Bob Marley today is a product of pop culture bastardization. The impact of his music has been reduced to the two-dimensional, an image printed on T-shirts or plastered on dorm room walls. I may be generalizing. But anyone who has visited the campus of a California university is right to doubt whether those in the hacky-sack circle are true believers, genuine Rastafarians. “Imposter-farians” seems to be a more appropriate description. 

Grammy Award winner Big Daddy Kane is an inventive New York “Hip Hop” legend who emerged in the mid-1980s. Big Daddy Kane was the catalyst behind Jay Z’s career. He is known to have gotten his start as Kane's hypeman. As an actor, he debuted in Mario Van Peebles' Posse.  Kane’s song "Ain't No Half Steppin' was named #25 on the list of the 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone Magazine, which also called Kane "a master wordsmith of rap's late golden age and a huge influence on a generation of MCs."

Because of the gang violence and drug addiction that is synonymous with the inner city and especially Los Angeles, there is sense that these type of measures are warranted for a people who commit such acts intra-communally. And police brutality stands as another repressive constant within the inner city. Something NWA summed up with their classic single F*ck Tha Police. Although some may cringe at the title and lyrics of the song, the sentiment is shared across the predominantly African-American inner cities in this country. 

Bonnaroo. Lollapalooza. Coachella. Firefly? That’s the goal for the second-year festival: Get mentioned in the same breath as the largest and most famous in the country. And with the success it’s had in its first year-plus of existence, Firefly might be well on its way. The Atlantic Coast has always lacked a signature festival. While the West is rife with multiday music events, Easterners have had to travel as far as Chicago or Manchester, Tenn., to get their fix. 

The Pharcyde is a soulful hip-hop group from the early 1990s. After a breakup, four of the original members have reunited. Fatlip, SlimKid3.  along with Pharcyde producers J-Sw!ft & L.A. Jay are now performing as Bizarre Ride Live. The animated and enthusiastic group is best known for the hit singles "Drop", "Passin' Me By" and "Runnin,'" as well as their first album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde. Highbrow Magazine recently met with and interviewed the band.  

Tago Mago rages schizophrenically from song to song, from the two-bricks-shy of a pop song “Mushroom” to the sprawling “Halleluhwah” and everything in between. This confusion, this constant search for how best to communicate, is part of the album’s appeal. West Germany and its people had to find new ways to be heard in the world—a nation dismembered, no longer quite German, not yet fully Westernized, and always idling in the Cold War shadows of the Iron Curtain.

A new independent group, Death Grips, merges punk and hip-hop, amongst a kaleidoscope of other genres, creating tracks filled with boldness, impatience, licentiousness and jolts of unfettered creativity. But the group’s chaotic sound isn’t exactly hedonistic or apathetic; it is, at its core, a call to the audience to create themselves. If Sir Philip Sidney was resurrected, he would probably approve: for not only do they delight the audience, but they move the audience to action. 

John Coltrane, for example, told of his religious awakening through his four-part suite A Love Supreme in 1965. Two years earlier, Charles Mingus released The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady, a masterful composition in six movements (or dances) which he described in the liner notes as his “living epitaph from birth ‘til the day I first heard of Bird (Charlie Parker) and Diz (Dizzy Gillespie).” Of all jazz composers, Charles Mingus understood best the capacity for jazz to delve into the mind and spirit of the musician. 

Hip Hop's raw depictions of life in crime-ridden communities, the rise to fame and the value of material gain seem to conflict with the traditional religious ideals of love, moral uprightness, self-control and humility. Despite the noted differences, there is an inseparable relationship between hip hop and religion. These street epics situate themselves between the reality of poverty, helplessness, and the unfulfilled American Dream while still holding on to the hope of a greater power having their back in the long run. 

That 1983 television performance was, for many Brits, their first introduction to the Smiths. All at once, that charming man managed to offend both straitlaced society and anti-society counterculture groups. Because Morrissey was neither: His Teddy Boy quiff juxtaposed his costume jewelry and woman’s blouse; his cockiness as a frontman was offset by the quaintness and faint homoeroticism of the words he sang. The Smiths were alternative and indie in the original sense of the word.