Worldcrunch
Led by young artists like Varsha and Sherin, Christian rap in India is emerging as a powerful genre used both for worship and protest. Gospel hip-hop, as it is also called, is gaining traction through social media and carving its own space in India’s spiritual and musical landscape.
Censorship in Russia has increased rapidly over the last couple of decades, especially since their invasion of Ukraine. Russian rap, which has often challenged the politics and society of Russia, has become even more censored than before, even causing some rappers to emigrate.
Funk is a music genre that originated in Rio and is inspired by social consciousness. Women have been overlooked in the genre, but a new generation of women funk artists are changing that.
Popularized by raucous music videos, sometimes considered quasi pornographic, this phenomenon has its origins in the ancestral Afro-descendant dances and advocates the liberation of the body.
With edgy lyrics and an attitude that’s too legit to quit, rapper Houda Abouz — aka Khtek — is pushing against the grain and gaining a substantial following.
CHENNAI — Twenty-six-year-old Arivu’s small room, on the fourth-floor terrace of an apartment in suburban Chennai, is as lively as his music. It is in this room that Arivu shot his now iconic rap song “Sanda seivom”, which effortlessly rips the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens apart. Pictures of Ambedkar and Buddha are looking over him and an ektara (the instrument) standing tall. “It was a gift from the Tata Institute for Social Sciences when I recently visited them,” Arivu says. “I intend to learn to play it and even use it in my rap.” A single […]
-Essay- MUNICH — Artists are now using anti-Semitism and Islamism to shock, and that’s not surprising. But if both listeners and rappers started to finally take music seriously, this could change. Since Germany’s top music prize, the Echo awards, honored the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang, there has been a misunderstanding that both sides of […]
SpongeBOZZ’s new album quickly shot up the German hip-hop charts, but his irreverence is telling, part of a growing trend to treat World War II as distant history.
BUENOS AIRES — Brian Molina and Maximiliano Fernández, two of Argentina’s emerging rap stars, met in jail. Molina was 11 years old when he wrote his first song. It was May 2005, and he was living at the Borchez de Otamendi home for minors in Buenos Aires. When he performed his song for friends, teachers […]
A South American writer rethinks the soundtrack of his teenage revolution, concluding that his aversion to culturally significant genres was a youthful indiscretion that deprived him of musical riches.
It’s Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, so our song of the day is this impressive “Pancake Rap” by Mac Lethal.
This clip of Dominic West, a.k.a. Jimmy McNulty from the series The Wire, rapping last week with emcees Sinead, Bugsey and Jah Digga from Nottingham, UK., is priceless.
Your weekly shot of what the Arab world is saying, hearing and sharing.
CULLY – He is majestic. The concert has just ended, and the audience is on fire. Opening his long thin arms, he takes a bow; in his checked shirt, he has the body of a Maasai warrior. The Cully Jazz Festival audience is shell-shocked by the performance they have just witnessed – totally under the […]