Read our interview with Kooley High The message wasn’t very clear when Raleigh’s hip-hop sextet Kooley High decided to ship a chunk of the group to New York only a month before the release of its long-awaited debut LP, Eastern Standard Time. They conquered and then deployed; in their wake, they have at least given […]
Eric Tullis
Bio: Eric Tullis lives in Chapel Hill, where he writes about music and basketball.Twitter: http://twitter.com/erictullis
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The Away Team’s Independence Day
The Away Team’s DJ Eclipse-assisted mixtape, Independence Day, unites a handful of rapper Sean Boog’s past anthems “The Shining,” “Likka Hi,” “The End of the Day”from the duo’s National Anthem and Training Day LPs with a smattering of fierce freestyles over producer Khrysis’ beats for other emceesMasta Ace’s “Da Grind,” Jean Grae’s “The Jam,” Sean […]
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Raleigh rapper King Mez offers, thankfully, a very different approach
King Mez opens for Kooley High at Tir Na Nog Thursday, July 8, at 10 p.m. The show is free. At the front of a packed crowd inside Five Star, an Asian restaurant in Raleigh by evening and a longtime haven for DJs and rappers by late night, a young woman consoles an older woman […]
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The in-studio chemistry of Murs and 9th Wonder, and its strange, sexy surprises
Murs performs at Cat’s Cradle Sunday, May 23, with Sick Jacken and NOCANDO, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13–$15. Since Los Angeles emcee Murs and North Carolina producer 9th Wonder began collaborating in the form of full-length albums with Murs’ 2004 record 3:16: The 9th Edition, the rapping half of the duo has become quite […]
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Little Brother’s LeftBack
Little Brother has been pushing the platform of “Dope beats, dope rhymes: What more can y’all want?” its whole career. Sure, they first dropped that motto on “Not Enough,” a track from their 2005 major-label debut and finale The Minstrel Show. But it was by then only a response to those who were constantly nitpicking […]
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Yahzarah
Last year, when all of a sudden a new music video appeared on the internet starring Yahzarah as a hypersexualized, voodoo-love neuromancer, a lot of us were taken off guard. We’d never seen anything from her that was as fleshy and decadent. Throughout the video, Yahzarah contorted and winded her delicately chiseled and oftentimes barely […]
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New Rapsody track, “Man’s World”: Rapsody, higher than Gilead?
Christina Aguilera’s stunning 2007 Grammy Award show performance of James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s World” reinterpreted the Godfather of Soul’s declaration and turned it into a womanly rebuke. Few could have done it better. 9th Wonder’s female rap threat, Rapsody, who’s signed to his It’s a Wonderful World/Jamla group manages to cut her own improved, […]
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SXSW10 Day 4: Doin’ the Don Lemon and dancing with white girls [Eric Tullis]
Today is David Hackney’s birthday. David, who passed away from lung cancer in 2000, was the lead guitarist for the 1970’s all-black punk-band, Death, compromised of David and his two brothers Bobby and Dannis Hackney, back when the concept of an all-black punk band from the Motown-stained streets of Detroit was a cultural and musical […]
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SXSW10 Day 3: The Human Serviette [Eric Tullis]
So far, I’ve had two cab drivers tell me that if it weren’t for their kindness, I’d be spending hours trying to hail a taxi. Apparently, being a black guy in Austin has its limitations and even I, a non-threatening African-American-out-of-towner, wasn’t immune to the cabbie-cold-shoulder. But gimme a break! There’s plenty of undesirables in […]
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SXSW10 Day 2: Grandmothers and Cooties [Eric Tullis]
My official SXSW initiation came with having a stranger find and return my Blackberry to me after picking it up it in the middle of 4th Street, severely injuring my big-toe after tripping over a pole-stump and later holding a brief conversation with Madlib about his two-inch wide, gold, arm-bands that he inherited from his […]