Hip-hop producers 9th Wonder and E. Jones are sitting behind the soundboard inside one of the rooms at N.C. Central’s old biology building, now home to a recording studio. The studio is part of the school’s three-year-old Hip-Hop Initiative, a program that teaches hip-hop history and industry to interested students. 9th Wonder co-founded the program […]
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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UNC point guard Quentin Thomas recording with 9th Wonder
Former UNC-Chapel Hill Tar Heels backup point guard Quentin Thomas has exchanged the basketball for a microphone. Thomaswho played at UNC for four years, won an NCAA championship his freshman year, and averaged 15 minutes per contest as a senior last yearhas recently been working with local producer 9th Wonder, the former Little Brother who’s […]
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Rapper Big Pooh & DJ Warrior’s Rapper’s Delight
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. The most obnoxious form in hip-hop today is the mixtape: Every great verse or beat comes matched with a scrap of nothing, a ridiculous contribution by a guest you don’t know, a beat by a producer who should be working […]
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Little Brother’s …And Justus for All
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. ⇒ Read our interview with Phonte Coleman and DJ Flash Little BrotherPhonte Coleman and Rapper Big Poohhave a thing with food: In 2006, after seeing Little Brother open for MF Doom at New York’s Nokia Theater, The Village Voice‘s former […]
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Zo! and Tigallo’s Zo! and Tigallo Love the ’80s
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. During a recent trip to visit my father, he shared with me something quite profound. “These days, I’m realizing that the true measure of happiness is the ability to laugh at yourself,” he said. While I doubt that Phonte Coleman […]
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Purple St. James (Yahzarah)’s The Prelude
No one knew what the hell to make of Yahzarah’s video for “Wishing,” a cut from her 2003 LP, Blackstar. In dreadlock pigtails, the Durham-bred singer played the part of a love-struck, candlelight-love-letter-writing girlfriend of a naval officer at sea. Suddenly, the heralded ebony soul-seducer with the coffee-shop image was employing the cheap ethos of […]
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KAZE’s Block 2the Basement
Several years ago, the backpacker/ underground hip-hop crowd and the hardcore/ thugged-out street crowd occupied entirely different spaces on the hip-hop landscape. Time passed. Most folks got over silly allegiances, and now these same folksall grown up now and more threatened by the approach of adulthood than musical strataabandoned the abstractions of backpacker rap and […]
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Chaundon
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. If the Justus League ever holds auditions for the newest addition to its hip-hop crew, the winner should make someone in the League swear that his record will be out within a year. Otherwise, said winner will be stuck with […]
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9th Wonder has some damn nerve!
Or at least that’s what I said to myself midday last Wednesday as I was standing in the parking lot of the Cat’s Cradle, mingling with some of the artists who would later take the stage to support 9th’s just-released sophomore album Dream Merchant Vol. 2. He was passing out freshly printed T-shirts for the […]
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Detroit Dilla
Only days after hip-hop’s beloved auteur and beat-charmer James “Jay Dee aka J Dilla” Yancey died of complications from lupus, hip-hop Web sites began selling T-shirts with a new motto: “J Dilla Changed My Life.” I own one. It’s not rare to find someone donning a T-shirt that symbolizes their allegiance to a deceased musician, […]