommunicated. They’d do better to center these conversations on the forces keeping them under the glass ceiling rather than genre itself. Any talking point that broaches wanting to “transcend” or be “more than” a historically Black music scene for “pop” status is ignorant of the fact that pop isn’t a genre in itself; it’s a descriptor offered to the most palatable sonics and/or artists in every genre. It’s in the middle of the musical Venn diagram. Unfortunately, performing in a racist, patriarchal music industry means race, gender, and a bunch of other categorizations factor into that palatability. It’s not the rhythm or blues’ fault.

Game drops The Documentary 3 and exploits the stan wars. He might be the truest 50 Cent disciple. It’s been 20 years since his formal debut and Game still uses conflict as the main marketing ploy for every album. 50, Jay-Z, Meek, Dr. Dre, Em, he’ll snipe at anyone he thinks will garner headlines for the next release. But this time was a master chess move; he rode the tide of the ongoing Kendrick-Drake stan wars by using fans’ biases against them. He took advantage of Kendrick’s “6:16 in LA” possibly referring to the date of filming his “100” video with Drake, then aired just enough grievances about Kendrick to make it seem like a diss was possible. He also dropped a single with Drake (barely on it) to further rile galvanize OVO stans. Yesterday I saw social media accounts promoting the song and album while wondering if a Kendrick diss was coming (negative). And I see Hitta J3, Kendrick’s cousin and top Twitter advocate, saying there’s no beef. J3 also said that he and Game are dropping a song together “to clear up all this fake beef.” All the bloodthirsty fans got played. I’ve talked before about the Kendrick-Drake vortex that’s infecting the major label rap bubble; now it’s extended into other artists exploiting fans’ biases to drum up attention for their own. I can be annoyed by it, but at the same time I’m not even mad at it.

Stephen A Smith and John McEnroe are reportedly being considered to reprise Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes segment. I’m hoping John McEnroe gets it just so white people can relate to asking themselves, “why the hell is an entertainer being given a national platform to weigh in on world affairs?”

I have nothing to say about DJ Akademiks except I had him and his audience pegged six years ago. “So many of his followers, like him, grew up as basement-dwelling Davids — but collectively, they’re Goliath, and it may be too late for anyone to get rid of them.” That virus has only mutated since then.

Fivio Foreign is making a gospel turn? He’s previewed two tracks this week, recently performing one song in Midtown. His career-defining “Off The Grid” verse hinted that he could be reflective and religious if he cared to. Let’s see if this lasts — and if spiritual renewal keeps him from acting out against people.

Is Lay Bankz changing her name to Layia? Late pass on this one. I just noticed a post on her Instagram noting: “‘Tap The Bottle’ (her new single) is the beginning of a new world for me.. pulling from Eritrean sounds, rhythm & spirit and bringing it into the world I’ve always created in my own way. 🇪🇷🌺” It’s interesting to me because it feels like a manifestation of a dearth of artist development. A lot of artists had an era before their true debut: Future was Meathead, Rick Ross was Willow, Young Jeezy was Lil J, Nas was Kid Wave, Mobb Deep were Poetical Prophets, etc. But they were able to bubble under the surface during those developmental periods until they refined a bankable sound and image. But with no barrier to entry, an artist will go viral, even make the XXL Freshman list, then realize they want to make a major pivot in front of the world. It’s risky; good luck to her.

Pablo Torre and his team at Pablo Torre Finds Out have left no stone unturned in their nearly yearlong investigation into claims that the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the NBA salary cap with side deals for Kawhi Leonard. They earned a Pulitzer Prize and an Edward R. Murrow Award for last year’s reports claiming that climate tech company Aspiration and scoreboard manufacturer Daktronics, two Clippers partners, paid Leonard sponsorship deals despite him doing zero marketing for them. But the reaction to Torre’s work hasn’t all been laudatory.

Naysayers have taken to calling Torre a “snitch,” seemingly unaware of the function of investigative journalism. Some feel like Twitter user Brett Usher, who revealed in a viral tweet that “I never cared about the Clippers thing — not even remotely.” That perspective ignores how Balmer’s alleged circumvention reflects the one percent’s wider corruption. The Clipper reveals are an elementary opportunity to take a united stand against a billionaire, yet people have instead exposed the deficiencies of our relationship with media. The baffling backlash Torre’s team has received exemplifies the uphill fight that investigative journalists face with an undereducated, nonchalant public.

We’re so inundated with information that we don’t care about anything that’s not a sex scandal or racist exposal. We’re not conditioned to connect the dots. We also give power way too much leeway, either enamored or defeated by it.

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Tyga — I mean $tarface’s — new 80’s-inspired AI album received a 0.0 rating from Pitchfork. He earned it. His new project, rife with generative AI, has forged the most treacherous path for music yet:…

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There were many highlights from Drake’s recent marathon stream celebrating Stake’s 9th anniversary. At one point, the Toronto icon mentioned the “Roc Nation subpoenas dropping soon.” His statement was most likely a reference to YouTube channel What’s The Dirt’s recent video entitled Untangling Jay Z’s Evil Plan To Destroy Drake. The video implies that Roc Nation is behind two class action lawsuits alleging that Drake used the Stake betting platform to pay for streaming bots to boost his streaming numbers.

What’s The Dirt is run by YouTuber Matthew Smith, who hypothesizes that Roc Nation had two attorneys formerly of Reed Smith, one of the company’s go-to law firms, represent New Jersey residents and several Virginians in the lawsuits. He also speculates that the Virginia plaintiffs met Reed Smith attorneys because many of them are justice-impacted and members of the firm were at a 2024 Job Fair in Virginia. Hmm…

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Sophie Cunningham wants to have her “ban trans players” cake and eat it too. The other day, the 29-year-old Indiana Fever player told reporters that after spending the past month being a transphobic …

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Photos by Prince Williams, Francesco Prandoni, Getty Images. Illustration by Jefferson Harris for Okayplayer

My only Rolling Loud attendance was in New York City in 2021. I remember the weekend for a constant overcast, introductions to TiaCorine and CEO Trayle, and being disappointed by one of rap’s biggest emerging superstars.

During night two, I walked past Playboi Carti’s set on the way to the concession stand. Up to that point, I liked some of his singles when I heard them, but didn’t consider myself a huge fan. And what I saw from his performance didn’t do much to win me over.

Dodging rain puddles and empty food containers in the Citi Field parking lot, I don’t know what was making me cringe more: how messy my Oreo 4s were getting, or what I perceived as a lack of stage presence during Carti’s set. He was shrieking over synth blips and seemingly deciding which phrases he wanted to recite over his backing vocals at random.

Maybe he was really high, I thought. Perhaps he’s so enamored with how he sounded on the record that he decided to be his own hypeman. Whatever the case, he didn’t offer much in the way of a vocal performance. But the crowd was having the time of their life. I didn’t hear any booing or echoes of “what the hell is going on?”

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Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash

In a prior life, one I long to rekindle, I had a home studio in my apartment. It was a pretty rough setup; I used an M-Audio interface that linked an AKG condenser mic to Pro Tools. My laptop and an end table I repurposed to hold my interface and MPK149 keyboard were in the right corner of the room. To the left of the desk was the mic, facing the front of my closet door, so the sound could be somewhat “absorbed” by my clothes. It got the job done.

At one point in the late ‘00s-early ‘10s, some friends, or some co-workers and their friends, would come through and record just about every weekend. They’d rap over beats I’d made, or instrumentals ripped off YouTube (!!!). Our plans for the music were pleasantly beside the point; I mostly remember it all as a fun, cathartic process. That said, we occasionally crafted songs that I remember to this day. There were some songs where I observed familial love transmuted through perfecting a back-to-back verse. I remember at least one track where someone cried while hearing it back.

I came to know my friends not just as people, but as people with artistry as part of their personality. That’s the healthiest way to consider any artist, no matter how accomplished they are.

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NLE Choppa has borne many faces since debuting in 2018. In 2020, he pivoted from a fairly conventional Memphis “street rapper” into proselytizing on veganism, meditation and holistic health (though i…

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Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

The internet is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It’s done so many wonderful things for us: It’s made a wealth of information accessible at the click of a mouse, connected people internationally, and galvanized social justice movements. Most importantly, though, the internet’s the main forum for Black men to tear each other down for the entertainment of others.

You’re nobody on the internet unless you’re e-mortal enemies with another Black man. Do you have an opp? Below are my suggestions to get one. Please don’t use them against me.

1. Buy a microphone, a camera, and a couch. Or get with someone who has one, preferably someone who asks dumb close-ended questions and repeats everything you say with a “___ is crazy” at the end of it. Bonus points if it’s a rapper or ex-drug dealer podcast.

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Credit: Apple Music/Verzuz

“For those of us engaged in Black radical politics, the degree of separation is not wide enough for us to view the ‘street cats’ as the proverbial ‘others.’ They are us and …

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This week we lost 42-year-old Atlanta rapper Alley Boy and 50-year-old Jacksonville DJ Bigga Rankin, who put on for so many acts. It’s not clear what caused Rankin’s death, but 50 is way too young. A…

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Photo Credit: The Art of Dialogue

I got home from Jay-Z’s Sunday night Yankee Stadium concert at 5 am; Dame Dash’s account of the weekend might have been recorded before I arrived. I’m going to write …

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Photo Credit: Bishop Elegino

Chinatown, NY-based band Chanpan, comprised of vocalist Grace Dumdaw, drummer Lance Tran, and guitarist Matthew Tran (who are identical twin brothers), just dropped their autogratis EP. A standout track on the seven-song project is “i got a gun” with a “I got a gun and you better run, run / ‘Cause I got a gun and I’m not done, it’s fun” refrain that reminds me of M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” in the way it slickly subverts a heavy topic within a frenetic soundscape that could have some people dancing past the message.

But there’s no misconstruing the conversation we recently had about the many faces of political violence, from exploitation in arts scenes to fascist governments vilifying the people who fight back against them. Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

Lance: All this happened through violence and force. When we talk about violence, we have to turn the question on its head. The things that we make art about, that we process, and we see in the news, like Luigi Mangione, or pushback in Palestine…it’s the tip of the iceberg. So much happens, and the boot is put on the neck of people for 300 years; it’s almost like a natural recoil. Something happens, and then that’s what we label as violence. That’s what we call immoral and evil. There’s so much cultural messaging, work, and framing that we have to wade through and undo before we can have an honest and real conversation about violence.

Someone I admire a lot is Frantz Fanon, and his book The Wretched of the Earth leads with the chapter on violence, which is one of the most famous cultural works that pulls apart the things I’m talking about and asserts that violence is good. He was a sociologist in French Algeria, and he worked with essentially colonized African subjects who were experiencing French colonization and all the brainwashing.

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Midway through my second glass of Ace of Spades at an Armand de Brignac and JAŸ-Z listening party, amidst a group of mostly 30-somethings, I realized how Millennial-centric the JAŸ-Z:30 celebration h…

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Yung Miami’s had a banner summer so far. She won a BET Award and the biannual Performative Pearl-Clutcher Prize (PPP) with “Spend Dat,” a track that moralists are blaming for hip-hop’s downfall and the nadir of Blackness. To this cohort, “Spend Dat” is not wombman-like. Nonetheless, she’s evaded deeper questions about her proximity to Diddy’s coercive “freakoffs” with an ode to tricking, making it rain, and every other nod to excess that comprises most mainstream rap singles. Neither the themes nor presentation are remarkable. But for some reason, the song’s sparked a wide debate amongst moralists and materialists on a collision course akin to the old helmet-smashing Monday Night Football intro.

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Lauryn Hill is a legend and absolutely deserving of her BET Living Legend Icon award. If you disagree, you’re crazy. You’re not worth debating. You’re deserving of words that I shouldn’t say e…

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In a sea of co-opted apps longing to sell us ads, confine us to an algorithm, and train AI with our likeness, the Corus app has a simple premise: post the songs and movies you’re feeling at the moment. Over the past couple of months, Corus founder Gabe Jacobs has cultivated a community of hundreds of music lovers and cinephiles on his ad-free app, which is available on iOS, Android, and a website.

Users can immediately log in and scour the site’s database for their favorite songs and films, curating a musical profile that matches their musical and cinematic tastes.

Corus is a spiritual successor to Cymbal, a cult favorite app that allowed users to upload their favorite songs. The lifelong music head co-founded Cymbal as an extension of an early ‘10s blog where he journaled his favorite songs.

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