Mark 563 is an Australian artist who specializes in sketch portraits. His latest series pays homage to hip-hop icons in pencil portrait form. Pop the hood for awesome portraits of RZA, Biggie, Eazy-E, and others.
Read the rest of this entry »

[L: Jimi Hendrix; R: Bob Dylan]

An artist named iri5, who specializes in chopping up things or series of things to create other things, has done something insanely creative and amazing with cassette tapes. Kids, save your compact discs, because they’ll come in handy for art projects like this in the future.

[Noise Addicts]

Another day, another music rag bites the dust. Blender magazine is dead and gone forever.

Blender, a music and entertainment magazine, will cease publication with its April issue, but will continue to publish on its Web site, blender.com, its owner, the Alpha Media Group, announced on Thursday. “We went as far as we could in a difficult environment,” said an Alpha Media spokeswoman, Nora Haynes.

Someone please put VIBE on suicide watch.

Ever since MC Hammer gave Google Analytics his stamp of approval, I’ve been using it as a guiding force to see which search phrases are bringing weirdos to The Rap Up. You won’t believe what folks are googling on their way to this blog. What’s sad is that fewer people are searching for my idol Lil Wayne than are searching for some good old Coco.

And now, the bizarre search strings that brought you here:

• joe budden has a big tahiri
• keri hilson turns me on
• cavitacious rhymes
• serena wiliams does common – hawaii
• ron artest wins championship
• where is cam’ron
• coco plays nude
• nicole scherzinger sex tape
• Beats by Dre is ass backwards
• what the fuck is a barack obama

Bumphiphop honors hip-hop’s fallen soldiers with various R.I.P. wallpapers. Too bad, they don’t have one for Aaliyah. To pimp out your computer with the R.I.P. wallpapers, head over to bumphiphop.com and grab some free downloads.

[Thanks, Daniel]

::NOT an example of a supergroup

That CRS thing with Kanye, Lupe, and Pharrell has been stirring up all kinds of supergroup ideas in my head lately. So here’s the deal: If you could create your own super-duper-group, hip-hop or otherwise, who would you tap for the gig? It’s your call, your rules, and your group. There’s one golden rule though: You have to include at least one producer in the supergroup.

Go!