Fake For Real

Assessing a musical genre on moral criteria is sad; it is simplistic and narrow-minded. Most often, it means setting useless boundaries, spoiling one's pleasure, and, basically, missing the point. However, it is legitimate. Among so many other things, hip-hop is rich with lyrics, images and...

By the year 2000, the indie backpacker hip-hop style had spread over almost all places in the United States, except maybe its Southern parts. Essentially, the most popular form of hip-hop, there, was its complete opposite: it was dirty, sexual, gangsta, and aimed at clubs. It had so few to do with...

If we need to select a symbol for retro-futurism – this trend consisting in coming back to the past, in order to reinvent the future – this needs to be Edan Portnoy. With his first album, the underground classic Primitive Plus, the rapper, producer and DJ created an improbable musical subgenre: old...

We had almost lost sight of Sage Francis. And for a good reason: for four years, he hadn't released any record. He seemed to have stopped rapping, managing his Strange Famous label, or travelling to Africa. Moreover, his previous album, Li(f)e (2010), a collaboration with indie rockers, had not...

The CunninLynguists have been some of these few guys, more or less affiliated to the indie rap movement of the early 2000's, who managed to make it and find a place in the bigger rap community. Those rappers from Kentucky, however, were not too different from their peers; they had followed more or...