As a casual fan of hip-hop, I find some publications on the music, the scene, and the culture inaccessible. Not so with recently released DropMagazine. It’s not as if co-founders Alex Richard and Sam Wils don’t know their stuff — based on the first few weeks, they do — but the articles, columns, reviews, interviews, and industry news offered on their site seem targeted at a slightly broader audience than the big name outlets. With any genre, increased popularity seems to lead to fragmentation as various cliques, sub genres, mainstream and underground elements splinter into increasingly incompatible (even downright hostile) camps. Media treatment of hip-hop can make matters worse, resulting in a off-putting mish-mash for those of us who love the music, but don’t want to deal with the drama. DropMagazine offers a fresh voice in the community, plus directly accessing its readers via blog, where users can comment and keep tabs on any new developments. If its early history is any indication, Drop’s future looks mighty promising.

“Collaborations. Everyone's at it – stores, brands, websites, blogs, magazines, toy companies, musicians (often in the very loosest sense of the term) and pretty much anyone who wants to get involved.” The collaboration has long since departed from the time when it was thought special and unique. Upset with the hoardes of collaborations, or as was so eloquently worded, “collabortions”, the team over at Sneaker Freaker have created the Top Ten Sneaker Collaboration Commandments: a witty advisory to those looking to design sneakers, including commandments like, “Thou Shall Take More Than Five Minutes to Design the Product,” and “Thou Shall Leave the Colorway in the Hands of Those Who Know What They're Doing.” The Commandments are a great set of rules for any designer to take into consideration, and hopefully they will aid in stopping all this “collabortion” madness.

When trucker hats became trendy a few years ago, who thought we’d get to where we are now? Behold Fujizaki’s new Cushioned Collection; these hats are limited edition and are a preview of what’s to come in their Fall/Winter 2007 collection. The front is made of cushioned satin (either white or black), and the inside is lined in either gold or purple satin. And lest I forget to mention that these hats are healthier than many others? Thanks to their Thermo Molded Transparency Visor which offers 100% UV protection, your pretty mug won’t get sunburned. While you’re not going to find these in some off-interstate truck stop in the middle of Nebraska, Fujizaki is currently distributed in Italy, Spain, Korea, Portugal, Denmark and in selected shops in Monaco, Dubai, Israel, Japan, and Australia — they are available through Fujizaki’s web store for 60 Euros. Get one before Ashton Kutcher finds out about them…after that, well. You know what happens.

Last night I went to see the film Knocked Up, and it proved to be every bit of the gut splitting, no holds barred comedy that everyone says it is. At the end, I wondered to myself how many times the word “fuck” was said, and concluded that it had to be in the hundreds. Is mainstream media finally warming up to the fact that people have simply adopted words like “fuck” into their everyday vocabulary…and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but merely the way language works? This ingenious Bud Light ad, “The Swear Jar,” hints at an answer of “maybe” to that question, as fuck-sayers are ultimately rewarded handsomly with macrobrew. As I watch the ad, I can’t help but to chuckle at the thought that day to day business probably wouldn’t get conducted without words like “fuck.”

It’s something you have to see to believe: four famous Brazilian graffiti artists, Nunca and Nina Pandolfo and duo Os Gemeos have been working for the past few weeks on covering the medieval Scottish Kelburn Castle with their colorful, signature styles. The photo of the project so far depicts a castle that looks like it would perfectly fit in at Disneyland as home to a new psychedelia-theme ride. The bizarre idea came from David Boyle and his sister, Alice, members of the “oldest family in Scotland to have continuously inhabited the same historic home, Kelburn Castle.” The Graffiti Project aims to bring together notions of urban and rural as well as cultural and traditional differences, but I think they may have already succeeded. Lord Glasgow, who is David and Alice’s father, has been a good sport throughout, even declaring in a humorous message posted on the site, “When my son, David, and daughter, Alice, came to tell me they had secured the services of some Brazilian artists to paint graffiti on the back of Kelburn Castle, I thought they had gone mad…Now, I wait with both excitement and trepidation, to see the result.” We are, too.

Photo via Supertouch

In today’s world of oh-so-current pop culture references and off-the-cuff fashion collaborations, high quality apparel with a minimalist style comes as a breath of fresh air. Tokyo-born stylist Tadadshi Mochizuki must have felt the same when he developed his RICO clothing line in 2002; his latest release takes inspiration from the 1965 Dylan classic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and its accompanying video shot in an alley behind London’s Savoy Hotel during Dylan’s Don’t Look Back tour. Mochizuki plucked key words from the cue cards Dylan holds up during the video and incorporated them into his latest release of men’s t-shirts. The shirts have a casual yet sophisticated style and the nearly abstract design will appeal to the most discriminating tastes – including Dylan fans. The RICO tees are available exclusively at Gamma Player, one of Chicago’s freshest boutiques.