We weren't intending to take the whole summer off, but...shit happens. We're back, though, with a continuation of Episode 6, where we celebrated Black Music Month and essentially posited the theory that ALL music is Black Music. For this episode, we are joined by Sandy Loam, a multi-disciplinary musician and a member of several bands. She offers he…

A: All music is Black music. In honor of Black Music Month, two Black music nerds (Jermaine & Mike) discuss how musical genres have become racialized over the years--and why those restrictions are slowly falling apart in the 21st century. We talk about everything from discovering seminal Black rock bands like Bad Brains and Living Colour to finding…

Sure, we just did a Queen Latifah episode. But who's to say when and how often we wanna go to the well? For this episode, Jermaine and myself (joined by fellow music nerds Ali Elabaddy and Woody Black) get into a wide ranging discussion about the Native Tongues posse, the Afrocentric rap collective that counted Latifah amongst its ranks. It also in…

Mike and JC are back with a new episode of Journey N 2 Sound, and the weather is warming up and concert season is about to be LITTY. Even as concert tickets rise into the near-unaffordable, we still are itching to check out our favorite artists on the road. We share our fun concert experiences and also examine the plight of the touring musician, es…

Rapper. Singer. Actress. Mogul. Queer icon. Queen Latifah (who celebrates her 53rd birthday this week) is all of that and more. She's lasted in the entertainment biz for three decades, blazing a trail in multiple disciplines. In this episode, JC and Mike break down the Queen's accomplishments, from becoming the first solo female rapper to win a Gra…

We're back with an episode that focuses on the institution that is the Grammy Awards (quick note: this episode was recorded before last week's ceremony). We talk about our histories as award show consumers, and we go into detail about what we feel are the three most egregious errors made by the Recording Academy voters over the years. We also sidet…

What was the first album you owned? Now, it may not necessarily be the first album you bought. This is the case for JC and Mike, who talk about their childhood experiences as music fans with assistance from, respectively, Whodini's seminal hip-hop classic Escape and Stevie Wonder's groundbreaking Grammy winning Album of the Year Innervisions. Here …