September 2009 Archives

Whatever label it ends up on, let's hope it all works out. The people need this one.

Try to ignore the Ninja Gaiden soundtrack.

Mike Posner is cool peeps. This should be interesting. Watch for it at Elitaste.

Peep the trailer for Mike Posner's web series, "One Foot Out The Door", which will debut on elitaste.com on September 30th. This series will correspond with the release of Mike's new mixtape, also entitled "One Foot Out The Door." The mixtape and series, which follows Mike as he balances his senior year at Duke with his full time music career, features appearances by Rosa Acosta, Wale, Gym Glass Heroes, Kid Cudi, Bun B, 3Oh3, 2AM Club and many more awesome people! It will also go behind the scenes of his shows, Austin City Limits, ThisIs50 Fest, the studio and even some important meetings. Tune in starting September 30th for Episode 1 and then every two weeks for a new episode.

Why He's Hot: They've got him behind the pot again! Wu-Tang Clan's Raekwon the Chef came back to cook up one of the most potent offerings of 2009 with Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II, which is the hottest album in the streets right now. And no, the Brain Trust isn't just overcome with nostalgia -- the conceptual Cuban Linx II picks up where its timeless predecessor left off a decade and a half ago. Rae articulates his calm anger and heavy-handed, at times unmerciful underworld regulation with a compellingly clear yet callous delivery. Production-wise, he went for the best: RZA, Dr. Dre, the late J Dilla.

The Chef has been able to do what few in his age bracket have accomplished: maintain respect and excitement with their more mature core audience, yet stay current and appeal to newer, younger fans. Chef came off a very low-profile hiatus late last year and reintroduced himself through one of his biggest venues to generate interests, the Internet. He's tweeted close to 3,000 times on his @raekwonicewater page and he's been a mainstay on YouTube and hip-hop blogs this year. Rae's moment of Net infamy came late in the summer, when he and his crew had a physical altercation with Joe Budden while Budden was live-streaming from his dressing room.

Rae has not released the videotaped footage of the incident he has in his possession, but instead has let his music grab the headlines. And with all the critical acclaim he's gotten, the Chef's notoriety won't be stopping any time soon: Cuban Linx more than 60,000 albums in its first week of release, another testament to his popularity.

>> More @ MTV

Hating on Birdman is like dissing Nick Cannon. Leave the man alone, he's helped usher in enough genuine bangers.

We're excited. With a list of collaborators that includes Mos Def, Raekwon, Pharoahe Monch (!), The RZA, Ludacris, Jim Jones and Q-Tip, how could you not be? Maybe if you were to engage in a brief recollection of the wretched history of supergroups and/or rap-rock.

Still.

The Black Keys are as about as credible as you can get within the modern canon, and with this bottomless roster of talent (Mos and Monch are no slouches when it comes to the blues, even on their own), it's a safer bet that "ROCK" ambitions won't steer this project wayward, despite its questionable title (and the conspicuous meddling of one Dame Dash).

Download the first single, featuring Mos Def, Jim Jones and The Black Keys, and scope the album art after the jump.

Fame Kills from kwest on Vimeo.

"What happened to all the rockstars? The fame killed them!"

After months of speculation and rumors centered around the Ye+Gaga tour; he finally decides to shed some light. Still, the vintage-sextape trailer poses more questions than it answers. One things for sure, like his last tour, it's not something you'll want to miss.

See you in Michigan...

Check the tour dates after the jump...

"On September 28, my fellow MTV News Hip-Hop Brain Trust members and I will start to release our -- keyword being "our" -- list of the Hottest MCs in the Game. Number 10 will be announced on the 28th, nine on the 29th, etc. through October 2. Then, on October 4 during "P. Diddy's Starmaker," we will reveal numbers five through one. Numero uno, the number-one spot.

You know the drilly by now, right? I mean, this is the third year we've done it. Well, in case you forgot or just didn't know, a group of my MTV News colleagues and I sit down at a roundtable and discuss who we think are the 10 hottest cats in the game right now. Each year the audience is very vocal with comments, and some people even come up to us on the street to tell us how much they agree or disagree with our list. We love it.

This year, there were over 1.2 million votes in our fan poll. The cumulative votes will be factored into the Brain Trust's rankings. But keep in mind, this is still the Brain Trust's list. Personally, I like having the fans' votes factored in. We're all in this together. I love the debate, and as anxious as you are to see who we picked, I'm even more interested to tell you guys. The Miss Cleo in me says that this is going to be our most controversial list ever. Just remember to have fun with it. That's right -- have fun, enjoy it. You'll get excited. You might -- almost definitely at some point -- get upset. But this is hip-hop. This is the music and culture we love"

"We did it all by phone," Williams said. "One-hundred percent. Phone and e-mail. I've never done that before in my life. I just sent him the joint, 'cause he beat me up for the whole album. He was just kinda like, 'I need something to really tell a story.' And I was like, 'OK.' And I sent him this track. I said, 'I'm sending you clouds with 808s [drums] under it.' There's just clouds, and it's expansive. You can just speak. It's a blank canvas. Then I sent him the hook and played it for him, and he lost his mind."

Williams said the song was made the day Jay-Z was mastering his album, and he believes the rapper held off on completing his album until he finished the song. The result, according to Williams, is another classic.

"[Just] the attack on it," he said of the song. "Ferocious."

Photographer Dan Tobin Smith on the process (to ItsNiceThat.com) :

"Greg Burke, the creative director on the project at Atlantic Records had seen the Letter 'E' I had shot with the set designer Nicola Yeoman and I guess he had it in the back of his mind when he was thinking of ideas for Jay-Z's new artwork for Blueprint 3. I think Greg and Jay-Z had lots of ideas about what the album meant and it seemed to be about taking it back to the source, in terms of the music itself and then subsequently the artwork. For the album and the idea was it was very much about the music and all the things that make music. The 3 is represented by 3 bars which is of course the old way of writing '3' so that seemed to work really nicely with the idea behind the album and the set design that evolved. We all liked the idea that the installation was almost machine like, like all these things were interlinked. That's why everything is packed and jumbled together. Like it had kind of grown out of this corner.

I think it was a brave approach for Jay-Z as all his previous albums have had him on them. I love still life, and the way I shoot is quite old school. It took 3 days to shoot, was all shot on 10×8 inch film, so the quality in the whites is fantastic, so much subtle tone. We worked long and hard on the colour work on the post and even in a single page mag advert I can see that effort. You could blow the image up to the size of a building and it would still hold up. It seems the album is about that old school crafted production so its nice that that same method went into the shoot."

Kamaal speaks on the making of two tracks from his first (out of two) infamously shelved experimental LP, Kamaal The Abstract. The album, which has been available only in rare bootleg form for years, is finally being released in stores Tuesday the 15th. The above is the groovy "Do U Dig U" and he explains another track, "Feelin" after the jump.

VH1 is re-launching its Emmy Award-nominated and critically-acclaimed series Behind The Music. The iconic series that helped put VH1 on the map will premiere on Thursday, September 10 at 10/9c with Behind The Music: Lil Wayne.  The self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" opens up about his childhood, his music, and his struggles, as he and the people who know him best describe his ascension from a poverty-stricken childhood in New Orleans to his reign as one of hip-hop's heavy hitters.

• Damn, and I had Oregon in the Rose Bowl.
• I almost drafted LeGarrette Blount in the second round of my office, NCAA fantasy league.
• I thought Jeremiah Masoli and the Ducks would destroy Boise State.
• And those sweet-ass uniforms...

I say what I mean, [random gibberish.] Me and Jay had a battle, I got in his ass. I got in his ass, before he got signed. Niggas was there, niggas know. In a pool hall in the Bronx. I fucks with him and had respect for him after that. Until he became the president of Def Jam, and I ain't gon say too much more about it, but you know what it is. There's a difference between doing wrong and being wrong. At one point, you were being wrong.

Niggas can't do it like we could. Niggas. Can't-- Niggas. Can't. Do. It. Like. We're. Able. To.

Jay is a talented motherfucker, don't misunderstand me. He is talented. But he has no heart. There's no soul behind it. It's motivated by money strictly... But I still maintain the respect, because our birthday is in the same month and you know, we have history. But I lost it when he became president of Def Jam, that's why I left Def Jam. '

When you became the president, you hit me "yo dog, the inmates is running the building!!!" You know what that mean, your mans is in charge... "That's what it is, we good," cuz we had history. And then you go do that.

You come down, listen to my shit... we ready. Then you go on vacation. Niggas take a picture of you with chancletas on. That's what you leave the hood for, son? That's why you walk out on your man for, son? Flip-flops? Serious? You serious? Real talk son, I respected you. I'm in my feelings about that. I'm hurt. I ain't ever talk about that.

Asked why of all his roles he would most closely identify with an African-American character, he said the answer might lie somewhere in his upbringing. "Although there weren't many black people around," he said, "I always felt black. I've always been a little bit of an outsider."

• He's a rip off artist.
• He makes movies that only relate to other movies.
• He knows nothing of real life.
• He could use sensitivity training.
• His flamboyant, unnecessary use of racist language.
• All the ornate dialogue, "...tends to unfurl at great, meandering length...the stem-winding monologue (Samuel L. Jackson's Old Testament shtick in Pulp Fiction) and the micro-observational tangent (Steve Buscemi's anti-tipping tirade in Reservoir Dogs)."
  

On yesterday's full leaking of The Blueprint 3:

"I may be the most bootlegged artist in history," he told MTV News shortly after his album leaked. "It's a preview. I'm excited for people to hear the album. I'm very proud of the work I've done, so enjoy it."

"My pager is actually ringing right now, so people are probably calling me and telling me they pretty much like it," he explained. "I can tell by the way my pager rings if a song is good or not. It's really going crazy right now."