Sunday Music: How Mass Appeal Kept Hip-Hop From Becoming a Museum
December 14, 2025·0 comments·zg
Art imitates life. To fit 5 decades of life into a piece of art though, especially in barely 2 minutes, deserves some celebrating. I’m not surprised to find it coming from Nas and DJ Premier, but the more I reflect on how it happened, the more I’m loving it.
We’re going to talk specifically about the song, “Madman” off of Light-Years, by Nas and Premier, but I feel like it deserves some extra background, first.
The past few years, we’ve enjoyed something of an epic run of Mass Appeal releases, showcasing mostly good NEW work from legendary/legacy artists. It feels like, it’s the system and pro-artist arrangement the blues artists never had, without turning into what the jazz artists only sort of got, in that none of these Mass Appeal releases have the art-conservatory vibe that almost always turns cool into commercial museum feeling.
How we got here and why this is working as well as it is deserves to be a bigger story. There’s a lot of Gen-X energy in this one, and a notable lack of Boomer BS-ing. In other words, people are making art AND getting paid without any of it feeling like a pure money grab, so - I’m happy.
The Mass Appeal story goes back to the late 90s, when it was a cool AF magazine. Think graffiti, mostly. Very underground, very punk-zine energy meets Complex, mostly because it straddled that line between art and vandalism (I guess that’s the best way to explain it, now?) and it just was super cool to leaf through. Clearly, it was niche popular at best. If one friend had a random copy they got from some unknown record shop, you’d look at it cover to cover six times over and hoped you’d run into a future copy when you were out and about. As a commercial entity, it was just a magazine though. So when the internet showed up, like many magazines, it died off.
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