When a photo of Raekwon and Jay Z surfaced, heads spun at the thought of the two collaborating on wax. Rae’s album, Fly International Luxury Art, was released this week and that expected track is missing. The Chef chopped it up with AllHipHop CEO Chuck Creekmur and dished on why that song never came to life.
He said when Jay made an unexpected visit to the studio, the two emcees had great chemistry.
“I actually came to the studio, and they said, ‘Yo, he actually wasn’t going to be able to be there while you was doin’ it.’ I was like, ‘I know n—s who’s busy.’ But yo, he wound up coming to the session. We talked about life. We talked about real s###. Real n—a s–t, family.”
The Wu-Tang rep said he has only met Jay two or three times during his career but was still excited to do the song, entitled “Heaven.” But because Ghostface Killah couldn’t mesh his schedule with theirs, the song has not seen the light of day.
“I think he just had a vision to put Ghost and me on a track together,” Raekwon says. “I was able to do my part, but Ghost wasn’t available at the time…Next thing you know, he didn’t want to put it out because he didn’t have what he wanted. And I know I get like that too…No love lost on my side.”
Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul got hit with a technical foul during the fourth quarter of his team’s Game 5 loss to the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday night, and the call left people scratching their heads.
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly has a lyrical makeup that has complexities which make it hard to digest all in one sitting. While trying to decipher its messages, fans may have missed that somewhere in the album pamphlet the album’s subtitle is listed in braille.
“[There]’s actually a sketch of braille that’s added to the title hidden inside the booklet that I don’t think nobody has caught yet,” the good kid told Mass Appeal. “You can actually feel the bump lines. But if you can see it, which is the irony of it, you can break down the actual full title of the album.”
Complex got in contact with Allison Hawes, MS who is a professor for the visually impaired. She said he used a basic form of Literary Braille, called uncontracted braille, and that subtitle reads “A Kendrick By Letter Blank Lamar.” It’s assumed that he meant “A Blank Letter By Kendrick Lamar.”
Well Lil’ B certainly hasn’t been having the best of luck. He is now accusing hotel staff in Oakland, C.A. of stealing $10K from him. He goes as far as to film a conversation with the manager of the Red Lion hotel, as he blasts her for refusing to help him find out who stole his money. Ummm this is unfortunate and crime can happen anywhere, but why was he staying at the Red Lion?
This Fox News reporter got the interview he was not looking for. Nick Mosby, a member of the Baltimore City Council stated on air – “The vast majority of protesters in Baltimore are peaceful, and they’re doing their best to put their city back together. The media should focus on that.”
“This is bigger than Freddie Gray,” he continued. “This is about the social economics of poor urban America. These young guys are frustrated, they’re upset and unfortunately they’re displaying it in a very destructive manner. When folks are undereducated, unfortunately they don’t have the same intellectual voice to express it the way other people do, and that’s what we see through the violence today.”
At the end of a short interview with Fox News reporter Leland Vittert on the streets of West Baltimore Monday night, , decided he had enough. “At this point, this is not productive,” Mosby said, walking away from Vittert. “All you want to do is talk about…”
CNN host Wolf Blitzer was determined to make the focus of his Tuesday interview with Deray McKesson about the amount of trouble protesters had caused in Baltimore, but the community organizer quickly turned the tables on the journalist.
“You want peaceful protests, right?” Blitzer began his interview by asking McKesson. “Yes,” McKesson replied, after being momentarily taken aback by the obvious nature of the question. “Remember, the people that have been violent since August have been the police. When you think about the 300 people that have been killed this year alone..”
McKesson agreed that the property damage in Baltimore on Monday night was unfortunate, but he urged Blitzer to remember that there had been “many days of peaceful protests here in Baltimore City and places all around the country.”
So Nick Young and Iggy Azalea may get married eventually.After all, they bought a house together and now have been dating over a year. Before they settle down, Nick wants to make sure Iggy is the right girl for him. Allegedly he is putting her through a 12 step program. He wouldn’t reveal all of the steps but he told Flaunt Magazine that Iggy has made it through two of the steps.
Via Flaunt Magazine:
1.) She cooks for him. I ask what, and when he replies that she made a mean pork chop sandwich; I begin to suspect that Swaggy’s not the toughest grader.
2.) When the bedroom got messy and he got annoyed, he would go to practice and come back to a clean house.
Do you think Iggy would agree to being put through a program just to “see” if she’s marriage material.
Chance the Rapper’s Surf album is coming with very short notice.
During a performance at Michigan State University, the Acid Rap spitter revealed to the crowd that his next project, Surf, will be dropping within the next week. He didn’t say much else, but since Chance was spotted in the studio with Kanye West recently, a collab between him and Yeezy is suspected. Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment will provide the instrumentation for the project.
“There’s a lot of great instrumentation. A lot of input from cool writers,” Chance told Billboard last October. “We worked with Migos. We worked with J. Cole. We did some work with Emily King just last week. Somebody who helped us out a lot with just getting into the project was Rick Rubin. And Frank Ocean. There’s been a lot of just people in the studio watching us work almost like a house band.”
Ciara stans wasted no time letting Future have it on his Instagram page after Ciara and her new boo were spotted at the White House State Dinner. CiCi’s stans went on a rampage in Future’s Instagram comments with football emojis symbolizing Ciara’s upgrade to Seattle Seahawk Russell Wilson. Poor Future! But seriously how are you going to mess up when you had Ciara?!
Salad restaurant chain SweetGreen has been capitalizing off of Kendrick Lamar’s “B–ch Don’t Kill My Vibe” by giving it a healthy twist and selling t-shirts that read “Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe.” Since the “King Kinta” rapper is headlining Sweetgreen’s Sweetlife Festival next month, they have created a salad under the same moniker, Billboard reports.
The Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe salad is loaded with roasted chicken, shredded kale, goat cheese, organic wild rice, flash roasted beets that are marinated in balsamic vinegar, honey and extra virgin olive oil. The salad will be available through May at all Sweetgreen locations along the east coast.
Well it seems like Muhammad Ali is reminding Floyd Mayweather that he is still the greatest! Mayweather sent the world into a frenzy when he stated that he was better than Muhammad Ali. He said,
“No one can ever brainwash me to make me believe that Sugar Ray and Muhammad Ali was better than me.”
Mayweather believes this because Ali was only fighting in one weight-class & the opponents they close for him to fight. It looks like Ali finally decided to remind Mayweather that he is not greater than him.
If you thought you saw it all, you just have to keep on living. This clever fox makes a double decker sandwich from three slices of bread and two sausages. Then took it to go
Musicians not only use Instagram to break news about their careers but to also share aspects of their lives. The accounts belonging to musicians drive more users to Instagram, so now the Facebook-owned company has taken notice and is now launching @music, a page dedicated to artists and their activities.
“[@music] means highlighting music photographers, album illustrators, instrument makers and, of course, fans. In the Instagram tradition, we will also welcome community participation with a new, music-themed Monthly Hashtag Project,” Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom wrote on the IG blog today (Apr. 29).
The page will soon host 11 series and six posts a week from Tuesday to Sunday that will spotlight artists from across the world from different genres. Questlove’s the first to be featured.
“One of our goals with this is to say, ‘How can we help facilitate artist discovery?'” said Jonathan Hull, head of strategic partnerships/music for Facebook and Instagram. “We know these artists are creating companions to their live show, as an extension of their creativity, so how do we make sure more people are seeing that?”
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of AllHipHop.com.
Today no group is more misrepresented in the American conscious than African American males. Their presentation in media is a glamorous image of Grammy Awards and NBA MVP statues. But their reality is one of failure unlike any other subgroup in all of America. Black maleness holds a bastion of unemployed, imprisoned and homeless. Our nation, not only forgot these men, it created their pseudo image as a placeholder for our country’s history. An image that has been painted with a cover of NFL logos and rap stars making millions of dollars. All as an optical illusion to accept our own conscious need to see this failure as personal, and not systemic.
The idea that he didn’t try hard enough, is much easier to accept than the reality that no matter how hard he tried his fate was decided once his race and gender were chosen. Unable to shake the shadow that comes when you force-feed a country a false delusion, these young men are now lashing out, in Ferguson, Baltimore and so many other cities. This is the result when you tell a country with the history of ours, “Everything is okay, as long as we have a singular Floyd Mayweather, or the rising of a President Barack Obama.” All the while failing to create systemic answers to the unresolved problems that were created by hundreds of years of oppression.
African-Americans suffered as chattel slaves for generations. This type of bondage was one where they were treated as property rather than human beings. Unable to marry or form stable familial units, any idea of family developed in an environment of constant fear. As a result, the evolution of black masculinity was deeply affected. The development of an ownership of self and control of one’s own destiny was not only disrupted, it was altered into an altogether different idea of power over one’s future. After slavery, Jim Crow created new constraints. In his piece “Manhood Rights in the Age of Jim Crow,” Professor Martin Summers of Boston University stated:
Given the synonymy between manhood and citizenship, it is not surprising that African American men viewed attempts to marginalize them politically, socially, and economically as assaults on their masculinity. In this period during which the privileges and protections of citizenship were being systematically rolled back – in the South as well as the rest of the nation – the struggle to maintain or regain them was framed as a struggle for “manhood Rights.”
It is this backdrop that framed the existence of black males well into the 1960’s. They lived in a struggle to find self-identity, while being continuously pushed back into a secondary status.
Over the last forty years entertainment via film, music and sports has created an alternative view of black men. With the early ascension of Sidney Poitier and Muhammad Ali, we saw a new kind of black male image take center stage. Strong, informed and outspoken on the social issues of the day, this was an identity of black men America had not seen in such form. These men of great stature spoke to the social ills of the day and stood front line on issues of civil injustice. With their ascension they paved a path for a new crop of blacks in the media.
Yet, despite the great promise of the new path they forged, the generation that followed was contorted and realigned with a new methodology. A decadent veil of wealth developed as the latest way to hide the struggles of black America. No group felt this veil’s pressure more readily than black men. This model was built upon taking a small number of black men and holding them up as the imagery of potential, while creating few, if any, real economic pathways for the many. I described this in a prior piece stating:
It is this new veil of economics that has allowed for a broad swath of America to become not just desensitized to black poverty, but also hypnotized by black celebrity. How could we not? Our channels from ESPN to VH1 are filled with presentations of black Americans being paid a king’s ransom to entertain. As black celebrity has been shown to millions of people, millions of times, the story of real lives has also been lost, and with it the engine that thrust forward the demand for social justice by the masses. The heartbeat of social action is to recognize your mistreatment, and demand better. With each presentation of Kobe Bryant’s 25 million dollar a year contract … a veil of false calm is created within the overall American economic psyche about the immense black wealth disparity. Young black men from ghettos across America that used to dream to make great changes in racial inequity now just dream to be a millionaire and be like Mike and dunk a ball or dance on a stage.
Behind this image working class black men pressured themselves to make it in ways not seen prior. Creating alter egos that could be framed in the light of a superhero. Forming fanciful places where they would one day become rappers, or basketball players, instead of everyday fathers or workers at the corner store. All this while even the corner store wasn’t giving them full-time work. To live in such a world of delusion is so very different than the America experienced by everyone else. That world is full of normal teachers, secretaries and every day people. Instead this is a world where our poorest pressure themselves to become millionaires or bust, ignoring the fact that while money multiples it does not appear out of thin air.
While the few playing on the Milwaukee Bucks make millions in the NBA playoffs and are shown across the globe on TNT, Milwaukee as a city sees its rates of unemployed black males between 16 and 54 at rates over 50%. As the Los Angeles Clippers play at Staples Center on ABC, thousands suffer in its shadow on Skid Row only a few blocks away from the Los Angeles arena. (Skid Row has the highest concentration of homeless in the nation. The population of which is predominately homeless black males).
As the number of incarcerated African American men reached levels unseen, the term black man took on a synonymous meaning with the word prisoner. In the piece “The Black Male Incarceration Problem Is Real and It’s Catastrophic,” I showed that there are more African American men behind bars than the number imprisoned by 9 countries that represent over 1.5 billion people. There are only about 18 million black males in total, counting children.
Despite all of this, the imagery of black men on television and media took the from of the rap mogul Luscious Lyon of Empire, or the iconic sports figure LeBron James. Multi-millionaire black males shown so many times that you would think they grew on trees. The irony being numerically in real terms they hardly exist.
But unable to stomach it, America refused to swallow the truth. So it made its own truth, a place where at any given moment you look to the cover of Yahoo and the same few black men in entertainment are shown daily as the top stories. All the while if you Google a common black male name and do an image search, it brings up a string of mug shots of men whose stories don’t make it to that premiere Yahoo news feed unless they are shot down.
This is the conflicted place where African American men exist, from Baltimore to Ferguson and beyond. This economic trap has created a monster of a problem that is bubbling and will burst upon all of our cities if unresolved.
“The Infamous Album” released 1995 is known to be the best EPs from Mobb Deep. Hit Singles such as “Shook Ones Pt. II” and “Survival of The Fittest” shook the room as the fans follow along bar for bar.
We got a chance to get a exclusive interview as they talked about the night and how they felt, before and after the show.
Watch as we get in the heads of Havoc and Prodigy.
(AllHipHop News) As long as there have been calls for Black people in America to fight against injustice, there has been a debate on whether the most effective means to achieve justice is through violence or nonviolence.
From Nat Turner’s slave revolt to Dr. Martin Luther King’s plan of passive resistance to the protests in Baltimore this week, the method of struggle against inequality has been both violent and nonviolent throughout history.
Atlanta rapper Lil Scrappy was asked about the Baltimore riots. Scrap explained to DJ Smallz Eyes why he thinks some of the angered citizens in the city turned to civil unrest.
“Some parts of the world, the United States – we are enraged. We feel like there’s no other way but for violence, because we have been nonviolent for so many years,” said Scrappy. “Now it’s become a point where we feel like we gotta put our foot down. We gotta do something.”
The star of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta also believes the public will have to give up some things, including lives, in order to achieve equality.
“I feel like Baltimore is doing some justice right now,” said Scrappy. “We have to sacrifice bodies, lives, money, things. We gotta sacrifice to get what we want.”
Scrappy goes on to add he does not want the current animosity between some police forces and the community to continue, but he thinks something is going to have to happen for the situation to change. Scrappy also suggested citizens stay aware during police interaction and confronted people should “fix your attitude.”
(AllHipHop News) Jay Z is not giving up the fight to draw in new users to his new streaming platform Tidal. The Brooklyn emcee is planning a free concert in New York for subscribers of the service.
Jay will run through rarely performed songs from his catalog on May 13. Tidal users must submit a playlist to the service for a chance to win tickets. The concert will stream live on the platform.
Since its star-studded relaunch in March, Tidal has struggled to gain traction. According to Jay, the service now has over 750,000 subscribers, but the company’s application has fallen out of the top 700 on Apple’s App Store chart.
The “On to the Next One” rapper claims certain companies are running a smear campaign against Tidal, and other sources have alleged Apple is actively trying to sabotage the success of the platform.
To enter the contest to win tickets to Jay Z’s “B-Sides” Concert visit here.
(AllHipHop News) Toya Graham’s decision to forcefully remove her 16-year-old son Michael from the streets of Baltimore during the unrest on Monday turned the mother into an Internet star. A viral video of Graham smacking, pushing, and yelling at the teenager led to people calling her a hero.
Graham was one of the few parents seen actively trying to keep her child from engaging in the violence. She spoke with CBS News about why she felt the need to go get her son.
“I turn around. I look in the crowd, and my son is coming across the street with this hoodie on and a mask. He gave me eye contact,” said Graham. “And at that point, [I’m] not even thinking about cameras or anything like that. That’s my only son and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.”
Many high school students took to the streets Monday afternoon to show their outrage concerning the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody. At one point people began throwing rocks and other projectiles at police officers, and some businesses in Baltimore were looted and burned down.
Graham saw Michael among some of the kids in the area. She could not believe her son was around the violence taking place.
“I was shocked. I was angry, because you never want to see your child out there doing that,” Graham said.
Michael later told his mother when he saw her his instinct was to run away. Rather than the situation be a point of embarrassment or shame, Graham hopes her son learns something from the entire experience.
“By him seeing everything what’s going on I just hope, I’m not sure, but I hope that he understands the seriousness of what was going on last night,” she added.
