Denver Nuggets star
Carmelo Anthony, who recently released his "Carmelo 1.5 Mixtape," has
come under heat for appearing in a DVD titled "Stop
Snitching," which allegedly features rappers threatening people who divulge
illegal activity to police.
U.S. Rep. Elijah
Cummings (D-Md.) of the 7th District, which includes Anthony’s old Baltimore,
Maryland neighborhood and the neighborhood where the DVD was shot, requested
that Anthony "take immediate action to formally condemn any association
by its players with activities that promote the illegal drug trade," the
Baltimore Sun reported.
Anthony has repeatedly
discounted the negative criticism of the DVD.
"I’m just on there," Anthony told the Baltimore Sun. "I understand
that everybody is on there talking about killing and doing this and that, but
it’s not like I’m on there with guns. I was back on my block, chillin.’ I was
going back to show love to everybody, thinking it was just going to be on the
little DVD, that it was just one of my homeboy’s recording."
Anthony appears
in about six minutes of the DVD, shot in September when Anthony was visiting
his old neighborhood.
The Nuggets Forward
is shown joking about Detroit Pistons Head Coach Larry Brown, who also coached
the Olympic basketball team Anthony was apart of. Brown frequently benched the
basketball star during the Olympic Games. "We gon’ lynch his ass if he
ever come here," one man said in the video.
A couple of rappers,
Black and Tony O, freestyle in the DVD, and Anthony at one point retorts in
a battle with Black, that he might "put some
money on his mother [expletive] brains." In another situation, Tony O freestyles
about a snitch.
"Carmelo has
never denied the fact that he comes from a tough neighborhood," Anthony’s
agent Calvin Andrews said in a statement. "He does not condone some of
the things that happen there and has worked very hard to rise above that difficult
environment," Andrews said.
Anthony
was also involved in a conflict last month at a New York bar, after someone
allegedly spat a drink in the face of his girlfriend, MTV host La La Vasquez.
