Menu Search
Author

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 Jul 27 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: Dr. Octagon – Dr. Octagonecologyst

Signaling the end of populist Hip Hop and shortsighted coastal rivalries, Dr. Octagonecologyst merged East Coast lyricism and West Coast experimentation, manufacturing an immersive, nebulous atmosphere built from the spare parts of splatter horror cinema, moody electronica and turntable work as staggering and vertiginous as a swarm of locusts. The hallucinatory effect of “Kool” Keith […]
Article Jul 24 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: Ghostface Killah – Supreme Clientele

Entrancing on the surface and rife with meaning just beneath, Dennis Coles crafts flavorful vignettes of meticulous detail, so consumed with the minutiae of gang life and the flavor of a hot meal that he compels his listeners to hear the clap of each gun shot and burn their lips on piping hot Ziti. The […]
Article Jul 17 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: J Dilla – Donuts

As an artist, James Yancey was more concerned with how sound is interpreted and how it affects mood than with his audience making a direct connection between his samples and their source material. Unlike the cultural collaboration of mash-up and its ironic pretense, Donuts is all cerebral exercise, emphasizing and expounding upon the commonplace just before stripping […]
Article Jul 11 2017

Honoring The Best Hip Hop LP’s: EPMD – Strictly Business

For a duo obsessed with leisure and the spoils of Reagan-Era consumerism, Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith rarely seem compelled enough to work for it, at least not at the expense of their relaxed demeanor or enough to warrant naming their album Strictly Business. Even music industry chatter would have been premature at this point, since […]