The big news: Barack Obama will announce Elena Kagan as his pick to succeed John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. If she’s confirmed, four of the nine Supreme Court justices will rep NYC.

Scalia: Queens. Ginsburg: Brooklyn. Sotomayor: The Bronx. Kagen: UWS Manhattan. Only Staten Island lacks supreme court love, a truly terrible oversight.

Can you say “Associate Justice Ghostface Killah“? He’s clearly not lacking for empathy:

Brings a whole new meaning to Supreme Clientele.

Now clearly the National Review isn’t the best place for existential ruminations on hip hop*, but NRO writer Mark Hemingway gave it a whirl this afternoon, arguing that the inauguration of Barack Obama represents the end of hip hop culture:

Well, here’s one small anecdote that suggests the era of hip-hop might be ending and the age of Obama might be beginning. The streets around the Capitol right now are swamped with Obama T-shirt and tchotchke vendors. One of them was selling this poster of Obama leading a posse of civil rights icons:

As I paused to take in the poster, a black woman in front of me stopped, took one look at the poster and blurted out, “Now, what the hell is Tupac [far left] doing on there?”

And here is the poster in question:

As far as I can spot, in addition to Tupac, the poster also includes Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley. (Wondering if Obama marks the end of boxing culture, as well? Rastafarianism?)

But to Hemingway’s point…seriously? I suppose, when you define hip hop culture as encompassing, and only encompassing, fatherlessness and mysogony, then, yeah, sure, the rise of Obama and the Obama family as role models may (hopefully) promote an end to those unpleasant things.

But…that’s not hip hop culture. As far as I know, as far as I’ve seen it to be…

Is hip hop to blame for a pudgy white dude’s (totally pudgy) misconception of hip hop as nothing more than the promotion of disfunctional black families? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

Nevertheless, and beyond stupidity at The Corner, watching hip hop digest Barack Obama over the next four-to-eight years is going to be big.

* (Imagining Bill Buckley breaking down Luda and American Gangster gives a certain thrill)

Aesop Rock astutely diagnoses the Freudization of hip hop, now in it’s 15th 35th year of existential crisis:

Pick up any rap magazine, and half the magazine is articles about hip-hop, and it’s just about the actual existence of a genre called hip-hop, or what the genre is doing, and it’s like, “Man, just make a record. There wouldn’t be shit to complain about if you just made music.”

Ironically, it is this bit of anti-psychoanalysis hip hop psychoanalysis that is the most compelling section of the entire interview.

The Bridge is New York City’s #1 spot for old school hip hop. Saturdays at 11:00 PM on NYC TV (Channel 25, Cablevision 22)

Continuing in our season-long tribute to the legendary Video Music Box, tomorrow’s episode of The Bridge dips into hip hop’s Golden Era, 1987 to 1990.

Featuring: exclusive vintage interviews with Heavy D & the Boyz (1987) and Al B Sure! (1987), live performances by Public Enemy (1989), Biz Markie (1989) and KRS-One (1988), and classic videos by Big Daddy Kane, EPMD, and Eric B & Rakim.

The Golden Era is the greatest era of hip hop, it’s golden, and by greatest and golden I mean in the sense of the aesthetic and/or intellectual. Because, to be frank, though the Golden Era is universally lauded as the best era of hip hop, it’s not necessarily everyone’s favorite era.

Which isn’t to say Golden Era hip hop isn’t stand-alone amazing, because it absolutely is. Rakim is fucking ill, KRS-One live on stage will light your house on fire and punch you in the face (tomorrow’s episode of The Bridge has the craziest live footage of KRS performing South Bronx and Criminal Minded. Insane.)

But the Golden Era isn’t exactly what I reach for on the iPod in a walk through Prospect Park or a ride on the subway. That would generally be some early 90s proto-street era stuff; Tribe and Nas, Gangstarr and Stakes is High.

It’s a bit like jazz: everyone can go around saying Miles Davis Bitches Brew is the greatest jazz album of the 60s and 70s, but when you’re reaching for a record on an early Sunday morning, you’re much more likely to land on…I dunno, Winchester Cathedral? Bitches Brew is just too g.d. good to listen to. It’s legendary, it’s unreal.

Hip Hop works the same way. Bring the Noise is easily the crowning cultural achievement of the 20th century, but, man, I can’t listen to it everyday. It’s too good, too legendary. I’m happy enough just knowing it’s out there.

Which isn’t to say people shouldn’t watch tomorrow’s episode, ooobviously. How else could you know it’s out there without a local television show broadcasting visual evidence??

sam·pling (sām’plÄ­ng): the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song.

The Sunday Sample: A new series in which The Daily Squid digs through the YouTube crates in search of some of the hottest breaks of hip hop’s Golden Era.

Gang Starr – Just to Get a Rep

Who knew a pioneering French electro-music producer was behind one of the hardest-hitting street anthems of the early 90s (among many more)?

He did it just to get a baguette

The Bridge is New York City’s #1 spot for old school hip hop. Saturdays at 11:00 PM on NYC TV (Channel 25, Cablevision 22)

Whole new season, whole new episodes, whole new vibe: Old School Hip Hop is new again (again) on The Bridge!

Season four officially launched this past Saturday; 8 more episodes showcasing some of your favorite old school videos (from Public Enemy to Wu Tang, Salt N Pepa to Black Moon) alongside contemporary interviews with classic hip hop icons (Rakim, KRS-One, Marley Marl, CL Smooth, Wu-Tang, etc.)

I’ve been involved with The Bridge since it’s inception about three and a half years ago (from Associate Producer, to Producer, to Writer-Director), and each season has been an insane, somewhat surreal blast (meeting Rakim?!?!!?!? Interviewing RZA while an assistant braids his hair?!?!?!? Completely losing my face while attempting to nervously inform Dres from Black Sheep that “Flavor of the Month” is my favorite hip hop video of all time ever?!?!?!?).

This season, however, season four, I’m especially psyched out of my mind about. 2008 represents the 25th anniversary of the legendary Video Music Box, the original, pioneering video show first launched by our host, VJ Ralph McDaniels, on NYC television in May of 1983.

Video Music Box was the first television program (anywhere) to touch on hip hop, and this season, we at The Bridge have done our best to honor that pioneering status, digging into Ralph’s vault to unearth some pretty exclusive stuff: Tribe live at the Marc Ballroom in 91, KRS at the Fever in 87, vintage interviews with Special Ed, Whodini and LL Cool J, the original EPK for Nas’s Illmatic, and more more more.

And while all of the above is some fine promotional talk (and if you live in NYC, watch watch watch!) nothing can really touch on the shock, awe and…I dunno, honor is too strong a word, but seriously; for a white-bred beyond-rural kid, I just can’t fucking believe I actually get to touch this stuff.

It’s all been a magical dream come true, and I’m just waiting to get shot up at the Source awards before I finally wake up and kiss my pillow a thank you.

So here is Notorious, the upcoming, long-awaited, this-thing-better-be-pretty-good Biggie feature film.

You can never dig too much out of a trailer, and this seems more like an initial teaser spot than anything else, so the benefit of the doubt is probably necessary. That said, I’m hoping the movie delves a little deeper than the smooth since days of underoos emphasis this preview takes. Biggie did indeed marry that ish while the rest of us remained merely engaged, but the nature of his death, and the larger implications of the mediated beef that lead to that tragedy, deserves a deeper inquiry.

The one big reason to believe that depth will be missed, however, is that release date. January 16th? No good movies come out in January; January is shit movie season, with rare exception. The Oscar push has ended and half the country is under 18 inches of snow, while every studio is holding off on its crowd-pleasing fare until the late Spring/Early Summer kicks off. January is for table scraps.

And Biggie deserves more than table scraps; he deserves some t-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch’s grape. Which, in the language of movie release dates, translates into a late November/early December opening weekend. Any Biggie picture should obviously appeal more to the street than it does to A.O. Scott, but is it too much to ask to get a high-quality movie out of this dude’s life?

When you’re the greatest to do the greatest thing ever to be done, you deserve your own Oscar-baiting biopic.

Contra Marc Ambinder, I’d like to think that “dollar bills” is an acceptable plural of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 dollar currency, otherwise I’m afraid Method Man is being ruled by a remarkably inefficient accumulation of paper money…

P.S. The video for “C.R.E.A.M.” was produced and directed by none other than Ralph McdDaniels, host of The Bridge! Check out a whole new season, Saturday October 25th at 11:00 PM.

In the wake of Don Imus’s recent firing, many comparison’s have been drawn between his racially charged, sexist remarks and the misogynistic nature of contemporary commercial rap music. Even Barack Obama had his own mini Sister Souljah moment as he drew the comparison in response to a question posed at a recent campaign event:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday questioned the way some rappers talk about women in songs, saying the lyrics are similar to the derogatory language used by fired radio talk show host Don Imus.

“We’ve got to admit to ourselves, that it was not the first time that we heard the word ‘ho,’ Obama told a crowd of about 1,200 at a fundraising dinner for the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus in Columbia. “Turn on the radio station. There are a whole lot of songs that use the same language … we’ve been permitting it in our homes, and in our schools and on iPods.”

It’s a fair point, though I think the criticism of rampant hip hop misogyny is a somewhat separate issue from what has be going down in the whole Imus affair.

Don Imus managed to say something that was both incredibly sexist and insanely racist. That’s no easy task (though, as Media Matters has carefully tabulated, not a sin of which Imus is solely guilty). But, when it comes down to it, it’s the racism that got Imus into trouble.

The misogyny of Imus’ remarks certainly pales in comparison to what comes out of some commercial hip hop today; Imus, after all, isn’t the one “looking for a slut with a nice butt to get a nut” or observing “bitch ya’ pussy smell like Pepé le Pew.” But the racial slur incoporated into his “nappy headed hos” comment is really non-comparable to anything in hip hop. Snoop Dogg referring to a black woman as a “ho” is incredibly sexist, indeed, but not at all racist; Snoop is not disparaging her race from a perch of racial privilege. Imus, on the other hand, with his “nappy headed” qualifier, was doing just that, an “old-ass white man that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls,” as Snoop himself put it. Whether Imus is an actual racist or not, it is that blatant racial insensitivity that ultimately cost him his job.

Criticizing hip hop for it’s rampant misogyny is a justified and worthwhile endeavor (though it should not obscure the fact that true hip hop, in its purest form, is essentially the greatest thing to ever happen to United States of America). But to imply that Imus has been fired due to the result of a modern day double standard really misses an important nuance to his oh-so-not-nuanced comment.

16. It ain’t where you from, it’s where you’re at.
15. Cash rules everything around me.
14. Ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks.
13. Season’s change, mad things rearrange, but it all stays the same like the love doctor strange.
12. The suckers have authority.
11. Kings lose crowns but teacher’s stay intelligent.
10. Elude the hook and your whole beat’s tookin’.
9. Straight out of Compton there’s a brother that’ll smother your mother and make your sister think I love her.
8. When sales control stats I place no faith in the majority.
7. If you find true love hold on till the end, ’cause we all know the women outnumber the men. I caught one to play me close like her name was Glen, and I’ll be damned if I ever let it happen again.
6. The meaning of raw is Ready And Willing.
5. Jay Dee don’t do no parties for free (no lie).
4. You want to learn how to rhyme you better learn how to add, it’s mathematics.
3. It’s about love for cars, love for funds, loving to love mad sex, loving to love guns. Love for opposites, love for fame and wealth, love for the fact of no longer loving yourself, kid…Stakes is high.
2. It’s bigger than hip hop.
1. Notorious B.I.G. — the best that ever lived, the best that ever did it, that best that ever lived it.

In keeping with some “Best Alive” hyperbole, over the past couple years Minnesota rapper One Be Lo has somewhat quietly become the greatest rapper to walk the earth since March 9th, 1997.

Some evidence from “The Axis“:

Every night you hear the bullets blast / Even if you in the suburbs every night, you see the footage flash / across your screen, I’ll tell you my biggest pet peeve / You lookin at it thinkin like, “It don’t affect me” / You livin large I’m thinkin like, “It don’t impress me” / Rockin them chains, Sojourner Truth is tryin to set free

or

In this land of Pocahontas, natives lost to conquest / Your false gods get framed, buffed and polished / If you ask who the prophet, they say Nostradamas

The whole album is an absolute hip hop masterpiece.

UPDATE: His underground solo debut from 2002 just recently received an official release.