In its early years, Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution Tour sported a nearly 50-50 mix of rock and rap acts. It’s symbolic, then, that the lone rapper on this year’s Projekt Revolution tour, Busta Rhymes, was dropped, leaving behind a line-up of just alternative and hard-rock acts like Chris Cornell, Ashes Divide . . .

“It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your…” well, you know the rest. Nelly scored a major hit with that 2002 single, “Hot In Herre” (sic), but his fame has waned in subsequent years, putting increased pressure on his upcoming album, Brass Knuckles, which is set for a September release. The pop-rapper will likely debut . . .

Back in the day, Tupac Shakur embodied rap as aggressive criticism of the world that is and a mirror to the lives of some of the world’s least fortunate. Milwaukee recording artist and filmmaker Sona Lionel produced an unconventional documentary that’s less a VH-1 style biography of the late artist . . .

Ethnic and racial identity has always played a crucial role in rap music, so it shouldn’t be too surprisingly, then, that a collective of Asian hip-hop artists have banded together with a touring called the Asian Hip-Hop Summit. Among the rappers performing tonight, when the tour makes its Milwaukee stop at the Wicked . . .

Given Nas’ inability to explain on his previous album exactly why hip-hop was dead, the media understandably greeted Nas’ latest album, originally titled Nigger, with great skepticism. Against the odds, though, the rapper created a piece of art that proves that its controversial original title wasn’t just a . . .

Nas has long been the most stoic and dead serious of all the major emcees. Especially since he returned to critical favor after his brief but image-killing flirtation with floss in the late '90s, he's been careful to avoid any hint of vice or banality. Of his four most recent albums, two explore his ever-consuming Jesus complex, one eulogizes the genre he loves, and the latest somberly charts the remnants of slavery. He carries the weight of the world-and the cross-on his self-beleaguered shoulders. While his one-time rival Jay-Z indulges . . .

One of the few Milwaukee rappers with ties to both the alt-rap hip-hop scene of the city’s East Side and the grittier, club-rap scene of the North Side, Prophetic stakes out an agreeable middle ground, embracing both sounds without succumbing to conscious-rap moralizing or thug-rap clichés. The slick production of his new album, Mo Profit, Mo Progress, finds a sonic middle ground between laid-back alt-rap and bombastic...

   Our conversation is painful, marked by enough long pauses to fill an entire season of "The Office." Pharrell Williams, the singer and public face of N.E.R.D., is normally the chatty one, but right now he's so disinterested in my questions that he's making his less talkative bandmate Shay answer them from a third phone line. Though he struggles to be polite, Shay prefaces many of his short answers with a barely disguised sigh.  "Hey, P, you still there?"

Kanye West cemented his star-making reputation when he produced Common’s 2005 hit Be, a soulful, down-to-Earth album that resuscitated Common’s career after 2002’s ambitious but muddled Electric Circus. Common teamed up with West again for much of 2007’s Finding Forever, a respectable sequel that never fully captured the simple charm of Be, but for Common’s upcoming album, Universal Mind Control, the conscious...

One of the Twin Cities’ best known emcees and one of its best known DJs, respectively, Eyedea and Abilities return to Milwaukee with their polished two-man act of sly, subversive battle raps and quick, beat-changing cuts. A trio of Milwaukee hip-hop mainstays have come out for the duo’s 10 p.m. show at the Stonefly Brewery tonight: The Rusty Ps, Kid Cut Up and King Hell Bastard will all open...