The 20 Best Songs in Videogames

The first commercial videogame involved navigating a rocket ship; it was created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1971. Music has been around for um… a lot longer than that. But the two have been intertwined from the nearly the beginning of gaming, as far back as Atari 2600, which allowed gamers to play alongside background “music,” which was really a series of simple loops. ...  read more

Tagging Museum Walls

Graffiti has long been considered one of the four fundamental elements of hip-hop culture, along with MCing, DJing and breakdancing. To ensure that this important visual component was properly represented in Recognize!, curators commissioned D.C. graffiti artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, whose work has been featured in advertisements and movies, to tag four 20-foot panels lining the hallway between the exhibition galleries. During the summer preceding the opening, Conlon and Hupp tagged the panels with the exhibition's title, their own tags (CON and AREK), two stylized self-portraits, and lots of playing cards—in particular, the king of diamonds. "You have...  read more

Hip-Hop Through the Lens of Portraiture

Hip-hop, by nature, is autobiographical. MCs tend to identify themselves strongly—even existentially—with a particular place and time, detailing their often humble beginnings and remaining the primary subjects of their own songs. In this way, hip-hop is a form of...  read more