As we continue to celebrate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, here’s how A Tribe Called Quest helped me appreciate one of the most important aspects of the genre. As a Queens native, my 15-year-old self was ...

Hip-hop turned 50 last year. During that half-century, the technology used to create this globally influential sound has continually moved forward. However, there's one tool that has remained ...

Lizzo called out music sampling laws as racially biased during a Million Dollaz Worth of Game interview and accused the system of criminalizing Hip-Hop’s roots. Lizzo called out music sampling laws ...

Albums like To Pimp a Butterfly and 1999 blend jazz harmonies with sharp lyricism, proving the genre’s deep connection. Hip-hop may keep evolving, but funk and jazz remain its heartbeat, fueling its ...

Having previously charted hip-hop artists by their vocabularies (and compared those vocabularies to Shakespeare and Moby Dick), Matt Daniels is back with another project that looks to recontextualize ...

Any conversation regarding the historical context of rap music will almost certainly rely heavily on the near ritualistic practice of sampling, essentially using older songs as the basis as the basis ...

PBS’s docuseries Soundbreaking recently dug into the history of Hip-Hop sampling with Chuck D, Q-Tip, RZA and more. In the sixth episode of their Soundbreaking series, PBS provides a well thought out ...

Sometimes you hear a new hip-hop song and think, “I know this song — I’ve heard these sounds before.” You’re probably right, because hip-hop music is built on sampling, the process of using existing ...

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, “Bizarre Ride,” appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.] For four decades, one of hip-hop's biggest external ...