Hey, did you see Wale last night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon? The homegrown rapper performed "Lotus Flower Bomb" along with crooner Miguel and Late Night house band The Roots. The rapper's had luck, in the last six months, with low-key for the ladies ballads (see this song and the earlier hit "That Way"), and you [...]
Javier Starks isn't a look-at-me rapper. He's nothing if not respectful, even referring to his male peers as "sir." And while Starks is energetic, he often keeps to himself in public, quietly reciting his own rhymes or studying the performances onstage.
Perhaps that humble demeanor made it easier to secure guest spots for his Faces of [...]
The results of The Village Voice's annual Pazz + Jop poll—aka the annual compendium of critical opinion that, given that it drops a month after every other top 10 list, only music scribes truly care about—are out. But how did D.C. do?
First, the albums list: Wild Flag, the so-punk-rock/kinda-classicist supergroup featuring two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney and D.C.'s own [...]
You've got a few more workday listening options, beginning this month. ESL Music, the label owned by local chill purveyors Thievery Corporation, launched an online radio station today, and it is so, so, so chill. How chill? So chill it's been playing the same chill loop—glossy keys, crowd noise, Rasta-voiced hypeman—since I tuned in like [...]
Once upon a time, rapping in D.C. wasn't so cool. In the 1990s, long before artists like Wale and Tabi Bonney put D.C. hip-hop on a national stage, local MCs couldn't spit a rhyme without being deemed a New York wanna-be.
Instead, aspiring rappers not named Asheru, Head-Roc, or Black Indian spit their rhymes alongside prominent go-go bands [...]
Weird year, 2011. D.C.'s most visible band released an app, not an album. Its great rap hope released an album that was disappointing in critics' eyes, but which cemented him as a mainstream presence. Dischord returned to relevance with a handful of new albums and handsome archival releases; new labels formed; and Sockets remained the [...]
There's no arts section to recap this week. For our Dec. 23 issue—on stands today!—the Washington City Paper staff took a look back on the year that was. No surprise, then, that a good chunk of our Annotated Guide to 2011 is devoted to the arts. Pick up a copy! Or read it online. Either [...]
Cheap Tickets, Please: D.C.'s Office of Human Rights is stepping into the fray over discounted theater tickets for young audiences, following a complaint it received about venues capping the definition of "young" at 30 or 35 years old, the Washington Business Journal reports. The city agency started looking at theater prices across town, and has [...]
Forgive us, but Drinkify is kind of addictive. You type in a band name, and then, using its algorithm, the site suggests an appropriate libation with which to enjoy your tunes. Some are hilarious—and some don't quite feel accurate. For example, type in "Black Tambourine"—that'd be the influential early '90s noise-pop group—and Drinkify tells you to [...]
Wale's sophomore album Ambition sold 164,000 copies in its first week, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard charts (behind Bieber!) and thereby making him twice as popular as the seemingly more popular Big Sean, though still a little less popular than the seemingly as popular J. Cole.
You may have noticed Wale on the cover [...]
