Magnetic Tape & Vinyl

The first time I heard the name Kanye West I was building with my boy Rashawn.  He had just got come from laying down a verse for his people’s from Chicago, Grav.   It was a posse cut, six deep  of a Chicago-NY exchange, that as far as I’m concerned goes down as one of [...]

 
It’s kind of wild to think of the time when Motown was putting out militant black rappers.  Not just any militant black rapper either.  A spitting image for Malcolm X himself.  When was that again?  Well around 1988 to be precise.  
I think I first heard “No Prisoners” on a Lord Finesse mixtape.  Finesse loved [...]

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was a bit of an enigma of the jazz scene.  In many ways he was the jazz equivalent to Ray Charles, and not just because he was blind, but because of the way he was able to fuse genres to create his own sound.  While usually thought of in a hard-bop context [...]