​This week's edition of the podcast put out by the storytelling outfit The Moth features a tale told by Fabrice Morvan, formerly one-half of the disgraced pop duo Milli Vanilli, now recording artist trying to make it on his own. As you might expect, it's a thumbnail sketch of his career, and it's a fascinating, sad story that begins with a recounting of the tense moments leading up to Milli Vanilli's Grammy win, discusses the genesis of their hair and the seductive charms of the music industry, and has Morvan singing a few bars acapella—because even though producer Frank Farian used other voices to craft the (out of print, which is a worse fate than it deserves, "authenticity" issues or no) Girl You Know It's True, both Morvan and his now-deceased bandmate Rob Pilatus wanted to sing. The podcast's available for free download at iTunes and is certainly worth the 14ish minutes of your time, especially if you're thinking of going into the world of dance-pop and have a sorta-sleazy producer wooing you; a few clips from the record, which might be the best-selling album to not be commercially available, after the jump.

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​Back in the early '90s, Ishmael Butler came to rap prominence as Butterfly in the group Digable Planets. These days, he's taken on the moniker Palaceer Lazaro and records as the lead voice in Sub Pop's first hip-hop signing, Shabazz Palaces. It's a metamorphosis that Butler has left deliberately shady, refusing to flesh out the biographical details between his two rap lives and leaving Shabazz Palaces' history defined largely by anonymity. But while it's tempting to use some sort of cocoon metaphor to describe Butler's grand artistic reinvention, he's left behind a trail of musical crumbs and curios that map out his gradual development.

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​Kool Herc plays the genesis figure in hip-hop's fable; the first party the Jamaican-born, Bronx-raised DJ threw in the recreation room of his building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in 1973 is credited with formalizing the genre. From behind two turntables Herc spun the short, percussive sections of (often) soul and funk songs; on the dance floor in front of him, kids would kick moves that eventually became known as breaking. Before hip-hop's holy old school trinity of Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, there was Herc. As Herc puts it today, "That's the reference point for hip-hop right there."

Backed up by the might of his Herculoids crew and a sound system comprised of a gargantuan wall of speakers, Herc continued to hold down the key DJ position during the period of hip-hop history that unfurled before the first rap records were released in 1979. Herc excelled in a creative playground of high school gymnasiums and local nightclubs, not the recording studios of corporate record labels that would scramble around to try and monetize hip-hop. In advance of his appearance at fellow old-school giant Melle Mel's 50th birthday party at BB Kings tomorrow--which will have a lineup spanning several rap generations--Herc looks back on his three most notable old-school hip-hop venues.

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