I mean, I’d heard Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines” — who hadn’t, you couldn’t miss it/avoid it. At the time we considered that the Rosetta Stone of rap, although I often mentioned that Isaac ...

In the summer of 1984 when I started work on SPIN, which was then nothing more than a vague idea for a magazine about the music people I knew were actually listening to and the larger world we lived ...