Sublime

what really made me want to take it seriously was hearing highly skilled MCs like Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, and Chuck D really pushing the form with their wordplay and rhyme patterns and bringing their unique voices and deliveries to the game. They were all so sick and so sharp—just straight killers on the mic. And I wanted to be like that

Josh Baer. He is not actually a journalist, but for over ten years he’s been sending out an electronic newsletter called The Baer Faxt that reports on, among other things, who is buying

Albert would often quote lines from the two movies and, for a while, started to dress the way he thought De Niro probably did in real life. All slacks and leather coats. Though, Roy once saw a photo in a magazine of the actor on the street in New York and he was wearing corduroy pants, a shitty windbreaker, and what looked like Velcro sneakers. Roy

That notion of empire—expanding into adjacent industries, starting companies, building new brands, grooming protégés, growing bigger and stronger—seems to be a much more natural part of hip-hop than other creative fields. The path from hustler to artist to mogul is a well-trod one, from P. Diddy to Birdman to Jay Z.