Angela Pusateri, 79, maybe unconventional, but according to her 13-year-old granddaughter, Jenna, “She really is a cool grandmother.” Pusateri, who lives in Hallandale Beach, Fla., is a rapper—and even has a new CD, Who’s Your Granny? When performing live, she wears a hockey jersey, jewelry, sunglasses and baseball cap.

The rappers appearing at V100’s latest Jamfest, Lil Boosie, Yung Berg and Hurricane Chris, are uniformly shrill, arrogant and odious—traits that all of them have leaned on to turn out some improbably good singles. Louisiana crunk tot Hurricane Chris’ defining single is “A Bay Bay,” a schoolyard chant with a whizzing synth line and a nagging chorus that taunts the listener long after the song ends. The low-budget “A Bay Bay” sounds like it was recorded in the backseat of a Buick compared to co-headline Yung Berg’s...

Nice to see that Lil Wayne invested some of his Tha Carter III profits into his live show. Wayne's concert Saturday night at Chicago's United Center was a pyrotechnical spectacle that owed more to Genesis' vintage, high-concept AV presentations than the typical low-budget, drive-by rap show. Ushered onstage by explosive...

When New York rap artist Jay-Z says, “Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends,” he touches on the twofold conundrum of faith and practice that is explored in The Tao of Wu (Riverhead). New York rappers know about sin in their city, and the internal struggles of breaking through. They wear the hard knocks of their lives—violence, drugs...

Milwaukee rapper Ray Nitti didn’t get much of a heads up from V100 when DJs from the radio station called to tell him they were going to premiere his single “Bow” on their local segment “Heat From the Streets.” “They told me I had five minutes before it was going to be broadcast,” Nitti recalls. “I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them my song was going to be on the radio...

Ramble John “RJ” Krohn, better known by his stage name RJD2, still remembers the moment that inspired him to begin creating the instrumental hip-hop compositions that would become his signature. “The big light bulb went off in my head the first time I bought a sampler,” says the producer. “I vividly remember the first time I made a beat and having this rude...

D. Ellzey knows he isn’t the only 30-something rapper, but sometimes it can feel that way. “A lot of rappers my age may have a family, business interests, a whole life outside of rap, but for some reason when they enter the rap realm, they don’t express those sides of themselves,” the Milwaukee rapper says. “They dumb it down, taking one part of themselves and exaggerating it. We all have a child inside of us...

Rapper T.R.E. of the Milwaukee group Malicious stresses that people can interpret the cover image of his group’s new album For Whatever It’s Worth however they’d like, though when pressed if there’s any way to interpret it aside from the obvious...

As a kid, Milwaukee rapper SPEAK Easy inherited a love of hip-hop from his older brother, listening to any rap album that his brother brought home. It wasn't until he discovered Eazy-E, though, that he considered rapping himself...