Rap Is Art. So Why Do Some Academics Still Feel as if They Have to Defend It?
Jessica Pabón-Colón, an assistant professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, does not want the events of last week to fade from memory. As a hip-hop scholar and a woman of color, and as an employee at the university, she feels that Gerald Benjamin’s comments last Tuesday are indicative of the academy’s lasting problems with the genre. When asked about the short-lived rap career of Antonio Delgado, the Democratic congressional candidate for New York’s 19th district, Benjamin said rap was not “real music” and did not represent the values of rural New York. Benjamin, who is…
How Future Rewrote Rap in His Own Image
It isn’t hyperbole to claim that the rapper is one of the 2010s’ most essential artists. Narcotized, addled, and sometimes tender, Future has spent the past decade making whatever music he wants: trap ballads, twerk anthems, petty kiss-offs, trippy blues. His superpower is his ability to smear emotional states into odd collages, his protean voice ascending to the peaks of exuberance or plunging to the depths of misery. In a single moment, a Future song can pivot into the sublime, altering what came before it and everything after. Future is chaos unleashed and distilled. Though he’s got fewer Grammys than…
The Big Read – Juice Wrld: “The rap game is so motherfucking soft now”
He went from unknown Illinois teen to Billboard-topping emo-rap icon in under a year, and his introspective, genre-mashing music draws on both Nirvana and Migos, offering up admirably honest rhymes about mental health, drugs and heartbreak. 20-year-old Juice WRLD, a self-proclaimed “old soul”, tells Jordan Bassett about his love of mid-noughties emo, his relationship with XXXTentacion, getting sued by Sting and disastrous shows with Nicki Minaj. PHOTOS: Andy Ford. Juice WRLD’s NME Big Read shoot is a family affair. In the plush basement of a central London hotel, his mum sitting a few feet away, tucking into a steak, the…
