In honor of today being 4/20—every smoker's favorite day of the year—SOTC has compiled the 25 Best Rap Songs relating to weed. Though some may be more about bud than others, all are guaranteed to make your high all the more enjoyable. Be forewarned, though... this list doesn't have any happy hippy weed music—this is straight thugged-out entertainment. Locate your lighters.

More »

Since the days of Wild Style and Krush Groove, rappers have put their music on hold and delved into the film world. A bunch of these efforts were pretty bad—remember Ice-T in Leprechaun in the Hood—while others were so bad they were good. Cam crying in Killa Season or KRS fleeing the scene without a word in Who's The Man? had some unintentional comedy, as did DMX trying to explain to Nas what our purpose on earth is ("Shorty can't eat no books!") in Belly. And then there were the ones that were actually straight-up good.

The 18 films that follow didn't get much in the way of Oscar recognition, but if cinema is meant to entertain, well, they do that and then some.

More »

The saga continues... for 10:24.

Last week, the new Gorillaz track "DoYaThing" dropped. It's long—a full 13-minutes and some seconds of music, a lot of which involves Andre 3000 getting frenzied and inspired with that rapping thing he does so well. With "DoYaThing" and persistent talk about Outkast reunion rumors bedazzling up the Internet, it seems like an apt prompt to get all expansive and cobble together the world's longest rap mixtape.

But first some rules! We're imposing a ten-minute minimum threshold. In the interests of listenability, we're also nixing any freestyles (sorry Game and your "300 Bars," and Weezy and your alleged "10,000 Bars"), and we're abiding by the rule of keeping it moving so the playlist spans hip-hop's growth and doesn't just dwell in a pool of lengthy old-school rap tracks (not that doing so wouldn't result in a very fine mixtape). We're also being curmudgeonly and overlooking anything that drifts into the realm of the ridiculous, like Canibus's 45-minute "Poet Laurette Infinity"—after all, if you're making your way through an artisanal 12-course tasting menu, the last thing you want is Canibus's rancid, oversized pulled-pork sandwich tampering with the delicate balance of your seared scallops with morels in a balsamic reduction sauce. In the interests of playlist culture maximization (and further clogging up your iPod), here's the world's greatest longest 12-track rap mixtape.

More »

Coming to you from heaven's art gallery: "Triumph Of A Heaven."

As you may have heard, Björk's latest album, Biophilia, has been specially designed to work best on an Alphasmart 2000 word-processor. This pioneering piece of multimedia is likely huge fun for tech-heads, but for music fans it might also be the aural equivalent of playing with your food. And Björk's food is usually fine as is.

So, then, why not take the opportunity of Biophilia's release to plot Björk's hip-hop connections. She said that Public Enemy's music was a fixture on the Sugarcubes' tour bus back in the day. Since fleeing that band and going solo, she's maintained on-and-off collaborations with rap artists and industry figures alike. Here then are Björk's ten most prominent connections to rap, listed in chronological order for optimum nerd-friendliness.

More »

RZA made it. It consists, from available evidence, entirely of dudes kickin' ass. It includes members of Jackie Chan's stunt team, a 34th-generation Shaolin monk, and Dr. King Ogun Ali Muhammad, founder of the Universal African Fighting System. (I'll admit I wasn't really sold on this until I learned that Dr. King Ogun Ali Muhammad, founder of the Universal African Fighting System, was involved.) It has, per Vulture, no release date as yet. But it will happen. Oh, yes. Spoiler alert: The Golden Phoenix is not going to win.

This picture currently serves as the entryway to the Vampire Weekend website. Augur of things to come? Rebuke to the haters? Larfs for the sake of larfs? No doubt we will find out soon enough. ...And, here we go: "What do Lil Jon, Joe Jonas, Jake Gyllenhaal, and RZA have in common" asks Anthem Magazine? "Well, aside from sharing the spotlight at the epicenter of music and film, they were all recruited to make cameo appearances in the new Vampire Weekend music video. The clip is for 'Giving Up the Gun,' the second single off the indie rockers' heavily lauded sophomore studio album, Contra, out now on XL Recordings." The video's co-director, Emmett Malloy, tells the magazine that the clip will depict a "bizarre-o tennis match." [Vampire Weekend, Anthem, via Pitchfork]

Surely you recall Victory or Death, the massive RZA-helmed tribute to Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's George Washington Crossing the Potomac painting, except with Wu-Tang members and hidden ninjas and a website that plays a remix of "O Fortuna" at swelling volume? Well our pals at the LA Weekly had the bright idea of asking the rapper how he got himself into that George Washington suit he sports so ardently on the bow of that canoe:

More »

Um, 80" by 60", 50 hidden elements per canvas, an original acrylic handprint straight from the palm of the RZA, a Wu-Tang flag, and a website that plays a remix of "O Fortuna" at swelling volume as a camera zooms in and out on the details. Part of a greater project called the Monument Series. Limited to 360. Reserve now! [h/t @vultureblog]