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In 1894, “The Little Lost Child” went “platinum” off sheet music sales in what might be considered the first successful music video marketing campaign. Innovations in aurafarming have taken things to dizzying heights since, sometimes literally — see Nettspend’s helicopter-assisted entrance to his 18th birthday party in the video for “impact” featuring xaviersobased — but more often via excess: hyperkinetic edit styles, delirious CGI, oversize asses, meticulous concepts executed precisely.

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Review: Playboi Carti’s MUSIC came alive at Rolling Loud Cali

I was watching the moon bleed on Thursday as midnight EST became midnight PST became 2 am, 3 am, falling asleep with the lights on, waiting for MUSIC. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, or worse, glazing, Playboi Carti is among the few musicians big enough to make fans wait years between albums without losing relevance, and may be one of the only willing to practice the restraint this necessitates.

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The best new rap mixtapes for snow days

January 2025 kicked off with a major ice storm across the U.S. and Canada dumping more than a foot of snow across multiple states and provinces.

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Who’s afraid of Nettspend? He hasn’t even peaked yet.

Unless your favorite dessert is cotton candy, you’ll understand the implicit problem with BAD ASS F*CKING KID, the rabidly anticipated debut of teenage rapper Nettspend: It's mostly fluff. And if you've ever purchased an $8 bag of cotton candy at the state fair, you’ll also understand why you might not care that it's a lot of puffed up air.

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Lateral progress, rap, and the 2025 Grammy nominations

Last month, the Grammys announced their annual awards show would move from longtime host CBS to ABC and Hulu starting in 2027. The 10-year deal is a retrenchment of Music’s Biggest Night™ following a pandemic ratings nadir, although viewership of just 9.2 million in 2021 had recovered to a healthy 16.9 million by this February.

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We don’t need a tapped-in president

When Kanye West revealed his support for Trump back in 2016 it was a scandal; nowadays, a rapper backing the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is barely news. Trump received the endorsements of Lil Pump, Lil Wayne, and Kodak Black during the 2020 election cycle (and gave presidential pardons to the latter two after losing), and 2024 has only been more fruitful.

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Wolfacejoeyy has mastered the sexy drill singalong

Wolfacejoeyy has to hand it to his mother. “My mom always told me, ‘You know you can sing right?’” the Staten Island rapper says. “I'm like, ‘Why are you telling me this? If I could sing I would know.’ Then I started recording music and I was like, ‘Hold on.

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Anycia doesn’t believe in fear

It’s a Thursday in early April and Anycia is calling me in the middle of getting her nails done. The 26-year-old rapper is supposed to be relaxing: she’s back in her hometown of Atlanta on one of her precious days off. She’d just done a show in New York the previous weekend, with an impending show in Seattle and a press run in LA.

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tdf is making 808s big enough to blow your speakers up

tdf’s productions can bait a certain kind of rap fan, down to his drops. Littered across his projects RELIGION and BLUEPRINT are vicious insults sampled from Instagram Live: tdf is a dickrider, tdf fell off, tdf has the Cheese Touch; tdf wants to be Pi’erre Bourne so bad, tdf keeps putting “random ass n***as” on his beats, tdf is “the worst prod in history.” “I don’t really take that stuff seriously, so I just put it in there,” the 20-year-old tells me over the phone. Based in Minnesota, tdf (née Tyrese Jones) mostly collaborates over the Internet.

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The heart and the tongue of Bear1Boss

When I hop on a Zoom call with Bear1Boss, he immediately notices the embarrassing amount of wrestling action figures displayed on the bedroom wall behind me. Like wrestling fans tend to do when they meet a fellow member of the tribe, we start debating our personal GOATs. Turns out we have the same favorite wrestler: CM Punk, the scrappy underdog from Chicago who swaggers to the ring to the massive riffs of Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” and never backs down from a fight.

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5 essential, unstreamable mixtapes you can hear on the Internet Archive

Online music is inherently precarious — if a physical recording of something is never made, it’s dangerously easy to erase any sign that it ever existed. With mass layoffs in the wake of Bandcamp’s sale from Epic Games to Songtradr, as well as the recent announcement that Soundcloud is seeking a buyer in a potentially billion-dollar deal, there are understandable concerns about the future of the music that’s been uploaded on those platforms.

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Breaking down Playboi Carti’s stream-subverting album rollout

A vicious debate rages across the internet this month, with manifestos etched into comment sections and forum threads. Picking the best Playboi Carti single out of the past four weeks is less an objective critical exercise than a musical Rorschach.

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6 artists who are keeping Milwaukee rap essential

So often, when regional rap scenes blow up nationally, they’re treated too much as a passing novelty: a city has its moment in the sun, and then it’s on to the next one. Just as frequently, the popularity of regionally-specific sounds doesn’t actually benefit artists from those areas very much.

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Hip-hop’s dangerous bet on the gambling industry

Earlier this month, Drake posted a black-and-white video to his Instagram Reels, set to the contemplative strains of Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again.” But instead of a heartfelt salute to Paul Walker, Drake repurposed the ballad to pay tribute to something else: gambling. As Charlie Puth croons and piano keys twinkle in memory of Vin Diesel’s fallen bestie, we see clips from the past year of Drake risking millions of dollars on virtual roulette, anxiously ripping a hookah at his kitchen counter as he stares intently at his computer screen and roleplays his own private Uncut Gems.

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How vinyl editions of mixtapes reveal the conflict at the heart of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary

This year has been filled with countless tributes to rap history, from live concerts with legacy acts to block parties hosted by New York City cop-in-chief Eric Adams (complete with a drone light show). But more than a celebration of history, “HipHop50” is very much a marketing campaign.

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DJ Envy’s scandal shows the darker side of rap hustle

The rap game is built on hustle. Sometimes that hustle is just hard work and sweat equity, but the industry’s emphasis on making money at any cost can sometimes make it a target for shadier operators.

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AGGRO DR1FT expands the Travis Scott branded universe

If you were one of the few people who caught an IMAX screening of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet when theaters were still largely locked down, you might have seen the music video for Travis Scott’s song “Franchise” ahead of the film. The fawning IMAX press release makes the short video clip sound like a banquet for the senses, boasting of “powerful precision sound and the highest quality crystal clear imagery on the biggest screens.” The collaboration speaks to how Scott has positioned himself as an artist: more than the music, the Travis Scott brand is about visual spectacle.

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Ghostwriter’s vision of music is all machine, no heart

In April, an anonymous music producer known only as Ghostwriter made headlines with a song called “Heart on my Sleeve.” Using AI-assisted tools, Ghostwriter was able to create glitchy facsimiles of Drake and the Weeknd’s vocals known as “deep fakes,” bringing the two artists together for a collaboration the pair had nothing to do with. Tens of millions of TikTok plays and a Universal Music Group takedown later, he’s ready for his close-up.

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10 years later, B.O.A.T.S. II: #METIME might be 2 Chainz’s classic

2 Chainz's 2013 album B.O.A.T.S. II: #METIME opens with a vision of catastrophe — he can't find the cash he left in his pants.

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The legacy of Mexican rap innovator Lefty SM, in 5 songs

Much has been made over hip-hop’s supposed decline in 2023, but if you look past what we conventionally define as “rap,” the genre’s influence is all over the charts. Nowhere is that more evident than the meteoric rise of regional Mexican folk, a sound that’s steeped in over a century of musical traditions while refreshingly open to the new.

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Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist’s NFT album isn’t a disruption

Voir Dire, the collaborative rap project between Earl Sweatshirt and veteran producer the Alchemist, was originally conceived as a needle in a digital haystack, a YouTube playlist buried under a fake name and burner account. The Alchemist first tweeted about the album in 2019; fast forward to 2021, and still no one had found it.

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