TSS Presents Smoking Sessions With Ice Cube
Kanye West ends brief boycott of MTV video awards
Dead rapper 2Pac tops “overrated” music list
Q&A: Young Jeezy gets political with his new CD
T-Pain’s Hunt For The Perfect VMA Ride Starts … At A Funeral Home?
DJ Khaled Talks New LP, Nas, Ringtones vs. Albums
…but not with Pac. Miss Info got the exclusive, click the pics for excerpts from Faith’s book:
more to come…
1. 50 Cent
2. Jay Z
3. Diddy
4. Kanye West
It’s been some year for Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. In the past 12 months, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-born hip-hop demigod released a platinum album, signed a 10-year, $150 million deal with concert promoter Live Nation and tied the knot with longtime girlfriend Beyoncé Knowles. Quite a record. But only good enough for a silver medal.
While Jay-Z topped Forbes.com’s inaugural Hip-Hop Cash Kings list of the top-earning people in the business last year, in 2008 he cedes the throne to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who raked in $150 million over the past 12 months–almost twice what Jay-Z made.
Kanye West clocks in at No. 4 with $30 million. The pink-polo-sporting rapper and producer released his third solo album, Graduation, last September. After handily outselling 50 Cent’s Curtis in a head-to-head opening-week matchup, West’s album went multiplatinum and won four Grammys. West has penned hits for Jay-Z, Alicia Keys and Diddy, among others. Earlier this month, he headlined the music festival Lollapalooza in his native Chicago.
5. Timbaland
6. Pharrell
7. Swizz Beats
8. Snoop
9. Dr. Dre
10. Ludacris
11. T.I., Lil Wayne
12. Eminem, Common, Akon (whoa, Common is rakin in as much as Akon???)
13. JD
14. Lil Jon, Outkast, Chamillionaire, The Game
Some hip-hop legends don’t need to do anything to keep earning outrageous sums of money. Andre “Dr. Dre” Young banked $15 million even though he hasn’t had a hit in years–he still gets rich on royalties from two decades of hits. A founder of the seminal rap group N.W.A he released his multiplatinum solo opus The Chronic in 1992 and has produced hits for the likes of Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Eminem and Tupac Shakur.
Tupac himself pulled in a handsome sum this year–about $15 million–even though he’s been dead for over 10 years. Tupac is probably having himself a last laugh from beyond the grave, knowing that his onetime friend Suge Knight isn’t cashing in on the bonanza. Knight, the bodyguard-turned-president of Death Row Records, long rumored to have arranged Shakur’s killing, filed for bankruptcy and put his Malibu, Calif., mansion up for sale last June.
Some Excerpts:
What will it say about the record industry if Def Jam drops you, 10 albums deep, over a single word?
That starts a revolution. It sparks something within the hip-hop community, within the streets, within the people outside the streets. It raises an eyebrow to the situation, you know? Nobody wants to deal with the word “nigger,” because what comes with the word “nigger” is a whole history where you show so much injustice, and you show so much that has not been fixed yet. So it’s a scary thing. But it’s also uncomfortable when I’m dealing with it. Like, no one can tell me what to do. None of the black leaders, none of these motherfuckers, record companies, none of them can tell me what to do. Because you can’t stop what I want to do, you understand?
Did Biggie ask you to team up against Tupac?
Yeah, he called me. He said, “Let’s get together.” He said that everyone was a little nervous about it, but he was calling me about getting busy.
Have you talked to Jay-Z since he left Def Jam?
Yeah. Homie’s chilling, man. He’s plotting.
On “Success,” how did you get away with talking about Jay?
What do you mean?
“Worst enemies want to be my best friends…” Can you see how people can take that as a diss?
But could you see how Jay couldn’t relate to that in his own life with his own situation? Everything in Jay’s rhyme, I relate to. “Is this what success is all about?/A bunch of bitch niggas running around with big mouths.” I feel that every day. I’m sure he can relate to “Best friends want to be enemies like that’s what’s in.” We can both relate to one another’s verses. It’s about success.
“What people don’t understand is that Trackmasters were there, Puffy came down to say hi to me, and Andre Harrell — Andre Harrell was there,” he said. “There was a guy by the name of Mark Sigel; he was the president of ICM at the time, ICM the agency talent group. You had Trackmasters, Little Shawn, Bryce Wilson — there was about 15 people there. So people in their mind, when they hear this story, they think it was just a bunch of guys, including me, trying to summon Tupac to the studio for no reason, on some hangout stuff. But it was all business. I was doing business that day as I have done, before then and after that. But as the story went on, the fairy tale of it got bigger, which really wasn’t the truth.”
“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. ”
“We published this story with the sincere belief that the documents were genuine, but our good intentions are beside the point,” Stanton said in a statement. “The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used. We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents and, as a result, in the story. We are continuing to investigate this matter and will fulfill our journalistic responsibility for critical self-examination.”
Here’s a link to the official apology
So the now infamous LA Times Article from last week may (what a shocker!) have some holes in it. Check out the MTV article and check out how Miss Info breaks it down.
According to the report, the allegations that the shooting was carried out by associates of Combs’, and that he knew of the plot beforehand, were largely based on faked FBI reports cooked up by “an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes and the Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’ trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion ‘Suge’ Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.”
The man in question, according to the site, is James Sabatino, 31, who it claims has sought for years to wedge himself, after the fact, into a string of important hip-hop events, including Shakur’s shooting and the murder of the Notorious B.I.G., though little evidence exists that he ever met or had contact with either man. Sabatino is described by the site as a “wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida” who was little more than a rap fan and whose father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as “a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.”
Sheek Louch Airs Out J-Hood, ”It’s Over, He Can’t Come Back To D-Block”
L.A. Times Writer Defends Story About Tupac, Diddy; Says He Has Two More Articles In The Works
Informant Makes Controversial Allegations Regarding Tupac; Music Biz
Ne-Yo, Hard At Work On Third LP, Makes Time For Lindsay Lohan ‘Challenge’
Gnarls Barkley Album Hits Stores Early
Busta Rhymes Sentenced to Community Service, Probation
Mariah Carey Says, ‘People Think I Am A Ditzy Moron,’ Insists She’s A ‘Prude’
In 1994, Tupac Shakur was ambushed, beaten and shot at the Quad Recording Studios in New York. He insisted that friends of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs were behind it. New information supports him.
Previously: Accusation: Diddy Setup Tupac Shooting| Diddy’s Denying
As expected, Diddy’s Denying, from AHH:
In an exclusive statement to AllHipHop.com, Sean “Diddy” Combs vehemently denied the allegations in the Los Angeles Times.
“This story is beyond ridiculous and completely false,” Combs told AllHipHop.com. “Neither Biggie nor I had any knowledge of any attack before, during or after it happened. It is a complete lie to suggest that there was any involvement by Biggie or myself.”
“I am shocked that the Los Angeles Times would be so irresponsible as to publish such a baseless and completely untrue story,” Combs stated.
UPDATE: Jimmy Henchman’s Denying Too
Previously: Accusation: Diddy Setup Tupac Shooting
the first time…
from AHH:
Nearly 15 years after Tupac Shakur was pistol-whipped, shot five times and left for dead outside a New York recording studio, new evidence has surfaced implicating two associates of entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs for orchestrating the rap icon’s ambush
It used to be all good…
Here are some snippets from the Snoop XXL article preview:
“Sensual Seduction” took people by surprise. Why release what’s basically an R&B record as your first single?
There was no strategy. My boy Shawty Redd wrote the song, and once I sent it back, he started playing it in the clubs in Atlanta. He’s like, “This muthafucka is a big record.” When I played it for my peoples, they didn’t feel it at first—not my immediate people, my record-label people. They were like, “Eh.” I was like, “Fuck what y’all talking about, I’m putting this shit out. This is some fly shit. It’s my career, anyway.”
Do you ever worry about what effects it might have? Ozzy’s son went to rehab. Nick and Jessica divorced. Britney and K-Fed. Any concern over putting your family on camera?
Have you seen Run’s House? They doing just fine. [Pause] ’Cause they Black. Black families don’t do all that bullshit like the White families do. This is bonding time, because this is helping us out. Somebody in the family wants to be a star. Someone wants to do this. So we’re looking at it like capitalizing off the moment. We’re not going to blow this moment and have a fallout.
Suge Knight has said that you and Tupac got into it right before he died.
He told you that?
He didn’t tell me that. But it’s been printed. He told XXL.
He said me and ’Pac got into it?
You’ve heard that before, c’mon.
We had a misunderstanding. Our thing was, if someone is on you, they on me. He had a problem with Biggie and Puffy, and I did an interview with Angie Martinez when we was in New York, and she asked me how I felt about Biggie and Puffy, and I said I was cool. That triggered an emotion in him, because he wanted me to say, ‘Fuck Biggie and fuck Puffy.’ But I didn’t feel like that about them, for the simple fact that they didn’t really even want to fight him. He was fighting some guys that didn’t even want to fight him. It’s like, if I act and step in, we’re going to kill these niggas. And it don’t even matter. I’d gotten to the point in my life where I just beat my murder case, and I was more forgiving and humble and sympathetic, and the gangster in me just turned down. And he was so used to me being Snoop Dogg the muthafuckin’ killer that, when he heard that, it just fucked him up, like, “These niggas tried to kill me, and you ain’t riding with me.”
But it wasn’t like that. We didn’t even talk about it. We went to the plane, and them niggas didn’t say nothing to me all the way home, five and a half hours. My Rolls was there. His Rolls was there. I got out the plane. I was like, “Cuz, you going to the fight?” [Mike Tyson vs. Bruce Seldon, Sept. 7, 1996, Las Vegas] He looked at me like, “I don’t know.” I jumped in my car and rolled out. Next time I seen him, he’s laying in the bed, half-dead.
Previously: Snoop Covers XXL
Timbaland delivers tirade at party
Mixtape Monday - Prodigy, 50, Rick Ross, The Wire
Dr. Dre Seeks Royalty Information from Death Row
Common & Just Blaze Mix It Up W/ Smirnoff For New Remix Campaign
T.I.’s Grand Hustle Launches Comedy Division
Common Confirms He’s Green Lantern In ‘Justice League’
TSS Presents 15 Minutes with DJ Drama
Snoop Dogg Previews Ego Trippin’
From AHH:
Eleven years after the death of Tupac Shakur, Las Vegas investigators are heading to Los Angeles to see if any questions can be answered regarding the 1996 shooting.
Possibly brought on by allegations in the documentary Tupac Assassination: Conspiracy Of Revenge, which was released in October, investigators are once again looking for clues and possible answers from Marion ‘Suge’ Knight and Reginald Wright Jr, both of whom are maintaining their innocence.
“God knows the truth and when it comes down to it, it’s not one person in the world with any sense to know I had anything to do with getting Tupac shot,” Suge Knight told Los Angeles’ Fox 11 News.
Until recently, the death of Tupac was considered a cold case.
According to Tupac’s former bodyguard and undercover FBI agent, Kevin Hackie, there are several major factors that point to Knight and Wright’s guilt in Tupac’s death.
Hackie maintains that on the night of Tupac’s death two dozen of Tupac’s bodyguards were told not to carry weapons.
Hackie also believes that the infamous fight at the MGM Grand Hotel involving Crip gang member Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson was staged, so that that the rival would receive the blame for Tupac’s death.
Hackie also claims that prior to Tupac’s death at a concert at the House of Blues, a .40 caliber Glock handgun was confiscated from a member of Tupac’s entourage and given to Hackie who in turn returned the gun to Wright.
A .40 caliber Glock handgun was used to kill Tupac and Hackie believes this was the exact same gun confiscated at the House of Blues, prior to Tupac’s September 2006 slaying.
From AHH:
The war of words between former Death Row Records Head of Security Reginald Wright Jr. and Kevin Hackie, a former bodyguard for rap legend Tupac Shakur, reached a new level as Hackie has offered Wright $100,000 to take a lie detector test to prove he had nothing to do with Shakur’s still unsolved murder.
“I will go on record and publicly offer him $100,000 dollars of my own money for him to take a polygraph test and if it comes out correct that he had nothing to do with the murder of Tupac Shakur, I will pay him that money,” Hackie told AllHipHop.com. “And I will publicly make sure it’s on the six o’clock news that he hasn’t had anything to do with it. I’m reaching out to him.”
According to Hackie, he is clear as to what happened once he arrived at the hospital.
“I’ll never forget the look in Suge and Reggie’s eyes when I saw them at the hospital,” Hackie said. “In 17 years of being a cop, I’ve seen a lot of guilty people and the look Suge had in his face, the look in his eyes when he looked at me, I knew damn well from their looks, those f***ers were guilty. There’s no doubt about it.”
