...It turned into a deep meditation on race. It pisses the black girls off because I start with the white girl verset—they're like 'Fuck you! How can you stand up for those bitches!' I'm like, 'I'm not—I'm just saying it as it is.' Then the second verse is about the black girls that don't fit in. Doing the kind of music I do, I always meet the one black girl in the room who's into, like, the Cure and Atmosphere; she'll be really cute, and all the thug guys at her school wish she listened to Tupac. The black girls that act white are still dark-skinned white girls, because they're white girls on the inside, and vice versa. That's America.

randomWalks listens to 'Dark Skinned White Girls': Murs - Murray's Revenge - MusicRemedy.com.

Mark Romanek directs music videos. His website is a great example of the web providing supplementary and explanatory material to more traditional forms of media. His music videos are all online in quicktime and you can read original treatments and see on set photographs. Romanek directed the video for Jay-Z’s 99 Problems this year and the video for Johnny Cash covering NIN’s Hurt in 2003. These are both great videos, and they complement each other perfectly. They are both by quintessentially American artists who work in quintessentially American forms, but their music could not be more different. Both videos offer recapitulations of the artists path and the choices they have made. The video for Hurt suggests that Cash wouldn’t change a thing, while the video for 99 Problems suggests how easily things could have ended differently for Jay-Z. And they both illustrate what music videos can do best: provide an alternate narration for a song, expose meanings you hadn’t considered before, evoke new resonances.

On Fridays and weekends, he performs on his wheels of steel: two turntables, speakers and a fader/mixer, all powered with a portable battery. The 27-year-old turntablist earns his living scratching and mixing funky beats here on the boardwalk.

"I got some hip hop, old school, new school, some drum and bass, acid jazz, dirty disco, old school classics," Hymn says. "There are no rules. It's just getting creative and funky."

“In A World Gone Mad…" is a new anti-war song from the Beastie Boys available for free download.

Hammer’s treachery by Anil Dash.

Until a moment ago, The Roots and Michael Chabon had but a tenuous connection in the map of my head.

San Jose Mercury News: Gay hip-hop innovators refute common stereotypes by Davey D.

We could go on and on naming gay artists who have made an impact on hip-hop. Gays have always been down with hip-hop. The question is: Do we accept our gay brothers and sistas?

These men live privileged 21st-century gay lives, complete with live-in boyfriends and jaunts to Black Gay Pride weekend in Washington, D.C. They enjoy all the benefits of gay liberation while colluding in the popularization of primitive ideas about gay people. They don't set out to make this music, but neither do they object to it in any way.