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Interesting article in the Columbia Journalism Review. Chris Faraone looks at why rappers are identified by their given names, while other performers outside the hip-hop genre are identified by their stage names in the media.

At the Times, the penalty for being a rapper is twofold: you are routinely called out on your birth name (no matter how nerdy and ironic it might be), and you rarely are addressed as “Mr.” This nominal double standard surfaces from time to time in hip-hop articles throughout the mainstream press

(via Linguistic Anthropology)