How I Came To Be Called “Butt Manager.” For Real.

Come have a laugh at my expense tonight: I’ll be telling my personal stories from the “Baby Got Back” era tonight at The Soundtrack Series (alongside luminaries like Maura Johnston and Sasha Frere-Jones) at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge (The Red Fish, for you Freedom Fries folks), 158 Bleecker Street in money makin’ Manhattan. […]

SxSW 2012 With Steve Stoute And Soul Train

On Friday, I’ll be heading to SxSW in Austin, Texas for two panels. Saturday at 11a, Steve Stoute and I will be having a conversation about America’s multiracial future. And a few hours later, at 1:30p, myself and Tony Cornelius — son of the legendary Don Cornelius — will celebrate the legacy of Soul Train […]

Def Jam: The First 25 Years Of The Last Great Record Label

The new book that I co-authored with Bill Adler and Cey Adams — Def Jam: The First 25 Years Of The Last Great Record Label (Rizzoli) — is out this week. (Click HERE to buy the book.) So much more than a “coffee table” book, it’s a comprehensive oral history of the label. The book […]

Sylvia Robinson (1936-2011)

Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson — the woman who produced the first commercially successful hip-hop record and perhaps the first female record producer in history — died this morning of heart failure. She was 75. (I know that some accounts have her birthday in 1938, not 1936, but from family accounts I believe the earlier date is […]

Why Eminem Isn’t Elvis

(Written for HuffingtonPost Black Voices) In July, RollingStone.com commissioned Village Voice pop music columnist Chris Molanphy to craft a feature called “Introducing the King of Hip-Hop.” The request came after the success of Molanphy’s previous post for the website, “Introducing the Queen of Pop” — in which Molanphy measured female music artists’ commercial performance in nine […]