Rap music always gets the most attention in hip hop, but as you should know, the culture is much bigger than that. Which would explain why HipHopDX dedicates a section to hip hop lifestyle. Be it movie reviews, video game reviews, interviews with movie stars or eye candy like Vida Guerra or Buffy the Body, we try and give you something other than just hip hop music.

Alana Wyatt-Smith: Real Wife Monday, July 21, 2008 - Mina Jasarevic | Comments: 31

The Hip Hop community felt a break in its beat as the Confessions of a Video Vixen, a first major tell-all book from Karrine “Superhead” Steffans first released in 2005. The book provides insight into Steffans’ tortured past while outlining her escapades, trials and tribulations as a video girl in the overly-misogynistic and competitively materialistic world of commercial Hip Hop. A year later, the mother of Nas’s child and Jay-Z’s former lover, Carmen Bryan, released her own literary exhibition, It’s No Secret. Despite the negative and one-sided labels attached to both Steffans and Bryan, one fact remains: they have exposed the vulnerability, and inadequacy of some of the best of the best in industry while...

Seun Kuti: African Dream Monday, July 14, 2008 - Francesca Djerejian | Comments: 8

While he credits Hip Hop artists such as Dr. Dre and Eminem as influences, Seun Kuti’s greatest musical inspiration comes from his father Fela Kuti, the legendary creator of Afrobeat. In the 1970s, Fela and his Africa 70 group introduced a new popular music style that fused traditional West African music with the influences of Jazz, Funk, R&B, and the ideology of the Black Power Movement. Renaming the group Egypt 80 in the 1980s to reference Egyptian civilization’s connection to Africa, Fela continued to deliver his Afrocentric and politically charged messages to the masses until his death in 1997. Since then, Seun Kuti has led the Egypt...

Platinum Pied Pipers: Triple P Funk Tuesday, July 08, 2008 - Sudaara White | Comments: 4

Aboveground; underground…it’s all relative to Platinum Pied Pipers' producer Waajeed. Being in the game since the early '90s as he teamed up J Dilla, where they both worked together on the song “Welcome to Detroit,” Waajeed had created a name and following for himself amongst the Hip Hop scene. Working with a fellow Detroitian Saadiq, the two met through their mutual friendship with Slum Village, they made their first album Triple P together. Artists such as ?uestlove of The Roots swears by the album claiming he’d go to jail for PPP because the album is that hot. Waajeed knows this, but do you? Brooklyn will with this month's...

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