Hua Hsu edits the hip-hop section of URB Magazine and writes about music, culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, The Wire and various other magazines and weeklies. Hsu hails from California's Bay Area but he currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is seeking a PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.
“I knew damn near everybody,” the late trumpeter and bandlead… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
“The world looks at this album as very personal,” a tired-sou… more »
Musicians aren’t always the best interlocutors of their own work, b… more »
Of the many things a time-traveling, 1988 Juice Crew fan wouldn’t u… more »
The French producer Onra first came to prominence with Chinoiseries, an a… more »
It should surprise no one that Gary War was once part of Ariel Pink… more »
The Bay Area’s DIY Solesides collective aspired to make a movement … more »
There is a clip of Damon Albarn being interviewed in August of 1995, on t… more »
By 1995, Blur had become bona fide stars — the kind who would be pr… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
It didn’t have to happen like this. As the story goes, Clive Davis … more »
“Underground” is one of those tantalizingly vague terms that… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
A hip-hop record for a different time, Quakers is a collaboration between… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Thumb-tacked to the wall of my room in my parents’ house is a list … more »
Arguably the greatest of all Wu solo efforts, there is something thorough… more »
With his strident falsetto and taste for grandiose, imposing production, … more »
The premise of the "virtual band" Gorillaz came to Albarn and his then-ro… more »
Sometimes staying underground is a necessity, lest the Secret Service sho… more »
All hip-hop is regional: This was the lesson of the early 2000s, as stars… more »
As they age, extreme metal merchants often inject various non-metallic styles into their songs in order to hasten their musical growth. Sometimes, as with Alcest and Jesu, they develop to the point where their original… more »
