Multi-platinum rapper, celebrated for raw storytelling, was first artist to top US charts with first five albums
DMX, the New York rapper whose gruff tone electrified the US music scene in the late 1990s, has died aged 50.
The star, whose real name was Earl Simmons, was hospitalised after a heart attack on 2 April, and had been placed in a critical care unit at White Plains hospital, New York. His family had organised a prayer vigil outside, which took place on Monday.
Continue reading...From the Godfathers of Arabic rap to the father of Ethio-jazz, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan guides a tour through global music’s greatest
This week I wrote about the glaring lack of international inclusivity in the Grammys’ newly redubbed global music (formerly world music) category.
In the category’s 38-year history, almost 80% of African nations have never had an artist nominated; no Middle Eastern or eastern European musician has ever won; every winner in the past eight years has been a repeat winner; and nearly two-thirds of the nominations have come from just six countries (the US, the UK, Brazil, Mali, South Africa, India). The situation shows little signs of improving.
Continue reading...The rapper’s arrest shows Spain has a problem with freedom of ideology. But people shouldn’t be scared to write songs that stand up to power
The arrest of Pablo Hasél this month, a Spanish rapper – like me – who is accused of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his lyrics, didn’t surprise me. When I was 18, I wrote a song about the Spanish king, the police arrested me and I was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. The day they came to take me to prison, I fled to Belgium and have been here ever since, despite the best efforts of Spain to have me extradited. It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges.
Related: Angry words: rapper's jailing exposes Spain's free speech faultlines
Continue reading...She has scored films, played with rappers, starred in a TV comedy, and performed for the dying. As the classical sensation releases three new works, she talks about the shock of playing arenas – and making the leap into opera
When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.
Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.
Continue reading...In the 1980s, his Harlem store attracted famous athletes and musicians. Then the luxury brands got him shut down. Now, at 76, he’s more successful than ever – and still on his own terms
It was a mentor on the gambling circuit in Harlem, New York, who gave Daniel Day the moniker that would make him famous. Day was just 13, but had revealed himself to be not only a better craps player than his guide, who was the original Dapper Dan, but also a better dresser. So it came to be that Day was christened “the new Dapper Dan”.
It wouldn’t be until decades later that Day would truly make his name. Dapper Dan’s Boutique, the legendary Harlem couturier he opened in 1982, kitted out local gamblers and gangsters, then later hip-hop stars and athletes such as Mike Tyson, Bobby Brown and Salt-N-Pepa. His custom pieces repurposed logos from the fashion houses that had overlooked black clientele. A pioneer in luxury streetwear, Day screenprinted the monograms of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, MCM and Fendi on to premium leathers to create silhouettes synonymous with early hip-hop style: tracksuits, bomber jackets, baseball and kufi caps. In the process he became a pariah of the fashion industry – and to this day, now aged 76, still one of its great influencers.
Continue reading...With multi-platinum No 1 albums including topics such as suicide and the psychology of paedophiles, the Congolese-Belgian MC has carved his own lane with total determination
‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”
This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.
Continue reading...With easy flow, hard barbs and a magnetic persona, the rapper casts herself as the successor to hip-hop’s old-school heroes
On YouTube, you can still see one of Megan Thee Stallion’s early appearances at a 2016 rap cypher in Houston. It’s a very telling performance. Twenty-one years old and still an unknown student (“Support the artists,” pleads the accompanying text, “this is only the beginning of their journey”) she’s vastly outnumbered by male counterparts who don’t seem to be taking her terribly seriously. It could be that they’re laughing and high-fiving while she performs because they’re incredulous at her skills, but it doesn’t really look that way. Yet she seems impossibly confident and self-possessed, ending her performance with the salacious, tongue-out taunt of “ahhh” that has since become her trademark. It isn’t just the benefit of hindsight that makes her seem the artist most likely to.
Continue reading...Officer Joseph Mensah was found to have acted in self-defence in two of the shootings, with another currently under review
Jay-Z’s social justice initiative Team Roc has called for a Wisconsin police officer to be fired and prosecuted, after he shot and killed three people while on duty.
Joseph Mensah, of Milwaukee suburb Wauwatosa, killed Alvin Cole, Antonio Gonzales and Jay Anderson in three separate incidents between 2015 and 2020. He is under review for the most recent killing, of Cole, but the earlier two were deemed self-defence and he did not face charges.
Continue reading...This new track sees Kanye at his very best, corralling his anger with masterful focus into an apocalyptic vision of America
America, divided along racial and political lines and led by its own Herod, faces an invisible plague and a public reckoning against its history of violence. It’s against this Biblical backdrop that Kanye West imagines the next apocalyptic event, in one of his most focused and arresting tracks for years.
Wash Us in the Blood sees the rapper call for a blood rain to deliver black America from evil. We’re at the point, perhaps, where normal water won’t wash; an emergency where we need something stronger. That sense of alarm is amplified by the two-note siren motif, a flattened-out version of the feedback sound on The Life of Pablo’s Feedback or Yeezus’s Send It Up, another of his warnings that puts the listener on alert. It gets your blood up.
Continue reading...While the genre is hugely popular in the country and sells in vast numbers, the French music industry and politicians have tried to downplay its success
Dave’s Mercury prize-winning debut album, Psychodrama, was the biggest-selling British rap album in the UK in 2019, certified gold for selling more than 100,000 units. Those numbers wouldn’t even have landed him in the top 10 biggest rap albums in France last year, where artists from greater Paris sell more rap albums than acts from any other city. But, while Dave won album of the year at this year’s Brit awards, and gave a nationally televised performance decrying the prime minister as racist, at last month’s Victoires de la Musique – France’s equivalent of the Brits – none of France’s black or Arab rappers were nominated in an album, artist or song category.
Days after the ceremony, French music industry body SNEP, which is responsible for collating the charts, distributing royalty payments and more, declared rap music an “overexposed phenomenon” in their 2019 market report. It argued that “fan support for urban music must not eclipse the performances of other musical genres” – an explicit call for less promotion and celebration of the most successful French popular music movement of all time.
Continue reading...In Listener’s Digest, our writers help you explore the work of great pop musicians. As fans eagerly await the album known as R9, here’s a guide to pop superstar Rihanna
Rated R (2009)
Continue reading...The queen of pop gets intimate, Taylor Swift feels the sunshine and Stormzy takes on the world … plus, classical celebrations begin for Beethoven’s 250th
Continue reading...Mina La Voilée is a female rapper from Parcelles, Dakar, who is breaking taboos by rapping about women's rights. As a woman who chooses to wear a veil, she explains how criticism from industry professionals who told her "the veil and hip hop don't flow together" drove her to succeed, and inspired her to tackle other controversial societal issues in her lyrics such as child marriage, rape and infanticide. She performs both as a solo artist and as part of an all-female rap movement, Genji Hip Hop, who use their music to fight cultural stereotypes and gender violence
Continue reading...All-female Genji Hip Hop collective use rhymes and art to fight cultural stereotypes and gender violence
Aminata Gaye picks up a grey scarf and stretches it into a T shape. She ducks under the fabric, wraps it around her neck and crisscrosses it over the crown of her head.
It is almost dusk outside, but in this windowless room there is no indication of time as Gaye gets dressed for a concert starting at 9pm. Her veil in position, the 27-year-old old is transformed into Mina la voilée (Mina the veiled one), her stage name as a rapper in Dakar, Senegal.
Continue reading...From uptempo romance to feelgood dance, politically spicy rap and crowdpleasing pop, the biggest tracks across Africa last year went big on cross-continental appeal
Continue reading...The rapper and singer reached millions by filling a void in hip-hop: tackling depression, addiction and heartbreak in anthems trembling with trauma
Jarad Higgins’ career was a corrective. Growing up, the rapper and singer best known as Juice WRLD listened to hip-hop like everyone else in his hometown of Homewood, Illinois (albeit behind his religious mother’s back). Though the music thrilled him, as a depression-prone teenager, he couldn’t connect to the lyrics about luxury, fast cars and mansions. So when Higgins started recording demos on his iPhone while still in high school, his aim was to fill that void. His songs, he decided, would be impassioned blood-lettings full of frankness and vulnerability that listeners battling similar emotional storms might be able to find comfort in. “Everybody’s got pain,” he said when I interviewed him for the Guardian earlier this year. “Depression, addiction, heartbreak: these are human characteristics.”
Higgins released two albums, two mixtapes and multiple EPs that interrogated those characteristics before his death from a reported seizure in Chicago this weekend. In 2017, the breakout anthems All Girls Are the Same and the Sting-sampling Lucid Dreams propelled him to the pinnacle of emo-rap, a sub-genre he helped tailor into one of the decade’s defining new sounds. Born on SoundCloud, it infused hip-hop with 00s rock heartache: two genres that Higgins, who grew up idolising Kurt Cobain as much as Kanye West, knew intimately. He found the angst he couldn’t see in rap in bands such as Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco: Higgins was perfectly placed to join the likes of Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert in making emo-rap infamous.
Continue reading...The Chicago rapper was taken ill at the city’s Midway airport on Sunday morning local time
The Chicago rapper Juice WRLD has died age 21, Illinois’ Cook County medical examiner’s office has confirmed.
After landing at Chicago’s Midway airport on Sunday morning local time, the musician, real name Jarad Anthony Higgins, suffered a seizure and began bleeding from the mouth, TMZ reports.
Continue reading...R&B star announces numerous African pop and rap stars on album out Friday, as well as Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams and daughter Blue Ivy
Beyoncé has outlined details for her 14-track new album to accompany The Lion King remake, entitled The Lion King: The Gift, to be released on Friday. The album features four new solo songs alongside collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Childish Gambino, Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy and more. It is separate from the soundtrack to The Lion King, though the Beyoncé song Spirit appears on both. The singer voices the character Nala in the new 3D-animated version of the 1994 Disney classic.
Related: The Lion King review – deepfake copycat ain't so grrreat
Continue reading...Ten years ago, electronic music in Iran was suppressed by the government. But now these strange, often punishing sounds are finding their way into the world
Ten years ago Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows About Persian Cats followed a young Iranian songwriting duo’s efforts to form a band with other underground musicians in Iran. It presented a country in which music deemed politically or culturally incendiary was prohibited, since artists hoping to perform or distribute their work had to acquire permission from the Iranian ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, or risk arrest.
Western journalists seized upon a narrative of sensitive outlaws holed up in underground studios, but today a new story is emerging: of a visionary music community now able to openly share its strange creations. Increasingly, Iran is becoming recognised as a hub for some of the world’s most vital, forward-thinking experimental music.
Continue reading...The Atlanta-based rapper 21 Savage did not talk about his British citizenship before because he didn’t want to get deported.
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