Matt Testa News Today

Known for her philosophy of 'soft power,' Ethel Ennis said she was proud to have bloomed where she was planted, in her hometown of Baltimore

Open share drawer Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Sean “Diddy” Combs’ 2010 side project: a dark and stormy concept album about one man’s transit through love. The act of adopting a new nickname has become an astrological event for the artist-producer born Sean Combs. He got the name Puffy from a childhood friend who said a young Combs would huff and puff when ...

T-Pain has long been considered one of the innovators of bringing Auto-Tune to the mainstream in the late 2000s, leading rappers like Kanye West and Lil Wayne to use it prominently in their music. According to Diddy’s engineer Matt Testa, the Hip Hop mogul saw T-Pain as the architect of the movement and even asked for his permission to use Auto-Tune. After receiving the green light, T-Pain ended up getting royalties without contributing anything other than his influence. In a new interview wi...

norman lebrecht December 10, 2020 America’s oldest consevatory, the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is wrestling with historic issues of slave ownership. Intensive research has just revealed – shock – that Hopkins was a slave owner. Now they’re looking into George Peabody. George Washington owned slaves all his life but no-one has yet got around to renaming the capital. Universities, though, are in the frontline of rewriting history. Here’s a note from ...