This may be looking up for the state of hip hop, even if it happened almost a year ago.  Back in Dec of 2008, Chingy, the awful excuse for a rapper that brought you such classics as Right Thurr (below), was dropped from his label.  Why?  Well he had a little tiff with his partner, Ludacris.
It may sound ridiculous, but I have to say I’m kind of happy about this developed.  If you ignore the obvious schadenfreude in a post like this, I think the overall sentiment is that removing …

It’s not often that we publish posts on humour-related topics (unless you count Twice’s recent musings on Vanilla Ice and Shaq), but this update from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish reminded me of my favourite Youtube video of all time, “Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing.”  Check it out:

Fax us your email address now! Priceless. Anyways, turns out Gabe and Max are launching their own online talkshow. Check out episode 1, which features them in similar, but also slightly altered roles:

This isn’t the first or the last time we’ve posted about Lin-Man (a.k.a. Lin-Manuel Miranda).  This guy is both a disgustingly talented freestyler and a Tony-award winning actor.  Hell, this guy was even on House.
He was invited to perform at the first-ever White House Poetry Jam and absolutely killed the spot.  You can see President Obama loving every minute of the performance.  And what was this performance?  A rap about Alexander Hamilton.
Informed, talented, and dope.  Lin-Manuel in a nutshell.

Sometimes, hip hop can be a powerful educational tool.  And I’m not just talking about teaching some kids the alphabet or with some kids hip hop.  I mean actually directly incorporating hip hop into the educational curriculum. 
That’s what Nikki Giovanni did.  This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Giovaani’s work, either.  We did one of our earliest posts about her, in fact, and we’re still proud of everything she’s accomplished.
Now, Giovanni’s using hip hop to teach kids about poetry.  This is from the NPR piece about her:
Giovanni’s new book, …

This is actually an entertaining rant from comedian Sean Patton.  As someone who probably verges on music snobbery from time to time (I have been known to hate from time to time), I can definitely appreciate how annoying it can be to other people.
Check it out.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard about Kanye’s latest little annoyance, but I’ll quickly fill you in.  He and Spike Jonze (yes, the Spike Jonze of Where the Wild Things Are fame) were making a short film together.  Kanye, apparently thinking the video was finished, leaked it on his blog. 
It wasn’t up for too long or anything, but long enough that Jonze felt the need to issue a statement.  More importantly, Jonze got to do something many people have been dreaming about for a long time.

Behind the Scenes With …

Since we here at 4080Records seem to love documentaries oh so very much, I thought I’d keep going with the trend.
Get ready to spend 49 minutes with Mos Def in Japan.

For all you Canadian readers (and hopefully even those of you outside of Canada) CBC Radio 2 is running a contest called the “Great Canadian Song Quest.”
You should take a look at the website for the contest.  It lets you select each province and look at a few select artists (including checking out a short sample by each one).  If you can’t see that, or you get annoyed by the Flash stuff, you can check out the Artist Press Kits here.
For you hip hop heads out there, both Shad and …

Lazy weekend of videos for you people out there.  Here’s a little documentary on just how those glorious LPs get made and wind up making you so happy.
I think it would be amazing to own the master record of any of a number of my favourite albums.  There’s something special about having the very first edition of something.

Marwa Yasmine Abdou is a young Canadian photographer with a surprising amount of talent.  And it’s been a long minute since we’ve even tried to do an art-related post, so I figured now was the time to change all that.