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Matthew Deapo is a Philadelphia-based arts critic and founding writer for Hip Hop Top 50 (hiphoptop50.blogspot.com) and Kinetoscope Film Journal (www.kinetoscope.org). His essay on Awesome Dré was recently included in Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop & Beyond, and his personal obsessions include popular culture, tall pints of beer, and his beautiful, supportive wife.

Follow Matt hiphoptop50.blogspot.com/

Articles by this author

Article Aug 17 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique

A love letter written in exodus, Paul’s Boutique glued the recollected pieces of the Beastie Boys’ New York City into a mosaic, teaming with the fragrant food carts and steaming sewer grates missing from their newly acquired, palm tree-lined Los Angeles headquarters. Packing their sonic suitcases with the auto-biographical detail of a Hemingway novel and […]
Article Aug 10 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Enigmatic and argumentative, Wu-Tang Clan‘s 9-man battalion of impeccable lyricists and raconteurs capture the grim reality of inner-city survival with a startling thematic fluidity, a unity wholly unexpected from a soup stirred by far too many ladles. Marrying a fly on the wall realism to the supernatural mystique of Wuxia cinema, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 […]
Article Aug 5 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory

Not content to recycle or reinterpret, The Low End Theory is an extension of the jazz that came before, merging the fluidity of Hip Hop vocal with airy, open spaces and curt instrumentation. Abrupt stops and starts allow each word to hang over an abyss of negative space, contributing to the composition as much as […]
Article Aug 1 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: DJ Shadow – Endtroducing…

Constructed of 100% recycled sound material, Joshua Davis’ bipolar, sublime ode to sampling exalted the sequencer as instrument, employing it to build the crescendos attributed to classical composition in the context of the Hip Hop beat tape. As obsessed with the correlation of discordant sounds as he was record collecting, Davis used his DJ Shadow […]