New York Hip Hop – Birthplace Magazine NY Hip Hop – Music, News, Information and Events – New York, NYC, NY

A new crop of NY's finest are marrying the home of hip hop's traditions with a bold look toward the future. Here's a quick playlist of names you either should know by now or need to know in 2012.

We're back with another installment of "10 Must See Videos by NY-area Hip Hop Artists," a semi-regular series where we take time to collect and deliver recently released, entertaining visual displays from hip hop artists and filmmakers in the New York City area.

Freestyle Mondays, NYC's longest-running weekly, live band, open mic, freestyle rap series, celebrates 10 years, starting 2012 in a new location, but with the same winning formula and eager participants that continue to rank Freestyle Mondays as one of our favorite reasons why New York hip hop doesn't suck.

Despite what some New York hip hop purists want to believe, 1990s New York hip hop does not define the genre. Today's music is no less "real" than that of hip hop's Golden Era. This doesn't mean that good, New York flavored hip hop doesn't exist, but is also doesn't mean that it has to sound the same as the 90s.

The Hip Hop TakeOver "mini-thon" airs Saturday, December 10th, from 4 p.m. until 1 a.m. Sunday morning on WBAI, 99.5 FM, New York City and online at www.wbai.org. Be sure to tune in and support New York hip hop in one of its most treasured forms.