This Labor Day weekend might offer the last chance for local hip-hop artists to complain that they never hear their music on mainstream radio. Starting next weekend, Sunday, Sep. 13, WQOK-FM 97.5 FM will air its weekly “919 Radio” show in an effort to “play the best in local talent.” The show will return after […]
Eric Tullis
Bio: Eric Tullis lives in Chapel Hill, where he writes about music and basketball.Twitter: http://twitter.com/erictullis
Posted inMusic
Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show a decade later, or Triangle hip-hop’s last major-label dance
If U Black Niggas Network, the satirical television station at the center of the 2005 Atlantic Records debut by Durham’s Little Brother, had been a real cable network, the tone of the broadcast would have been much different on September 13, 2005, the day The Minstrel Show arrived in stores. It would have been as […]
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Festival update: The Art of Cool Festival announces (some) 2016 headliners, plus Hopscotch day parties
During the Sunday morning VIP brunch finale of April’s Art of Cool Music Fest in Durham, Art of Cool Project board member Susan Scott announced the dates for next year’s festival: May 6–8. Technically, the festival hadn’t even ended, but its organizers had already moved on to the next one. On Monday, AOCFEST got another […]
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DURM Hip Hop Summit & K97.5: Why can’t local rap and radio get it together?
DURM Hip Hop Summit with Deniro Farrar, G. Yamazawa, Danny Blaze & more Friday, Aug. 14–Saturday, Aug. 15 Various Venues, Downtown Durham www.durmhiphopsummit.com Local hip-hop radio could learn a lot from the shopping mall. In recent months, The Streets at Southpoint, the sprawling 1.3-million-square-foot emporium a dozen miles from downtown Durham, has incorporated local, non-chain […]
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Raleigh rapper King Mez talks his work on Dr. Dre’s Compton
Morris Wayne Ricks II, better known as King Mez, remembers the first time he used his own money to buy an album. He was 9 years old. The record was Dr. Dre’s Chronic 2001. It was 1999. Last week, the West Coast rap icon finally issued that album’s long-awaited follow-up, Compton: A Soundtrack By Dr. […]
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Kaze’s “Hillmatic” will celebrate Chapel Hill music that’s not indie rock
Veteran Chapel Hill emcee and My Carolina Today entertainment contributor KAZE announced “Hillmatic,” a mini-festival set for Saturday, Aug. 22, at Local 506, on Wednesday. The one-night event sports the tagline “Celebrating Chapel Hill Hip Hop Culture” and will feature performances by some of the Tar Heel town’s current hip-hop torch carriers, such as J […]
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Live: Jill Scott owns up to her womanhood in Durham
Jill Scott Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham Thursday, July 30, 2015 43 years seems like a decent time period in which to judge whether you have become or are still on your journey to becoming the person you want to be—to becoming your own hero, an exemplar of your species. But as Jill Scott pointed […]
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Durm Hip Hop Summit finally releases festival lineup with Deniro Farrar
The cart must come before the horse when it comes to selling tickets to Triangle music festivals, meaning that festival organizers expect for supporters to buy into their lineups before knowing who, exactly, even fills those lineups. Hopscotch did it. Moog has done it. And this year, Durm Hip Hop Summit went for the stunt, […]
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King Mez lands several spots on Dr. Dre’s new album, Compton: A Soundtrack by Dr. Dre
We already knew that Raleigh’s King Mez had packed his bags, left the Triangle and settled on the West Coast, where, almost immediately, he began working on something huge with legendary producer Dr. Dre. We had no idea that the fruits of that labor would be this monumental. On Saturday afternoon, during Dr. Dre’s Beats […]
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Skyblew’s Race For Your Life, SkyBlew
The Chapel Hill rapper SkyBlew seems to have grown out of the phase in which he sported his Dwayne Wayne-style flip-up glasses. But on his new album, Race For Your Life, SkyBlew, he still reflects the ideals of the A Different World television star, known for those specs and his black exceptionalism balance of book […]