In August 1973, the Jamaican-born Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell held his first block party in the Bronx, bringing the Jamaican sound system culture to America and inadvertently providing the first ...

When the mainstream popularity of rap music elevated in the late 1980s, it often did so with the help of inventive sampling. While many samples came from the R&B funk world, clever hip-hop artists and ...

Though he was deliberately not a household name, the music that producer and DJ Matt Dike created, sampled and spun helped define both underground Los Angeles club culture and commercial rap music in ...

Long before he was gunned down on a Harlem street, Alberto “Alpo” Martinez was immortalized in film and song as one of the city’s most legendary drug kingpins of the 1980s. Rap hits by the likes of ...

On This Day: '80s Band’s Debut Album Hits No. 1—Then Stayed on the Charts for Nearly Two Years originally appeared on Parade. The 1980s saw a wave of new music stars burst onto the scene. While some ...

The Grammy winner was convicted of illegally funneling millions in foreign contributions to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. 1 day ago In an age of bouncy and slow trap-based rap music — where the tempos ...

3. Music in the '80s changed direction, and some people couldn't handle that. As sad as it is to realize, rock fans are not a universally open-minded group. It's distressing to realize that the same ...

Biz Markie, the legendary rap pioneer known as “the clown prince of hip hop” and for his 1989 hit single “Just a Friend,” died Friday. He was 57. “It is with profound sadness that we announce, this ...

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in ...