Yesterday's class session showcased a handful of arguments regarding hip-hop and the "direction" it's heading in. One statement in particular was pretty adamant that rap music was not all there was to hip-hop, and that the culture of hip-hop was far bigger than the music; big enough for the other aspects to exist on their own, and that any consideration that could be made about them could be made independently of rap music.

After many frustrated attempts at trying to clarify her statements, one girl finally just said:

"Why can't we talk about hip-hop without having to refer to the…

I've been enrolled in a hip-hop class for December intersession here at the University of Oklahoma for almost the last three weeks (the class is over this Friday), and one of our tasks was to start a blog documenting at least nine entries that pertained to hip-hop in some way. The blog could literally be about anything we wanted it to be about, so long as it tied back to hip-hop in some fashion, and had to be a minimum of 300 words.

I have, of course, taken things a slight step further, and have used this assignment as a…

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This will be my first review as PopMatters' newest R&B specialist. It's what they consider a "high priority" release, so I imagine they'll be getting this published within the next week. It's been a weak-sauce year in R&B, though, so I'm being allowed to steer clear away from the genre for awhile. Upcoming albums I have in the pipelines are by country artists Heidi Newfield and Jessica Simpson (?!); Roman electronic connoisseur Jacopo Carreras; Israeli surf rockers Boom Pam; singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell; and a bunch of indie rock cats who call themselves Ten Kens. I'll…

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Disclaimer: This month’s free association space is going to be filled with an excess of extraneous drivel that you may or may not be interested in, so if you’re just here for the usual goods, use the on your tidy browser and search “JULY” so you can skip past the ensuing wall of text.

For those of you who have already made the intrinsic observation that this month’s header image is not really all that different from last month, I firstly have to point out that I’m terrible at Photoshop. Photo-editing is a trade I picked up solely to…

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In trying to stay honest with myself, I have to admit that I’ve been operating on minimal activity mode these last few weeks since the semester let out. I’m still currently bumming around in-between part-timers, so most of my time is spent eating, intermittently working out, playing Mario Kart Wii or Super Smash Bros.: Brawl, and cruising the web. This wouldn’t be completely annoying if it weren’t for the fact that – especially for the last couple of weeks – I haven’t really been reading or researching anything particularly constructive online, either.

Beforehand, I used to dedicate a…

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I’m back in Dallas for a few more days, but I’m think I’m just going to use this intro space to free-associate with some segments of pop culture I’ve been recently exposed to; those of you interested in the albums portion of this journal should feel free to skip past this. Otherwise, here goes:

As my massive legion of readers all know, my fallout with American Idol is a well-documented event in contemporary American history. Simply put, it was the show’s gradual nosedive into vocal mediocrity with each passing season that finally drove me to call it quits on…

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I’ve been struggling with my writing a lot lately, especially now since I’ve effectively decided to delay my ’07 year-end list ‘til after this semester’s finals are all said and done. Fortunately, positive feedback regarding some of my work has slowly been trickling in these last few weeks from people I would have never thought would have any vested interest in this sort of thing, so that is encouraging in the very least. Funny how people can get bored enough on Facebook to sift through someone else’s imported notes.

Anyway, I actually had impressions and a header image made…

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…yeah. Still no year-end list. I suck. But here’s some cool stuff to look forward to!

Oh, yeah. Happy Valentine's Day. I GUESS.

♫ FEBRUARY

5 February
1. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark
2. Sheryl Crow – Detours
3. Foxy Brown – Brooklyn’s Don Diva
4. Jack Johnson – Sleep Through the Static
5. Lenny Kravitz – It’s Time for a Love Revolution
6. k.d. lang – Watershed

[Up until this point I’ve hated everything Hot Chip has put out, but I was really shocked at how disarmed and enamored I was when their lead-off single, ‘Ready…

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Happy New Year, beautiful babies! I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable time off for the holidays. For me personally it was a much-needed mental and spiritual hiatus that I mostly used piddling around, getting tore up, and – most importantly – dragging myself out of educational limbo in order to blueprint the next 12 months of my life.

Additionally, much to the chagrin of some of you disbelievers out there, 2007 turned out to be an remarkably wonderful year in music. I don’t blame some of you for thinking otherwise, however, since none of you had anyone…

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This month features the most secured purchases I’ve had in quite some time this year. It’s slightly on the inconvenient side in the fact that rent is due at the end of the week; not to mention that my roommates and I dropped some mad cash-money-dollaz on our annual Halloween bash this past weekend. Conversely, it’s a wonderful thing in that quasi-Buddhist faith is guiding my confidence in three releases in particular by Alicia Keys, Seal and Kylie Minogue. I’m so hell-bent on blindly picking up all three that I had to coin-flip for this month’s header graphic. It…