Ethan Hein's Blog

If I had to pick a single track to explain to an alien or time traveler what hip-hop is and why it’s so awesome, I think I’d pick “Nas Is Like.” Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what makes this track for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web [...]

There’s a commercial on TV right now featuring a bunch of CGI hamsters that reacquainted me with this Black Sheep classic. I knew the song better as the one that goes, “You can get with this or you can get with that.” Thank god for Google, otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about anything. This is [...]

Hip-hop at its best is about truth-telling. It doesn’t get any realer than “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth.

MJ’s death still makes me sad. It was so untimely, and so preventable, and it seems like he might have been on the cusp of a genuine creative reawakening. The life leading up to the end is as sad a story as I can think of. And the music keeps sounding better and better with [...]

While I was researching the Spoonie G meme, I noticed that Brand Nubian uses a lot of remarkably creative samples. It inspired me to do a sample map of their first album, One For All. Click to see it bigger. Hear all the tracks sampled on One For All, via Kevin Nottingham’s awesome blog.