Peter A. Berry

At the beginning of billy woods' verse on Armand Hammer and the Alchemist's new song "Dogeared," a woman asks him a straightforward but weighty philosophical question: "What's the role of a poet in times in like these?" If anyone would know, it's woods. Meandering through dazed Middle Eastern synths and his own troubling thoughts, he turns forlorn subway rides, late night smoke sessions, and fried eggs into a mosaic of subtle, encroaching despair. It's a prison of ironies hidden in plain sigh...

In the pantheon of prestige rap, it never gets fancier than a Clipse reunion. While Pusha T and Malice predated the whole “play this street rapper at New York Fashion Week” motif, their stylishly spare soundscapes and high-brow dexterity made them couture rap before couture rap. They could spit like a sleeker Little Brother, but there’s a nihilistic thrill in the idea that they might sell coke to your little brother, too.
They’ve been relatively dormant since their “Til the Casket Drops” albu...

Generally speaking, subliminal messages are supposed to be, you know, subliminal. But for their new Sydney Sweeney ad, American Eagle traded in the dog whistle for a megaphone and subtext for bolded captions. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” she tells the camera. “My jeans are blue.” At best, it’s a shitty dad joke. At worst, it’s a scantily coded rallying cry for white supremacy. More likely, but no l...

Photo by Zach Beeker/NBAE via Getty Images
If basketball were only about aesthetics, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander would be the greatest player of all time. Blending the balance of Simone Biles with the reflexive flexibility of a contortionist and the audacity of Kobe Bryant, his trips to the basket collapse the distance between violence and grace, imagination and tangibility. He twists and turns, starts and stops, and elevates around and between opposition like a thrill-seeking thief. Imagine a ch...

The New Orleans rap legend on his new album, the Cash Money reunion tour, his relationships with Lil Wayne and Birdman, and more
Anytime you can be a benchmark for celebrity fitness is probably pretty cool. Or, at least I thought. Standing on the sidewalk about 70 feet away from SiriusXM’s Manhattan offices, Juvenile’s just told me he needs to get his ass back in the gym, motioning to his stomach before pointing to my own gut to make his point. “I’m getting a ‘you.'” Of course, l’m really han...

Shams Charania’s debut as part of ESPN’s NBA Draft coverage last week doubled as a herculean exercise in restraint. In past years, he famously used X (formerly known as Twitter) to reveal team draft picks before league commissioner Adam Silver could announce them, leaving fans — and, undoubtedly his current employer, ESPN — at least a little peeved at his acts of spoilery. As unnatural as it was, for the 2025 NBA Draft, he abstained from the tradition.
“It’s really just trying to be a great t...

Besides Tim Duncan, it’s hard to say anyone’s ever been more unimpressed with their own aura than Nikola Jokić. If he were fluent in arbitrary internet superlatives, he might dismiss the idea that he even has one. Even through a championship run and three MVPs, it’s a narrative throughline (read: a meme) that’s persisted with Trumpian resiliency. Jokić might be the first center to average a triple-double, but deep down, he’d rather be brushing one of his majestic steeds at his Serbian horse s...

Sometimes serendipity looks just like an empty bank account. At least it did for Fela Kuti. Following a series of self-funded U.S. shows with his band in 1969, the Nigerian innovator found himself flat broke in Los Angeles after being conned by janky promoters. But that turn of events set him on the road to mining a brand-new musical bag that found inspiration in America’s Black Power movement — specifically, the legendary funk of James Brown.
Fela spent the 1960s shaping the sound he coined,...

The thing about mythmaking is, it’s a lot cooler when other people do it for you. Except for maybe when it’s a state attorney aiming to send you to prison until Barron Trump’s re-elected president. Staring into the judge’s eyes during Young Thug’s RICO trial a few years ago, a Georgia state prosecutor was doing just that as he told a fantastical tale of Thugger’s crime boss alter ego. It was an opening statement fit for Spike Lee’s The Slimefather starring Denzel Washington: “This is the most...

One perk of becoming a semi-famous rapper is that, after many years of anonymity, you’re finally a big enough deal for someone on Genius to transcribe your lyrics.The downside, of course, is that they can f**k them up, too.
Sitting at the edge of a couch in a clandestine Manhattan smokers lounge, Theravada’s face morphs from appreciative amusement to exaggerated disappointment as he examines some freshly mangled lyrics on my iPhone screen. “You can’t make this up! [For] the first word, there’...

Midway through his snarling Drake diss, “Not Like Us,” Kendrick Lamar issued a succinct, but forceful personal mission: “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show n—as.” It was both a plan of action and a self-fulfilling mandate.
Since then, he’s won that rap beef in the most unequivocal terms imaginable: “Not Like Us” has been nominated for multiple Grammys, a rare diss track to achieve that status (ironically the last was Drake’s Meek Mill swipe “Back to Back”), the peak of a six-song flurry, be...

It's been a historic weekend.

Once upon a time, a dick-measuring contest threatened to destroy the whole world. After J. Robert Oppenheimer helped create the planet’s first atomic bombs, the United States and Russia found themselves in a race to develop as many nukes as possible, just so the other country knew not to fuck with the other. This idea evolved into the concept of “mutually assured destruction,” which is to say, “if you nuke us, we’ll nuke you.” Or as the late Prodigy once said, “I...

If you were looking for the exact opposite of a phrase like “Live Laugh Love,” it would be, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Released 10 and a half years ago, Earl Sweatshirt’s melancholic sophomore album title is the anti-Annie — a bleakly abrupt way of saying, the sun won’t come out tomorrow, and even if it does, I’ll be too busy brooding and watching The Wire Season 4 to notice. The tracks themselves are similarly dire, with singles like “Grief” sounding like a bottomless pit where y...

For the 10th anniversary of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’ Okayplayer revisits Kendrick Lamar’s explosive single, “Alright.”
A month after telling the world he wasn’t their savior on Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Kendrick Lamar used the 2022 Glastonbury festival to cosplay as one. For his set, Kung Fu Kenny blessed the stage with his typically visceral raps and theatricality. And an iced-out crown of thorns. Embedded with 137 karats worth of diamonds, the piece turned a tragic symbol of Jesus’ perse...

Tyler, the Creator isn’t exactly a “spell it out” kind of guy, but he made an exception for his new song “Big Poe.” On Monday morning, after years of indulging in blonde bob wigs and cockroach-eating cryptics, the 34-year-old used the track’s opening words to issue an unambiguous command to fans and critics who are surely waiting to dissect his latest mosaic: “No sitting still… dance, bro.” It’s a mandate that’s easy to follow with “Don’t Tap the Glass,” a meticulous yet deliberately low-stak...