Editorial
Mobb Deep’s The Infamous Samples Sounds from a Rich Cultural Heritage
The Opus: The Infamous is currently ongoing, and you can subscribe now. To celebrate the new season, stream Mobb Deep’s iconic album via all major streaming services. You can also enter to win a copy of The Infamous on vinyl — signed by rapper Havoc himself. Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | Radio Public | RSS Follow on Facebook | Podchaser If they’d never released another album after 1995’s The Infamous, Albert “Prodigy” Johnson and Kejuan “Havoc” Muchita of Mobb Deep would still reign as hip-hop visionaries 25 years later. Heavy on realism and scant on hope, the record stands as one of the most unflinching documents of hip-hop’s East Coast Renaissance. As our own Okla Jones put it in a recent retrospective, “The indelible legacy of [The Infamous] will be that it helped shift the co...
Reno 911! and the Thin Blue Line Between Satire and Cruelty
In a world where micro-streaming service Quibi was watched by anyone except exhausted culture writers assigned to cover it, their relaunch of the mockumentary sketch show Reno 911! would take up at least a couple days’ worth of exhaustive Twitter culture war discourse. For what it’s worth, the cast of the acclaimed Comedy Central show are all back and haven’t missed a step, sliding back into their roles as if no time has passed. Unfortunately, that same sense of nostalgic comfort is also the show’s greatest weakness; for better and for worse, the show (and its sense of humor) hasn’t changed a whit since it went off the air in 2009. In the Bush-era heyday of Reno 911!, the show perfectly fit that South Park peak of edgy, subversive humor. The sketch-based, improv-heavy nature...
