Put One Out For the Phifer

For me, the passing of Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor hits home in a very literal sense. I grew up in the St. Albans area of Queens, New York. To this day, I pass the Nu-Clear Cleaners on Linden and the one-nine-two-where A Tribe Called Quest stood atop in the “Check the Rhyme” video-regularly to […]

Addressing The Blind Elephant

For almost the past decade, my favorite emcee has been a guy out of Chicago named Gemstones. He was originally a member of Lupe Fiasco’s 1st and 15th imprint and Gemini. On Lupe’s debut album, Food and Liquor was released, I bought it the day that it came out. However, by the time I heard […]

Déjà-Vu

I felt like I had been here before…Sitting in traffic rushing from Midtown Manhattan to Long Island to get to my nephew from elementary school and Cydney from Pre-K on a March afternoon. I was visiting someone in a hospital who had just undergone surgery and they were in an immense amount of pain. […]