Andrew Noz of the hip hop blog Cocaine Blunts offers his some of his favorite rap tracks right now, Gas Station from SL Jones and Kissin Pink from A$AP Rocky.

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Michael Rapaport (above right, with Q-Tip) has an extensive list of acting credits, from Woody Allen films to roles on Boston Public, Friends, and Prison Break. For his newest project, he began with a vision to profile his favorite hip-hop group, A Tribe Called Quest, and ended up documenting their deep-rooted friendships and conflicts along with the musical history of the group.

The movie is called Beats, Rhymes and Life, and features interviews with members Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Mohammed and Jarobi White. Animated sequences of Tribe songs are interspersed with remarks from hip-hop producers, radio personalities and rappers, and give a portrait of the time as well as of the group itself. The film opens in NYC and LA on July 8th.

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JESSE THORN: It's The Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn. My guest is Michael Rapaport. He is, of course, best known as an actor, having worked for some 20 odd years with legendary directors like Woody Allen and Spike Lee, and on numerous television programs, innumerable films, in audio, all over everywhere.

He's here today, though, for his directorial debut; a documentary called Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. It's the story of one of hip hops most significant and storied groups, and I know one of the most significant to Rapaport specifically. It opens July 8th in New York and Los Angeles.

Michael, I want to ask you personally what A Tribe Called Quest meant to you in 1989, 90, when they came out and you were a very young man; you were at an impressionable age.

Cocaine Blunts blogger Noz is back to bring us some of his favorite tracks right now:

DJ Quik - "Ghetto Rendezvous"

Max B - "Where Do I Go?"

Fat Trel - "Tokyo Spinach"

E-40 - "Concrete"

And two more that were cut for broadcast:

Juicy J & Don Trip - "Introduce"

Shabazz Palaces - “An Echo from the Hosts that Profess Infinitum”

Click here for a full transcript of our talk with Noz.

Prodigy (aka Albert Johnson) is a Grammy Award-winning rapper. He and his collaborator Havoc founded the seminal hip hop duo Mobb Deep. His new autobiography is My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy.

JESSE THORN: It's The Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn. My guest, Prodigy, is one of the fathers of hardcore hip hop. As a teenager in the early 1990s, he and his partner Havoc, found an East Coast answer to the emerging West Coast gangster sound. As Mobb Deep, their tone was dark, eerie, and minimal; and their lyrics cold and brutal. Let's take a listen to Prodigy's opening verse from Shook Ones Part II, the apical single from the apical record, The Infamous.

Prodigy was recently released from three years in prison on gun charges, and he's just put out an autobiography called My Infamous Life and a new free digital record called The Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson EP.

Prodigy, welcome to The Sound of Young America, how are you?

PRODIGY: How you doing, man? Thank you, I'm doing good, I'm doing really good.

Das Racist is a Brooklyn-based hip hop trio known for tracks like "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" and "hahahaha jk?" They've referred to their particular approach to hip hop as "deconstructualist," combining humor, nonsequiturs, and culture theory. Their newest album, Relax, is due later this year. Victor Vazquez (aka Kool A.D.) and hype man Ashok Kondabolu (aka Dap) joined us in the studio.

JESSE THORN: It's The Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn. My guests, members of the hip hop group Das Racist, are a lot of different things. Heems, Kool AD and Dap are, in part, the heir to the playful smart identity politics of “Daisy Age”-era De La Soul. They're the men behind one of the most successful hip hop novelty records of the last couple of years, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” They were the only rappers in last year's Sundance Film Festival, at least that I'm aware of. They're MCs who drop social theorists' names casually into their lyrics, like no one in hip hop since Diggable Planets' second album, Blowout Comb. They're also three guys from Williamsburg, who apparently like to drink and smoke weed. Let's hear a little bit of “hahahaha jk?” from their most recent mix tape, Sit Down, Man.

Two of the three members of Das Racist, Kool AD and Dap join me on the show. Welcome, guys.

VICTOR VAZQUEZ AKA "KOOL A.D.": Hello.

ASHOK KONDABOLU AKA “DAP”: Hi.

Click here for a full transcript of this interview.

Dan Charnas is a veteran of the hip hop business and one of a few early writers of hip hop journalism. His newest book is The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop.

JESSE THORN: It’s The Sound of Young America, I’m Jesse Thorn. My guest on the program is Dan Charnas. He’s held basically every position there is to hold, outside of artist, in the world of hip hop; and has made the transition from a record company guy to writer. His new gargantuan book is, I think, one of the better books about hip hop I’ve ever read. It’s called the Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop. Dan Charnas, thanks for being on The Sound of Young America.

DAN CHARNAS: Thanks for having me.

JESSE THORN: The obvious question is: there are all these books of hip hop history, such as Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop and Brian Coleman’s Check the Technique and a million others; why did you think it was important to write a book that was specifically about the business side of hip hop?

DAN CHARNAS: That’s a really good question. I want to note that Jeff Chang’s book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop was really one of the big inspirations for writing this book, because what Jeff did was - - he really wrote the first linear history of the culture and more specifically of the generation. None of the great books of hip hop really talked about how the records were made; not in terms of how they were made in the studio, but how the artists got signed, how they got developed, how they got pushed out into the world. But then the larger question of how did this obscure street culture that nobody knew about from the streets of New York become, within 30 years, the world’s predominant pop culture and a multi-billion dollar business. You can’t tell that story, which is a great American story, without talking about the business people.

Click here for a full transcript of this interview.

We continue our journey into The Sound of Young America's vast audio archive with this program from The Sound of Young America Classics.

Grammy-winning rapper Killer Mike is a native of Adamsville, Georgia, outside of Atlanta. Since debuting on the Outkast single "The Whole World" in 2001, he has emerged from the shadow of his legendary mentors, combining a ferocious delivery with lyrical density in a manner reminiscent of Ice Cube in his hey-day. He recently released "I Pledge Allegiance To The Grind," a two-CD "street album" with his crew, Grind Time Rap Gang.

Please note: we had a little phone trouble 2/3 of the way through and Mike had to go on speakerphone, apologies for any audio quality issues.

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