Year In Review
Hip-Hop 2012: Inside Lamar's Black Hippy Crew
PUBLISHED Dec 20, 2012
Flipping the Wu-Tang Clan's model for success, the four-headed beast that is South Central L.A.'s Black Hippy wants to establish each of it...
Hip-Hop 2012: New Era Hip-Hop
PUBLISHED Dec 20, 2012
Overall, 2012 was good to hip-hop: the artists that had the greatest successes proved that the genre has matured beyond a binary old school...
Pop and Rock 2012: It's Getting Loud
PUBLISHED Dec 19, 2012
Separated by musical backgrounds and international borders, a phalanx of young bucks were united in 2012 by a common purpose: the hard and...
Pop and Rock 2012: Breakout Label - Arbutus
PUBLISHED Dec 19, 2012
One of 2012's undeniable breakout stars was Montreal's Grimes (pictured above) and her Polaris-nominated album, Visions. The label behind h...
Pop and Rock 2012: Every Bedroom's A Stage
PUBLISHED Dec 19, 2012
Once upon a time, there was no internet, and as a result no blogs, no YouTube, no Tumblr. Not even MP3s! Musicians had to leave their homes...
Groove 2012: What Frank Ocean's 'Channel Orange' Taught Us
PUBLISHED Dec 17, 2012
Owner of perhaps this year's most unique backstory, R&B artist Frank Ocean's ascendance into the mainstream was a perfect storm of promotio...
Groove 2012: PSY vs. Snoop Lion
PUBLISHED Dec 17, 2012
Nobody could have predicted that a cherubic thirty-something rapper from South Korea would record the most popular song of 2012. However, j...
Dance and Electronic 2012: Breaking Down the Boundaries of Sound
PUBLISHED Dec 14, 2012
If there's any song that summed up electronic music's renewed infatuation with hip-hop and R&B this year, it was Ryan Hemsworth's remix of...