My Philosophy, Thirty-Eight Years Later

KRS-One built a song out of a mission statement in 1988. In 2026, he's turned that same title into a book — spending a year researching in Greece to argue that philosophy itself has been telling the story wrong from the start.

There's a myth that gets repeated so often about KRS-One's 1987 debut Criminal Minded that it's calcified into fact: that it's the first gangsta rap album. KRS-One doesn't accept the label. Asked directly, on record, he gives that credit to N.W.A. — they're the ones who actually got saddled with the term. Criminal Minded, he says, was something closer to reality rap, even conscious in its own way. The distinction matters, because it's the same distinction he's been drawing his whole career: between describing the streets and glorifying them. He calls it "criminal-minded to spiritual-minded" — a straight line from the album that put him on the map to the man he'd become.

That evolution has a name now: My Philosophy: Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment, his fourth book, titled after the 1988 Boogie Down Productions track that first laid out his worldview over a Stanley Turrentine sample. Thirty-eight years later, he's still making the same argument — he's just widened the frame. He spent close to a year researching the book while on tour in Greece, and its premise is a direct challenge to how philosophy gets taught: that Western philosophy starts its own story in the wrong place. Everyone points to Pythagoras, Aristotle, the Greeks — but philosophy, he argues, begins with the first humans, full stop. He traces it back to Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old Ethiopian skeleton anthropologists named after a Beatles song rather than anything about who she actually was — and makes the point plainly: African history isn't a footnote to world history. It is world history. His summary of the whole book comes down to one line: philosophy, in its true sense, is the development of character. Without character, he says, you can't learn.

It's not a new idea for him — it's the same one that produced The Gospel of Hip-Hop back in 2009, an 800-page work structured like a religious text, built around what he calls H-LAW: Health, Love, Awareness, Wealth. Its foundation goes back further than the book, to the culture's own founding principles: Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation first codified Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun as the guiding creed of the culture, and KRS-One has carried that forward his own way — sharpening the last of the four into "safely having fun," a small edit that says a lot about how he thinks the culture should police itself from the inside rather than wait to be policed from outside it.

That instinct goes back to something rawer than a book or a creed, too. In 1989, after his DJ and creative partner Scott La Rock was shot and killed, KRS-One founded the Stop the Violence Movement, channeling grief directly into a call for the culture to hold itself accountable. Around the same time came a related initiative, H.E.A.L. — Human Education Against Lies — and it traveled further than most people realize. It wasn't confined to records and interviews; the concept shaped real actions on the streets of Europe, including a 1991 Amsterdam intervention where a Benetton billboard was spray-painted in H.E.A.L.'s name, an act the Dutch Advertising Code Committee went on to formally rule "contrary to good taste." Both the Movement and H.E.A.L. were early, practical versions of the same instinct that would later formalize into the Temple of Hip-Hop in 1996: Hip-Hop is not just music and dance, it's a culture with knowledge and self-understanding built into its foundation from the start, alongside breaking, MCing, graffiti, and DJing.

He's brought that same argument to a very different room recently: a 2026 episode of Lemme Ask You This, the podcast Talib Kweli co-hosts with Tef Poe — a show built on unfiltered, long-form conversation at the intersection of art and activism, closer to genuine dialogue between people who've spent decades inside the culture than to a industry press run. Across a wide-ranging conversation, he walks through the South Bronx, the origins of boom bap, the founding of the Temple — and then, without prompting, turns the conversation onto what he calls "the culture of white supremacy." His argument there isn't abstract. If a group holding disproportionate power is also the group driving the world's corruption and unchecked capitalism, he says, the ethical move for that group would be to step back and let others lead. The refusal to do that, he argues, is the actual mechanism keeping the wrong people in power — not some natural order of things. He goes further, invoking the Declaration of Independence's own justification for overthrowing tyrannical government, and turns it into an accusation: people who call themselves "real Americans" are ignoring the document itself. He closes the thought by comparing Dr. King's 1963 speech to the present — reading it again recently, he says, he was struck that the same complaints, police brutality, voting rights under attack, could have been written yesterday.

It's the through-line that connects everything: a song in 1988, a movement in 1989, a temple in 1996, a gospel in 2009, and a philosophy in 2026. Same argument, four decades running, in whatever room will have him. As he puts it himself: Hip-Hop is not just music, and it never was supposed to be.

Sources:

1. By All Means Necessary — Boogie Down Productions (Wikipedia)
2. KRS-One — artist overview (Wikipedia)
3. The Gospel of Hip Hop: The First Instrument — KRS-One (Goodreads / Open Library)
4. "KRS-One Invading Europe: The 'My Philosophy' Tour 2026" — UndergroundHipHopBlog.com
5. "KRS-One Brings 'My Philosophy' to Zagreb in Live Lecture and Book Signing" — Maria Jackson 27 Magazine
6. Lemme Ask You This with Talib Kweli & Tef Poe, Episode 29 — KRS-One (YouTube)

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above.

Southern Avenue Isn't Waiting Its Turn

Memphis doesn't do subtlety, and neither does Southern Avenue. Name a street that runs from the city limits straight into Soulsville — the old home turf of Stax Records — and you've basically declared your mission statement before playing a note.

Memphis doesn't do subtlety, and neither does Southern Avenue. Name a street that runs from the city limits straight into Soulsville — the old home turf of Stax Records — and you've basically declared your mission statement before playing a note.

The band's origin story sounds almost too clean to be true. Guitarist Ori Naftaly left Israel for Memphis in 2013 chasing the International Blues Challenge, fell out of love with his own group, and then met vocalist Tierinii Jackson — a singer who, by his own account, rearranged his entire future the first time he heard her. Her sister Tikyra came in on drums, the chemistry locked immediately, and Southern Avenue was born in 2015. Violinist and vocalist Ava Jackson — the third Jackson sister — later joined, deepening the family thread that now runs through everything the band does.

Stax Records, the label whose old neighborhood gave the band its name, signed them for their self-titled 2017 debut. It hit the Blues charts and stuck around the Americana Airplay Top 30 for half a year — a serious opening statement for a band barely two years old. Grammy nominations followed for 2019's Keep On, then years of relentless touring: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Sheryl Crow, Los Lobos, and a 2024 run on the Outlaw Music Festival Tour alongside Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and John Mellencamp — a bill that reportedly got the notoriously camera-shy Dylan to pose for photos, which tells you plenty about the impression they made.

In 2024, Southern Avenue signed to Alligator Records — as close to a definitive stamp of blues authority as a label can offer. Their Alligator debut, Family, was recorded at Memphis's Royal Studios (Al Green and Ann Peebles' old stomping ground) with Grammy-winning producer John Burk and engineer Boo Mitchell, released in April 2025. Bassist Blake Rhea, who played on Family, died in 2024. His playing is part of the record's foundation. It earned the band their second Grammy nomination, for Best Contemporary Blues Album, announced in November 2025.

Sources:

1. Southern Avenue — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Avenue_(band)
2. Alligator Records artist page — https://www.alligatorrecords.com/artists/Southern-Avenue/
3. Rock and Blues Muse — https://rockandbluesmuse.com/2025/02/24/southern-avenue-to-release-family-new-album/
4. Relix — https://relix.com/news/detail/southern-avenue-sign-to-alligator-records-detail-label-debut/
5. AllMusic — https://www.allmusic.com/artist/southern-avenue-mn0003582453
6. NPR — 2024 Outlaw Music Festival lineup — https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234145739/willie-nelson-bob-dylan-mellencamp

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above.

Jane Handcock Made a Weed Anthem in 2021 — And It's Still a Stoners Banger

Before "Stingy" introduced her to a wider audience, the First Lady of Death Row Records dropped a one-of-a-kind ode to getting high. Four years later, the message still holds up.

In 2021, Snoop Dogg handed the mic to Jane Handcock for a compilation called Snoop Dogg Presents: The Algorithm — his mission-statement album about putting feeling back into music. Buried in the tracklist was "Like My Weed," a song that never chased a chart position and didn't need to. It's stayed in rotation for anyone who found it since, and it holds up in a way a lot of 2021 rap didn't.

The song is simple on its face: Handcock likes her weed in the morning, and she says so, repeatedly, unapologetically. But the writing is where it earns its keep. She raps about being so high she left her wallet and lighter behind in El Segundo, and she tips her hat to A Tribe Called Quest's very first single along the way — a small detail that signals she knows exactly where she sits in hip-hop's lineage, even on a song this loose.

That lineage matters more than it might seem. Handcock isn't just a Death Row artist — she's a ghostwriter with credits across the industry, having written for names like Kelly Rowland, Rick Ross, Teddy Riley, and Tyrese, alongside her own catalog of overlooked gems. "Like My Weed" is one of the rare Handcock songs where she's fully in the frame, voice and personality both, rather than working in service of someone else's.

It's also a song that's aged into relevance rather than out of it. Cannabis culture in 2021 was already mainstream, but the specific image "Like My Weed" traffics in — a Black woman openly, casually enjoying weed as self-care rather than rebellion — still isn't a message pop culture makes room for often enough. The war on drugs didn't affect everyone equally, and the normalization era hasn't fully caught up with who gets to be casual about getting high on record. Handcock's version of that casualness is worth holding onto.

Four years on, "Stingy" is the song most people found her through. But "Like My Weed" is the one that shows her range — an artist who can write velvety soul confessionals and a stoner anthem with equal command, and make both sound completely her own.

Sources:

1. uDiscover Music — "Snoop Dogg Presents Jane Handcock And Her New Single, 'Like My Weed'" — https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/snoo-dogg-the-algorithm-jane-handcock-like-my-weed/
2. West Coast Styles — "Jane Handcock Drops Official Video For 'Like My Weed'" — https://westcoaststyles.com/news/2021/11/jane-handcock-drops-official-video-for-like-my-weed/
3. Apple Music — "Like My Weed" — https://music.apple.com/us/song/like-my-weed/1599378498
4. Pot TV — "Jane Handcock – Like My Weed" — https://pot.tv/video/2021/12/22/jane-handcock-like-my-weed/
5. YouTube (Official Video) — "Jane Handcock – Like My Weed (Official Video)" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2I1X4o7m0g

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above.

Sister Nancy: The First Lady of Dancehall Never Left

Most sampled record in dancehall history — and why the woman behind it never got her due

In 1982, an eighteen-year-old singer from Waterhouse, Kingston walked into Channel One Studios and cut a song that would outlive every trend it touched. Her name was Sister Nancy. The song was "Bam Bam." Four decades later, it's widely regarded as the most sampled reggae record ever made — and for most of that time, she saw almost none of the credit or money that came with it.

"Bam Bam" rides the Stalag riddim, the backing track Ansell Collins built for producer Winston Riley — one of the most reused rhythms in Jamaican music history. Over it, Sister Nancy toasts with a confidence that sounds decades ahead of its time: playful, unbothered, completely in control of the mic. She wasn't the first woman in dancehall, but she was one of the first to sound like she owned the room.

The song didn't chart. It didn't need to. It moved the way dancehall always moved in that era — through sound systems, cassette tapes, and word of mouth — until it became something closer to folklore than a single record. By the '90s and 2000s, "Bam Bam" had been sampled by Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Gwen Stefani, and dozens of others, turning up in commercials, films, and playlists Sister Nancy herself often had no idea existed until someone told her.

That's the part of the story that isn't folklore — it's a warning. For 32 years, Sister Nancy received no royalties at all from "Bam Bam." Publishing and licensing on Jamaican records from that era were notoriously murky, and the song became a case study in how a record can belong to the world while its creator gets left out of the paperwork. It wasn't until her daughter heard "Bam Bam" in a Reebok commercial in 2014 that Sister Nancy pursued legal action. The case settled in 2016: she received ten years of back royalties and 50% ownership of the song going forward — persistence most artists never have to spend on their own work.

What makes her story land differently than a typical "uncredited artist" narrative is that she never disappeared. Sister Nancy kept performing, kept touring, kept showing up — not as a nostalgia act trading on one song, but as an artist who understood exactly what she'd made and was determined to eventually be paid like it. She didn't need reintroduction. She needed recognition to catch up to where she'd already been standing the whole time.

"Bam Bam" remains dancehall's most quoted opening line for a reason — it's simple, it's rhythmic, and it refuses to age. Every generation that discovers it treats it like a new find, which is its own kind of tribute. The riddim keeps circulating. The voice on top of it is unmistakably hers.

Sister Nancy is proof that influence and compensation don't always arrive on the same timeline — and that the artists who shape a genre's DNA aren't always the ones history remembers first. She's still here to make sure that changes.

Sources:

1. CBC Arts — "Sister Nancy's Bam Bam is one of the most sampled songs ever, but for years, its creator got nothing from it" — https://www.cbc.ca/arts/sister-nancy-bam-bam-documentary-1.7448909
2. Grammy.com — "Sister Nancy Talks 'Bam Bam,' Why She Loves Jay-Z & Longevity In Reggae" — https://www.grammy.com/news/sister-nancy-interview-bam-bam-jay-z-documentary/
3. Wikipedia — "Bam Bam (Sister Nancy song)" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bam_Bam_(Sister_Nancy_song)
4. Okayplayer — "It Took 34 Years For Sister Nancy to Get Royalties From 'Bam Bam'" — https://www.okayplayer.com/it-took-34-years-for-sister-nancy-to-get-royalties-from-bam-bam/616858
5. HipHopWired — "Sister Nancy Lauds Jay-Z For Sampling Royalties" — https://hiphopwired.com/2880455/sister-nancy-lauds-jay-z-for-sampling-royalties/

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above.