November 28, 2007

Halifu Osumare Interview

To round out this week’s focus on Dr. Osumare’s book, we’ve got our first ever interview featuring none other than the good Doctor. If you are truly interested in the global aspect of hip-hop, pick up her book. It’s a great read and one of the only texts out there that covers the global spread [...]

November 26, 2007

Props To the Local Boyz: Hip-Hop Culture in Hawai’i

This week we have a special treat for you. Dr. Halifu Osumare was nice enough to write a post based on a chapter about Hawaiian hip-hop from her book, The Africanist Aesthetic In Global Hip-Hop: They tell us that we’re equal. But if you look at history, we’re just another sequel By virtue of Hawaii’s [...]

November 17, 2007

Korean Underground Survey

What follows are three of the best underground Korean hip-hop videos you’ll ever see. As you may have noticed, Flight 808 has been sticking to the artist profile model pretty rigidly over the course of the last month or two. After several days of scanning the net for that next ’bout-to-blow Korean emcee, my Word [...]

November 12, 2007

Korea: Epik High makes Seoul music

Like so many of the artists covered here on Flight 808, Epik High is fairly unknown in the U.S. In Korea, they are huge. MC Tablo, a Stanford graduate with a prolific catalogue of guest shots, formed the group in 2000 with Mithra Jin and DJ Tukutz.They experienced their first taste of success in 2005 [...]

November 8, 2007

Chile: Tiro De Gracia

Inspired by the films Beatstreet and Breakdance, Chileans first became involved with the hip-hop culture through breakdancing in the streets of Santiago. Rap music was not originally the center of their hip-hop scene. When more and more music from the U.S. reached Chile in the late eighties, hip-hop groups began to emerge. By the mid [...]

November 6, 2007

Flight808 Featured in Iconocastic.com Podcast

5 tracks from Flight808 are featured in the latest edition of iconocastic.com’s Hip-Hop podcast. Give it a listen or Subscribe to it or RSS it. Check out their other episodes as well. Good stuff.

November 5, 2007

Control Machete

Underground hip-hop has been alive and well in Mexico since the early 1990s. Commercially though, it hasn’t been thrust into the mainstream in the same way that US-Latin acts such as Kid Frost and Cypress Hill have. The exception, of course, is rock-rap trio (well technically now duo) Control Machete. If the name doesn’t ring [...]