Lawyers employed by Kanye West sent out a cease and desist letter yesterday to a number of media outlets effectively confirming the existence of a sex tape featuring their client.
A sex tape starring Kanye West and a married 18-year-old "Kim Kardashian lookalike" is allegedly on the market — much to Yeezy's chagrin.
This week, the music industry looks something like Christmas. It's not that the new music releases are gifts, per se (quite the contrary), but there are so damn many high-profile albums after a relatively dormant summer. This kind of flurry is usually reserved for the holidays. And what's more, together they give as full of a picture of the state of label-based pop music in 2012 as any recent concurrent set of albums. Really, all this week is missing is a neo-boy band. Let's explore:
Chief Keef's entrée into hip-hop earlier this year was a quick and unusual one. At 16, Keef had made a small name for himself on Chicago's south side with a handful of enthusiastic but poorly produced rap videos, the most promising of which was "I Don't Like." As its name portends, "I Don't Like" is a musical rundown of the things that chap Keef's hide, including bitch niggas, snitch niggas, and fake shoes. The video he recorded to accompany the song depicts him and his friends smoking a lot of weed, passing around a handgun, and dancing around his grandmother's house shirtless.
When Kim Kardashian and Kanye West started dating a few months ago, people scoured the universe for signs that could have foretold the event.
Forbes has named the brolic and dormant Dr. Dre this year's Hip-Hop Cash King, the result of him taking in $110 million almost entirely from the immense success of his Beats By Dre headphones. Dre, Forbes explains, "collected $100 million pretax when handset maker HTC paid $300 million for a 51% stake in the company last year."
Perhaps inspired by Kiese Laymon's excellent essay, Kanye West took to Twitter yesterday to examine some of his more controversial language, particularly "bitch" and "nigga." This, of course, comes just three weeks after he released a Kim Kardashian-inspired song called "Perfect Bitch," but still, progress is progress. Here are Mr. West's tweets, in convenient paragraph form:
A ridiculous person named Vincent Peters sued Kanye West in 2010, alleging West had stolen a song Peters had sent the rapper in 2006. The overlap in question came in the chorus of Kanye West's "Stronger," which starts, "N-n-now that that don't kill me / Can only make me stronger."
My grandmother married a beautiful brown troll named HaLester "Les" Myers 20 years ago. The Christmas before last, Les slumped across from me in Grandma's gaudy pink throne while she finished making supper. I watched the still water flooding the gutters of Les's sleepy eyes, the way his nappy gray chin folded snuggly into the top of those musty blue overalls, and I knew that the dusty joker really believed what he said the night before about Kanye West and the importance of treating females like cats.
Well music, anyway.
If you are a best friend or close friend or casual acquaintance of or do not really know Kanye West, chances are you are reading these words under the watchful gaze of a $34,000 gold skull statue recently given to you by Kanye West.
Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" is the actual song of the summer, but Pink's just-released "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" is bound to be nipping at its heels on the Billboard Hot 100 in no time. What sounds like the product of tossing Modest Mouse's "Float On" in a blender with some stadium rock and a pinch of house, this is the most undeniable ear candy I've heard from Pink since her debut single, "There You Go" (back when she was R&B and of ambiguous ethnicity). The yelping she does at the end of the chorus ("I've had a shit day, you had a shit day, we've had a shit day") is the best, riskiest use of her pipes yet. Pink often irritates me for carrying herself like she's above her pop peers, but here she actually is, so hooray for her.
Last night's BET Awards featured a 20+ minute extravaganza tribute to Whitney Houston that included Mariah Carey talking about herself (...and Whitney), Monica blowing the doors off the place with a cover of "I Love the Lord" (from The Preacher's Wife) and Chaka Khan reclaiming the song that Whitney once made her own, "I'm Every Woman."
The thing about this lawsuit is that it hinges on the testimony of a man who might be more hungry for fame than Kim Kardashian and Kanye West combined.
When Jay-Z and Kanye West released Watch the Throne last year, they did so, at least in part, to glorify things. Thing-glorification is a pursuit with a rich and not wholly invalid history in mainstream rap music. And from its opulent golden cover to its braggadocio about cars, clothes, jewelry, and women, Watch the Throne makes sense in the way that Paula Deen using whole tubs of butter makes sense—Jay-Z and Kanye West are rich men who like to revel in rich things.
"Home is where the heart is." "Bless this mess." "Sometimes I get emotional over fonts."
Kanye West debuted a 26-minute film titled Cruel Summer at Cannes Wednesday night. He is credited as a writer, producer, and director on the project. Here's what you need to know about it:
Chief Keef, the 16-year-old unsigned rapper from Chicago, is still on house arrest at his Grandma's, but now he has a Kanye West remix to his name, because technology has had something of an effect on musical collaborations. Instead of recording in the studio together, Kanye sent some producers from his new label, G.O.O.D. music, to Keef's home in Chicago, where they set up a laptop and a microphone. Keef typed out a verse onto his iPhone on the spot, then yelled into a microphone for a few minutes, and this banger of a street remix was born.
