Blog: The Village Voice: Sound of the City

Those who spent this summer listening to New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne's "A Milli" crank out of car stereos from Harlem to Brooklyn could be excused for feeling a bit sad. It wasn't so long ago that we had our own indigenous ways of making SUVs (er, hybrids) thump—years after D-Block and Wu-Tang and Roc-a-Fella fell, New York still had the Diplomats : Cam'ron, the leader, prone to pink chinchilla coats and rhymes of dazzling internal intricacy; Juelz Santana, the young heartthrob, whose casual delivery and tendency toward rhyming a word with the same word, over and over again, [...]