Growing up in East Tennessee, it wasn’t uncommon for your neighbor or grocery cashier or mailman to ask, unprompted, if you’d found your “church home” yet; my devoutly religious first-grade teacher ...

Kurtis Blow is, somehow, only 67 years old. To put that in context, Jay-Z, whose debut album came out in 1996, is about to turn 57; Run, who introduced himself to the rap world as “the Son of Kurtis ...

In the early 2010s, the north side of Long Beach, California became a place synonymous with hell. You understood cops were out surveilling as early as 6 a.m.; you lived and died by the gun in spite of ...

We know the truth. Click to read POW MAG, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

I’m in New York and doseone is at his home in Santa Fe and we’re talking about Sumerian tablets over a wifi connection so clean it sounds as if the 49-year-old avant-garde rap legend is sitting right ...

You can see the living wraiths limping around the 19-story Regional Justice Center, mumbling about crystal meth fixes and spare change as the attorneys skirt around them in cream sport coats and ...

In 1906, San Francisco was hit by the deadliest earthquake in American history, which destroyed more than 80 percent of the city. Having prior to the disaster established itself as the “gateway to the ...

Editor’s note: Over the course of this year, we’re publishing a series of essays about the rap albums that defined 2001, both creatively and industrially, and whether they predicted or were abandoned ...

As you walk toward the check-in desk, you notice how unsettlingly quiet the lobby is. It’s late, but not late enough for a hotel to be this deathly empty. No sound but that of your own footsteps on ...

At this point, we know the supposed story: Napster and the internet in general leveled the playing field for hip-hop. Blogs and message boards helped artists and scenes transcend location and ...

Stevie Wonder spent the late 1960s and early ‘70s riding a high of unparalleled imagination, pumping out a series of genre-defining and -defying albums like Talking Book, Innervisions, and ...

The kids aren’t alright, at least based on how they’ve been engaging with popular music. In the frenzy to prove themselves the most devout stan, listeners have assisted millionaires in winning ...