New ScholarMan video for The Answer II - the first single off his upcoming album “GameShift: The Movement,” which is scheduled to drop in January 2009.

East Lansing, MI - Who says science doesn’t turn people on? Kate McAlpine is a rising star on YouTube for her rap performance - about high-energy particle physics. Her performance has drawn a half-million views so far on YouTube.

The 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about news of the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 27.35km circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. McAlpine raps that when the collider goes into operation on Sept. 10, “the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.” (more…)

Will.I.Am and John Legend performed their now-famous Yes We Can live at last night’s Democratic National Convention.

Interesting CNN News story on voting, the hip-hop community, and conveying political messages through art and hip-hop. From BlackTubeChannel.

During an ABC News-sponsored debate last spring in Philadelphia, Senator Hillary Clinton and even the debate’s moderators made numerous charges against Senator Barack Obama. Analysts roundly panned the debate as a “gotcha” fest and devoid of substance.

In a campaign appearance the next day talking about the debate, Obama reached over to his shoulders and made a motion to brush off any “dirt” that may have collected there as a result of the debates, a gesture borrowed from hip-hop artist Jay-Z. The potential President of the United States being willing and knowledgeable enough to reference a major hip-hop artist is significant, and helps explain why so many young people gravitate towards his him. Hip hop is the most dominant music in the world for youth and its influence on pop culture today is unmatched. (more…)

Accompanied by a representative of the U.S. Embassy in Managua, Brooklyn-born rapper George “Ritmo” Martinez and DJ Smash toured some of the more depressed barrios in Nicaragua this week in an attempt to inspire at-risk youth by channeling their creative talents through hip-hop. The “cultural ambassadors,” as a U.S. embassy called them, visited León, Rivas and Managua this week, where they discovered that the U.S.-born art form is well-received among young Nicaraguans.

Martinez said Nicaraguan culture has a “different type of feel” than other Central American countries. “There’s a sense of optimism, hopefulness here that’s not in other places. Most people have some sort of connection to this culture of hip hop. It’s hip hop al estilo nicaragüense,” he said. (more…)

ALMOST every taxi stereo vibrates with its beat, its images inevitably flicker across your screen as you surf the TV news channels, its graffiti is scrawled across the back of buildings and in all the alleyways - it’s hip hop, Mongolian hip hop to be precise.

Although a relatively recent arrival to the land of the blue skies and throat singers, the unmistakable sound of the rhyming raps over the bass-laden backbeats has reached a level of ubiquity in the nation’s popular culture. “Hip hop is the movement of the moment,” says Benj Binks, an Australian filmmaker so intrigued by the Mongolian take on this American cultural movement that he is making a documentary on the subject. (more…)

Ill Bill just dropped this on his YouTube channel. It is the first video from his upcoming album, “The Hour of Reprisal,” which is due out September 16.

New video from “Eardrum.”