After Pop Smoke’s tragic death in 2020, many wondered what would become of New York drill, and many naysayers claimed it died with him. Over the next year, several booming voices would knock at that door, but the man who broke it down was one who raps in whispers. 27-year-old Queens rapper Shawny Binladen’s reimagination of drill music opened up …
‘From Staircase to Stage’: Raekwon on growing up in N.Y. and the Wu-Tang Clan
To hear the broadcast version of this interview, use the audio player below. “Park Hill was a pretty nice environment — the buildings were very clean and they had doormen, intercoms in order to get in the building,” recalls Raekwon, the legendary rapper best known as a core member of the canonical Wu-Tang Clan, of some early memories. In a …
Go | Todd Haynes’ ‘The Velvet Underground’ documentary @ Sun-Ray Cinema
The revered avant-garde rockers finally get the rock-doc treatment
You don’t have to be a mystic, or even religious, to understand that coincidences don’t really exist. Indeed, any student of rock n’ roll knows that the history of the canon is littered with chance encounters and ripe scenes made up of unusually heterogeneous mixtures of characters. In 1957, a 15-year-old Paul McCartney paid threepence to watch a popular Liverpool …