Eric K. Arnold

Get Off the Stage marks Too $hort's 17th album — not counting compilations and reissues — but it's also the end of an era. It's his last for Jive, the label he's been associated with since 1988. "I'm a legend in the game," he says on "Shittin' on 'Em," adding,...

Ever since Buena Vista Social Club, Afro-Cuban music has been on the radar of mainstream trendspotters both old and young. Yet the majority of new releases and rereleases since BVSC have concentrated on the Caribbean side of the equation (with the possible exception of Senegal's Orchestre Baobab), to the detriment...

Hmmm. Let's see. Bay Area all-stars, check. Illmatic production, check. What's not to love about Heroes in the City of Dope? From the intro, "Noon Time," which interpolates Led Zep's "No Quarter," to the closer, "Badlands," which mixes Yay Area slaps with exotic-sounding melodies, Heroes disproves the theorem that the...

In a world of vitamin-watered-down gangsta rappers with suburb-dwelling, soccer-mom fan bases, C-Bo is a tall can of Steel Reserve — far worse for your health but more potent and intoxicating. This is a man with combined record sales of 3 million who once said in an interview that he'd...

While Rick Rock, Droop-E, and EA-Ski are often cited as the Bay Area's premier slap-nicians, Traxamillion's dope-ass album suggests that the San Jose-based producer is just as responsible. Trax has the basic slap formula down, but what makes his knocks so habit-forming is his use of keyboards to create a...