It’s a central concept on one spectrum of the ideology that is gender studies, an explanation for why the humans that carry they Y chromosome act as they do. It’s been overanalyzed and oversimplified to the point where it is almost cliché, but it remains as prevalent as ever in our society and burns the brightest in the hip-hop community. It is the idea that men don’t cry, that men don’t talk about their feelings. We instead shoot guns, talk about football, cook only things that end in “Helper” and tell women we love them only when the door to the bedroom is shut tight and the lights are off. Even though this is very much an 18th century ideology laying out a blueprint for how men should act, it has snuck its way into the 19th century. It’s baffling, really. 80′s rock bands made a living crooning about their feelings and one of the most popular modern artists of today, John Mayer, is signing about exploring women’s bodies and feeling perfectly lonely. But hip-hop finds itself stuck in quicksand, a third-world country compared to other genres of music that have stopped trying to dictate what a man can or cannot sing about. Hip-hop birthed a cesspool of emcees who spoke about guns, drugs, their lack of love for women and whole lot else that never actually played a part in their lives. It was a never ending play, a fantasy world starring the Waka Flakas and Gucci Manes of the world. And while I despise what these fictitious rappers stand for, I almost cannot blame them. It’s the culture that hip-hop created, the idea that if you aren’t hard you don’t belong in the game. It’s dissipated some with the emergence of people like J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and other rappers who have no fear of describing themselves as they really are, but the walls still stand strong.

I always get a bit nostalgic whenever I come across Apathy’s name. Back in the days of early high school, when I was wearing oversized t-shirts, spraying Axe all over my body and a hip-hop newbie, I used to roll with the Army of the Pharaohs crew. These were guys like Jedi Mind Tricks, 7L & Esoteric, Celph Titled, Apathy and others. I don’t listen to these guys as much anymore, my hip-hop palate has matured with age, but Apathy was always my favorite, and he can still spit with the best of them. The Connecticut emcee drops a video for the first single off his hilariously titled upcoming album, Honkey Kong, dropping August 23rd. Enjoy.

Many of you here on 5STARHIPHOP may not be familiar with these three spitters, we don’t post their music here very much, but don’t think for a second that this is anything but pure dopeness. Random Axe consists of Black Milk and Guilty Simpson from Detroit, as well as the Nah Right-championed Sean Price from NYC. This it that put-on-a-fitted-cap-sag-your-jeans-talk-shit-and-flip-off-the-cops-type rap right here. Their album of the same title dropped today for $1.99 over at Amazon.com, so if you want to hear more and support good hip-hop for the same amount you might drop on Wendy’s sandwich later today, please do.

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The headline to this article can be misleading. If the Heat and Cleveland’s arch-nemesis LeBron James defeat the aging Dallas Mavericks this month, it’ll sting. And if Jason Terry’s airplane persona remains delayed on the runway and J.J. Barea keeps playing like a hobbit instead of just strongly resembling one, that outcome is inevitable. But as we Clevelanders search for a reason not to implode if LeBron indeed slips that rings over his stupid, yet talented, finger, I think I’ve found a pretty good one. And that reason is, for the first time in his life, LeBron James is not the best player on his basketball team.

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It is a strange, but maybe common practice I divulge in. When I think about different parts of my life, I can’t help but think about the music I was listening to at the time. Play me any song from Love Below/Speakerboxx and my mind will drift off to the snow-splashed hills of Banff, Canada, where I went on a luxurious ski-trip with my family in high school. Each morning the voice of one of the members of Outkast would pulsate through my headphones as I sat in the front seat of our rental car, taking in the gigantic mountains that snarled back at me through the window during our half hour drive from the hotel to the resort each morning. Turn up a track from Kanye West’s The College Dropout and I’ll picture myself sitting in the Philadelphia airport, patiently waiting out a seven-hour layover to return home to Cleveland after visiting France for a week as a freshman. But this story isn’t about Big Boi and fluffy white ski trails or Kanye and oversized baguettes. It’s about a dorm room, a Roots CD, and Wale.

I always tell people my discovery of The Roots spurred my love of hip-hop. My infatuation with the legendary group is a tale for another day, but their CD, Rising Down, which I received in the mail packaged with a t-shirt engraved with that same title, is important. I was a freshman in college and hip-hop was still relatively new to me. I had dabbled in some weird shit, mostly Vinnie Paz from Jedi Mind Tricks rap about murdering Christians, but from the moment I sat down to listen to the dark masterpiece that was The Roots seventh album, I knew I wanted more of whatever it was that resonated so deeply inside of me. As I looked for ways to branch out and and consume more music, I was particularly drawn to a young, dread-locked fellow by the name of Wale who appeared on the finale of the album, a song entitled “Rising Up.” I was particularly tickled by his line “so good rappers ain’t eatin’ they Olsen-twinning.” I wanted Wale to be my gateway drug into rap, so I immediately began searching for his music anywhere I could find it. I stumbled upon “Nike Boots,” still my favorite Wale song to this day. I scoured the internet for his mixtapes and I downloaded them all. It was like I started on weed and had moved on to cocaine the very next day. Wale was just so different than anyone I had heard before. His District of Columbia roots gave him a distinct accent which made it hard for me to understand his lyrics at times, but I liked that. His cadence was distinct, non-traditional and at times off beat, but I liked that too. Most of all, I loved his obscure references. He would evoke the names of people I had never heard of and compare things to them. Wale taught me who Mills Lane and Glass Joe were. He made me chuckle when he said “I never back up like Cleo Lemon on myself.” I mean, who uses a former backup quarterback for the Miami Dolphins in a rhyme? Wale does, that’s who. I loved how his mixtapes had a theme to them. His love for Seinfeld birthed A Mixtape About Nothing, his best and most acclaimed work. The irony was that the songs on that tape were far from meaningless, as Wale had a dialogue with his listeners about the N-word, the true meaning of success and countless other social issues. Wale Folarin wasn’t rapping about nothing, he was speaking on parts of his life that were just cloaked in incredible lyricism.

The mention of Lebron James’ name has thrown me into a fury more than once, but Chris Broussard and Skip Bayless took “entertaining banter” to a new level this morning on ESPN’s 1st and 10. Posed with the question of what they thought of LeBron’s response to Scotty Pippen’s claim that he could one day be better than Michael Jordan, the Killer B’s soon began gunning for each other’s throats. What began as a simple request to gauge LeBron’s response ended with Bayless telling Broussard that he “sold his journalistic soul” and Broussard telling Bayless that he was, as the kids say, tripping.

What’s ironic about this entire confrontation, and maybe a bit alarming, is the notion of credibility and objectivity. I don’t want to get all journalistic on everybody (I already took four years of objectivity talk at Mizzou, I’m good on that), but lost in all of the screaming and yelling and Skip’s mullet flapping in the wind is the fact that neither Broussard or Bayless have the right to question the other’s credibility.

Hey Delonte. It’s Jordan. It’s been a while since we’ve spoken, almost a year now. Time flies huh? Last time we talked, you were in Boston, that awful town where Paul Pierce flashes gang signs and fans of men who wear Red Sox used to complain about a curse. The last time we spoke you were trying your damnedest to beat the Celtics, to keep the Cavaliers’ season alive for one more day. You were part of a machine, a well-oiled machine, one that won 66 games during the regular season. Everybody was best friends. Heck, you guys probably had sleepovers at LeBron’s house, intensely watching Scoobie Doo reruns, trying to guess who the bad guy was before the end of the show. I bet you got it every time. Oh Delonte. You were the clown of the group, weren’t you? Remember that time, during player introductions, when you jumped into one of your teammates arms, the rest of the Cavaliers surrounding you as you guys created a slightly homoerotic family photo? Yeah, that was pretty awesome wasn’t it. You were always so funny, so outgoing. You loved doughnuts, didn’t you? So much so that you told J.J. Hickson that he “betta have” them, clearly a strong lesson in discipline that made Hickson a better human being. You went to KFC and ordered $47 worth of chicken. Not just any man can do that, Delonte. You did though, and the world was better for it.

I’ve cooked. I may not be able to whip up a mean potato salad or douse a well-cooked salmon with spices from foreign lands, but I can get into the middle of a dance circle and mime like I’m pouring a bunch of different ingredients into an invisible caldron. Lil’ B created a dance and I obliged, just like I Supermaned all them hoes as a freshman in college. But just like I quickly tired of Soulja Boy, who is known more for his ignorant comments than his awful music, I’ve tired of Lil’ B.

Maybe I shouldn’t put all the blame on the Based God himself. In what is seeming more and more like a new golden age of hip-hop, maybe my blame should placed on the idea that as long as you aren’t conforming to the mainstream, you can come in and be respected as a hip-hop artist. Maybe I should be blaming the media outlets that see someone doing something out of the ordinary and rush in to place them on a pedestal before researching just how genuine they are in the first place. Whatever it may be, Lil’ B’s latest anticts, sprinkled in with the meteoric rise of Odd Future, have got me a bit perturbed.

Lupe Fiasco had a plan. Once upon a time the emcee hailing from Chicago, blessed with a style that few had heard before and the ability to paint vivid pictures with his words, looked to put out three albums. First, he would drop Food & Liquor, where he would allude to his character Michael Young while also introducing himself. Then, he would drop The Cool, a concept album in which Michael Young would encounter The Game, conquering it before becoming consumed by its power and ultimately perishing. Finally, there would be LUPEnd, the final chapter in his trilogy, a summation of Michael Young and Lupe’s parallel journey. Something went wrong though. Food & Liquor and The Cool were created, distributed and labeled classics by those who listened to them. But LUPEnd never followed. Rumors floated in and out of the blogosphere that Lupe was now putting together a completely different trilogy of albums, but that also proved to be false. Finally, three years after The Cool, LASERS surfaced as Lupe’s next album, and the anticipation for another lyrical masterpiece began to bubble.

Machine Gun Kelly performs “End of the Road” off of his excellent mixtape Lace Up, which XXL recently ranked as number 30 of the 100 best mixtapes of 2010, on the first stop of his Lace Up Tour at the University of Missouri.

As a Cleveland native, it was pretty dope looking around the crowd and seeing people sing the words right back at MGK. If his name has reached the small town of Columbia, Missouri already, the kid has a pretty bright future. If you have a chance to check out his show, I highly recommend it. It’s full of energy and feels like one big party. Enjoy.

When separated into their individual parts, the Money Making Jam Boys might not seem that impressive. Besides Black Thought, their body of work is bare, lacking quantity and recognition. But when Thought, STS, Dice Raw, P.O.R.N. and Truck North gather together in a studio, damage is done. Mics are incinerated, as verbal barrages pummel it into submission. Hyperbole? Sure, but as you grab a set of headphones and treat your ears to the audio pleasures of this 5-man wrecking crew, I promise you haven’t heard anything like it. Hit the jump to understand why.

Stalley “The Tune Up” from Kellen Dengler on Vimeo.

The talented emcee with the spoken word flow continues to prep Lincoln Way Nights (Intelligent Trunk Music) that is dropping on Feb. 8. This time, he clones himself three times for a dope visual to this short but poignant track. Also, shoutout to Stalley for rocking a Cleveland fitted and “Cleveland is the City” hoodie in the video. A lot of good music is coming out of my hometown.