Tonight and Saturday night our friends at Massline, KEXP, and The Stranger are bringing something called the Freshly Dipped Tour to the Showbox at the Market. We don't know what Freshly Dipped means, but we do know that headlining the night will be Seattle's own hip hop heroes, Blue Scholars, and from Oakland, California, The Hieroglyphics. It was about four years ago that we first heard "Blue School" from the Scholars' debut self-titled album. We......

Ra Scion stars in Common Market's newest offering: a music video for their Tobacco Road single "Trouble Is." Directed by Sabzi's brother Zia Mohajerjasbi, the video's set in the small-town South and features a very funky gospel choir, gorgeous old-timey aesthetic accents, and oodles of cameos by local hiphop heads. This is a case where the video adds to the song rather than distracts from it. Well done, Zia! *update: Here's the full video including......

Common Market released Black Patch War in early May, but it's taken Seattlest awhile to get fully on board with the album. You too are forgiven for sleeping on it this long, but further snoozing is not recommended. Ra Scion has posted the lyrics to three of the seven songs from the album over at his blog, six minutes to sunrise, with footnotes and everything, and it makes for a riveting read if you're so......

Think nightlife is getting the short end of the stick in Seattle? Filled with righteous indignation over the way hiphop gets portrayed as Capitol Hill's downfall? We do, and we are, so it was a healthy shock to the system (and yet oddly familiar) to read about this Saudi hiphop group which, to the great chagrin and social shame of the guys' fathers and wives, made it onto MTV Arabia. From the MSNBC story about......