Diggin' In The Digits

Continuing our celebration of Women's History Month, the DITD duo turn their attention to another pioneer. Or should we say, pioneers? We take a look into the background, music and legacy of the legendary Salt-N-Pepa. The trio of Hip-Hop women that dominated the mid-late 80s with their music and culturally still hold relevance as the rare all-female Hip-Hop group that genuinely made waves. TIMESTA...

Our Women's History Month celebration continues with another certifiable legend of Hip-Hop. The one & only Queen Latifah. Queen Latifah came into Hip-Hop as one not to be messed with. Lyrically she was (and still is) top tier, her first three albums are all classics in their own unique ways and outside of Hip-Hop, has carved a career in entertainment the average person would kill for. She's si...

Missy Elliott has rightly been celebrated in the past few years. It's been wonderful to see such a modern legend get her flowers. But after this episode, we hope you realise that we're still not celebrating her enough. Not from a standpoint of influence but one of reverence. The term "one of one" is rarely the perfect phrase to describe someone but for Missy, it fits like a glove. The DITD duo att...

Rejoice! We have finally come to the final part of our 2.4k Series! For the last instalment, we get into groups, (& duos...) Producers, Artists & Rappers. For some reason, recency bias is nearly thrown out of the window with these! (It still rears its head enough though...) We also spend a few minutes in the end with general reflections over the series and a sigh of relief as we can all mo...

The bloodbath goes on! Our 2.4k Series continues with four more categories: Overrated, Underrated, Most Consistent & Best Year. The overriding conversations for these? How we define these categories and the ABSURD level of recency bias. Some would say a criminal level of recency bias. The DITD duo gets into it all. TIMESTAMPS: Weekly Music Roundup - (1:14) Topic Intro - (20:08) Underrated - (2...

For those that follow Hip-Hop Numbers, you know that Ben took advantage of the viral sensation that 2.4k of you participated in. Listing off your All-Time favourites in several categories. After weeks of collecting and organising the data, Ben has blessed us with an all statistics-based mini-series. We're calling it the "2.4k Series". For Part 1, we go through the Top 15 Mixtapes, Songs & Albu...

Some time has passed since Billie Eilish made her comments on Rap. Hip-Hop has constantly had to defend itself from comments like these decades before Eilish was even born. It's a dead conversation on the surface. But below the surface, there is a deeper conversation to be had. One of fighting for authenticity, why is it always Hip-Hop? One of confusion, why are artists like Eilish, Miley Cyrus &a...

The Grammys have been & gone and it's yet another year of disappointment. But this year feels different. Not only can the Recording Academy not recognise Hip-Hop like it's successfully done for decades, but now it's not even recognising Hip-Hop artists that explicitly say their work isn't Hip-Hop. But hey, black= Hip-Hop/R&B/Jazz, right? And let's not even start with "URBAN"... So what is...

A retrospective we didn't want to do at a crucial point in the subject's life & career. But due to his death and the recent posthumous release "Circles", this was the best time to dive into the music career of Mac Miller. For context: Ben has been a fan of Mac for years and parallels his life to Mac's. Charlie, however, only spun "The Divine Feminine" when it initially dropped and spent the we...

The third verse. What used to be something that made Hip-Hop special is now on life support. In recent years, entire albums have been dropping that have no third verse to be seen. One could say that this is a concerted effort to make music shorter for the short attention masses. So what is going on? Why are artists omitting third verses? And what are the implications for mainstream Hip-Hop caterin...

DMX. Everybody knows DMX off the name alone. Even if you haven't heard a DMX album, you know what DMX sounds like. You may even know his motifs. "Rrrrr" "AR, AR" "WHAT!" "UH HUUUUUH!" "WHERE MY DOGS!". I guarantee you read those and heard him in your head. He's an iconic artist for more reasons than one. The DITD duo explores DMX. From his music, to his lyrical content, to his influence. TIMESTAMP...

Think for a moment about where you get Hip-Hop news. Now think about where you get quotes from people of note. Unlike the regular News Journalism we all know of, Music Journalism isn't so easy to define. Because a majority of the news we get is either bare-bones information such as 1st Week sales or release dates. Or they simply come from the source and leads outlets to just regurgitate the inform...

Depending on who you are, 2019 was either a good year for Hip-Hop or a bad one. Factually, 2019 was a commercial dud. But look past the numbers and you will find plenty of artists taking centre stage with their work. The DITD duo recaps some of the year and looks forward to potential 2020 releases. TIMESTAMPS: Weekly Music Roundup - (3:36) Topic Intro & General Thoughts - (16:12) How we treat...

The 2010s... It's been an interesting one for sure. The music landscape has shifted dramatically in the past 9-10 years. Hip-Hop is now a dominant force in the music world, it's become easier to get into music and to get big, but even harder to stay on top. The world has sped up so fast, but we attempt to slow it all down for an hour and look forward to the new decade as well as take a look back....

The posthumous album is something that we want and don't want in equal measure. When somebody says "Do you want never-heard-before music from an artist you like?", of course, you're going to say yes! But when that artist isn't alive to have a say, some take pause and ask themselves do they want it? There are many places to look at posthumous albums, there are many examples, good and bad. The DITD...

Certifications are confusing. Simple as that. A lot of us claim to know a lot about it but in reality, past platinum plaques, we know nothing. Charlie has been long done with the certifications ever since Nicki Minaj broke a record held by Aretha Franklin. Ben, as the numbers guy, stands on the other side of the fence but the two come together in acknowledging that these numbers, especially in the...

Well. Here we are. The number 1 Album of the Decade. Throughout the past few weeks, Ben & Charlie have been going through their individual Top 10 AOTD's. From albums about blackness, concepts, mental health, self-reflection and looks into worlds we haven't experienced before. Both lists are interesting in different ways. But at the end of the day, it all came down to, not just the Hip-Hop Albu...

It's time for Part 3 of our four-part series covering our personal Top 10 Hip-Hop Albums of the Decade. On this episode, we cover our list from 4 to 2. TIMESTAMPS: Weekly Music Roundup - (2:27) Topic Intro/Charlie's No.4 - (23:53) Ben's No.4 - (36:05) Charlie's No.3 - (48:23) Ben's No.3 - (1:00:59) Charlie's No.2 - (1:10:49) Ben's No.2 - (1:22:49) Thanks for listening. Below are the Social account...

Our Top 10 Hip-Hop Albums of the Decade continues! On this episode, we cover albums that are ranked 7 to 5 on our lists. This episode went so long that we had to, for the first time ever, cut our runtime. So our Lighter Note had to be snipped a little. But don't fear, if you want to catch the omitted section, tune into Episode 52 of "What's Good?" W/Charlie Taylor. You can find the show in the sam...

As 2019 and the 2010s winds down, the DITD duo begins a four-part series, counting down their Top 10 Hip-Hop Albums of the decade. This episode covers numbers 10 to 8. These lists are 100% Subjective, this isn't about what album hits the hardest or the albums that sold the most or what was the most critically acclaimed. These are the albums that the duo loves the most, the albums that stuck to the...

The concept of a duo is an interesting one. You have one-time duos that catch a vibe and decide to make a project together. (The Throne, Drake & Future) You have homegrown duos that grow together (Eric B & Rakim, Mobb Deep, OutKast) and you have anomalies like Run The Jewels that just find the rare camaraderie that is as if they were homegrown. You also have the duos that rely on expertise...

Mixtapes, in the classic definition, is a thing of the past. But since the turn of the Millenium, Mixtapes have evolved to become more and more about the artist and nothing to do with the DJ/Producer anymore. So how did this happen? Did the DJ's fumble the bag? Has a fun essence of Hip-Hop gone away with the commercialisation of Mixtapes? Why does Charlie get so irked about Mixtapes sounding just...

Hip-Hop as a genre of music is always evolving, constantly changing, year by year. But what about those artists or those albums that kind of straddle the Hip-Hop sound but takes significant inspirations from other genres? The DITD duo talk about labels, (The things you stick on your chest, not the music ones...) genres and the foundations that Hip-Hop are built on. Is labelling something "Hip-Hop"...

Beefs are some of the greatest things about Hip-Hop culture, watching two (or more) artists go at each other on wax. It's a win-win for every Hip-Hop fan. Even more so if the tracks are genuinely fire. So the DITD duo looks at a couple of tasty rivalries that have produced some of the most ruthless tracks in music. We take a look at Ice Cube vs NWA (& Eazy vs Dre) and the recent beef that we s...

Hip-Hop indulges in plenty of things we can consider negative. Money, sex, guns, gangs to name a few. But none of those has been as contentious as the conversation around drugs. Back in the day, Hip-Hop were the sellers of them because that's what Uncle Sam forced them to do. Some outright denounced it, some made positives out of the negative. Now, Hip-Hop are the buyers, the users, and people hav...