Word: rappers
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...Rapper Vanilla Ice is touring with his new thrash-metal album, Swallow This...
Some people watch the musical Annie and see a moppet belting out show tunes. Brooklyn-born rapper JAY-Z, whose latest release debuted last week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, saw something altogether grittier. "I watched the movie and was mesmerized," he says, referring to the scene in which the orphans sing Hard Knock Life. "They're too strong to let life bring them down. That's the ghetto right there." Inspired, Jay-Z sampled the song on his new album's title track, Hard Knock Life. Needless to say, the tune's original author was somewhat...
...first time Williams, 26, has moved an audience to tears. The son of a pastor and a teacher, he began acting in a third-grade production of Julius Caesar and knew he had found his calling. Two years later, he wrote his first poem, influenced by early "big word" rapper T La Rock. But it wasn't until grad school that he attempted to meld his dramatic training with spoken-word performances. Kicking around the improv poetry circuit in Manhattan, he met Levin and landed the main role in Levin's loosely scripted, no-budget feature about victims of unjust...
Working with jazzy back beats and the smooth abstract poetics of rapper Q-Tip, The Love Movement offers a few of the classic Tribe head bobbers, but the majority of the album tends to be devoted to relaxed raps about love. Busta Rhymes joins in on "Steppin' It Up," but the synergy of past ventures doesn't quite reappear, and the song, as do many aspects of the album, sounds halting and deliberate. Q-Tip waxes an eloquent soliloquy in "The Love" about love in all forms, but for every one of these slick arrangements, there is a lame...
...music isn't subtle: the volume on each song, just as in This Is Spinal Tap, is usually turned up to 11, and too many of the songs are simply numbing sonic assaults. But a few tracks grind along successfully, most notably Children of the Korn, in which rapper Ice Cube makes an engaging appearance. And the band's goofy audacity and Zeitgeist-savvy sense of humor are, at points, captivating. It's hard to completely dislike a CD that makes references to both the Waco disaster and Austin Powers' chest hair...