Their March 26 and 27 concerts would have served as a small homecoming for an artist whose lifelong love of hip-hop culture began nearly three decades ago in the Bay Area. Instead, the year-old rapper is back at his home in Honolulu, Hawaii. He and the Chee-Hoos managed to finish nearly half of their dates, including a show in New York and a final gig in Boston. Names like Shing02 and Nujabes may ring unfamiliar.
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Culture Trip stands with Black Lives Matter. During his 20s, the young hip hop fanatic made his mark on the Japanese hip hop scene not only through his releases, but by being a savvy business owner as well. He was the owner of two Shibuya-based record stores, T Records and Guinness Records, and in he founded the independent hip hop focused record label Hydeout Productions , which featured the world of local legends like Uyama Hiroto and international talent like Emancipator, as well as his own efforts. On February 26, , Nujabes was sadly involved in a traffic accident upon exiting the Shuto Expressway in Tokyo and passed away not long after. However his legacy still lives on to this day. Though in terms of mega-mainstream hip hop influence, it may be a little difficult to pin down where Nujabes sits, when discussing the evolution of the production of hip hop music, he definitely made his mark no matter how understated his arrival was. This combination of old world musicality with the more forward pushing ideologies of hip hop, produced a world in which a mix of both old style atmosphere and new boundary pushing flowed.
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When a traffic accident on Feb. The Japanese rapper Shingo Annen, better known by his professional name Shing02, was among the first to break the news, in a blog post published March Throughout his career, Seba had been a reluctant public figure, forever working to ensure that the focus remained squarely on his music. He opened his own shop, Guinness Records, at the age of 21 in , and it soon developed a following among discerning beat heads, not least because it sold the latest underground hip-hop releases for less than anywhere else. Seba dabbled in music-making while at high school, but began to work seriously on producing beats around , releasing a clutch of well-received DJ mixtapes. When I made my first loop, it was all I listened to for an entire day. The lead track featured the bilingual Japanese rapper L Universe, now better known by his J-pop alias, Verbal.
More Images. Please enable Javascript to take full advantage of our site features. Edit Artist. Born: February 7, , in Japan. Died: February 26, , in Tokyo, Japan aged
