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Kanye West Accuses Kim Kardashian Of Trying To ‘Kidnap’ Their Daughter And Forcing Him Into A Drug Test

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The Kanye West and Kim Kardashian drama continued after he criticized her for allowing their daughter North on TikTok and she responded by calling out his relentless attacks on social media. West doubled down after his ex-wife’s response, again accusing her of sicking security on him at their daughter’s birthday party and of making him take a drug test. He also claims she accused him of stealing from her home, which, again, is across the street from his, and questioned her assertion that she is the main care provider for the children.

“What do you mean by ‘main provider?’” he wrote in a post on Instagram with a screenshot of Kim’s earlier post. “America saw you try to kidnap my daughter on her birthday by not providing the address You put security on me inside of the house to play with my son then accused me of stealing I had to take a drug test after Chicago’s party cause you accused me of being on drugs Tracy Romulus stop manipulating Kim to be this way…”

Tracy Romulus is Chief Marketing Officer of KKW Brands, the corporate entity through which Kardashian manages her beauty, clothing, and fragrance lines. While Romulus obviously has Kim’s ear as her business partner, Kanye’s comments overlook a lot of facts over the last few years, mainly in the area of his own erratic behavior. While he’s pushed back on characterizations that he’s “crazy,” it doesn’t seem that anyone has ever called him that other than himself.

In Kim’s earlier statement, she wrote, “I wish to handle all matters regarding our children privately and hopefully, he can finally respond to the third attorney he has had in the last year to resolve any issues amicably.” If anything, it seems the only thing she wants from Kanye is to behave like an adult.

A New ‘Jeen-Yuhs’ Trailer Teases An Exploration Of Kanye West’s Journey So Far

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Ye (aka Kanye West) is on a lot of people’s minds right now, for reasons including Kim Kardashian drama, Julia Fox, and the upcoming Donda 2. On top of that, there’s also the upcoming Jeen-Yuhs documentary series, which is set to premiere on Netflix on February 16. Ahead of that, Netflix has shared a new trailer.

The trailer features a voiceover from co-director Clarence “Coodie” Simmons, in which he says, “When I first put the camera on this up-and-coming producer in ’98, I knew he was destined for greatness. The goal was to see how far his dreams would take him, but I had no idea where life would take us next. It felt like the bigger Kanye got, the farther we grew apart, but there was more to Kanye’s story that I needed to tell.”

There’s also a quote from West in which he explains what he thinks are the reasons behind his success, saying “I just think it was in God’s plan. I think He just has me here for a reason and I have something to say. There’s people that might be better programmers, better rappers. The way I think I really won is I had the heart. If I do what I’m supposed to do, people gonna look back like, ‘Man, remember dude used to just make beats for people?”

Watch the Jeen-Yuhs trailer above.

Q-Tip Wishes One Thing About A Tribe Called Quest’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Nomination Was Different

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On Wednesday, the nominees for the 2022 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction class were announced and some hip-hop icons made the cut, including Eminem, Rage Against The Machine, and A Tribe Called Quest. Now, Tribe’s Q-Tip has spoken about the nomination, revealing that he’s happy about it but indicating that it’s a bittersweet moment for him.

In an interview with Billboard the day after the nominations were revealed, Q-Tip said, “I was pleased, [but] I wish my man [Phife Dawg] was here.”

Phife Dawg, a founding member of A Tribe Called Quest, died in 2016 at 45 years old.

Elsewhere during the conversation, Q-Tip spoke about how he believes A Tribe Called Quest helped bridge the gap between rock and hip-hop for many people, especially white listeners. He said, “I was just saying to LL Cool J the thing about Tribe is we played in front of more rock audiences than rap audiences. Just being on tour with Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Green Day, Beastie Boys, and our first show we opened for Big Audio Dynamite — at our time, we kinda helped bring white audiences to hip-hop. So it’s overall good. I feel like the story of music and music’s evolution can’t happen without hip-hop artists.”

Check out the full interview here.

Amber Mark’s Leap Of Faith Grants Her Happiness Again On The Riveting ‘Three Dimensions Deep’

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Amber Mark Three Dimensions Deep artwork
PMR/EMI

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Three is a very common and important number in Amber Mark’s life. In a 2017 interview with NME, she explained how that number has constantly made itself present in her life. “My mother was born in 1953, my brother was born in 1983 and I was born in 1993,” she said. “Then, my mum passed away on June 3, at 10:23 pm in 2013. Since then, I’d see three’s everywhere.” In 2017, she released her 3:33am EP. Nearly five years later, she returns with her debut album, Three Dimensions Deep, and a riveting tale that follows her through a journey of searching for the deeper meaning for her life and the world that surrounds her.

Three Dimensions Deep presents a well-executed blend of R&B and funk used in different ways throughout the album. Sometimes it’s a 50-50 split, and other times, either genre sits in the driver’s seat while the other makes its presence felt just enough so that the 17-track project remains cohesive. This varying production helps to add a second dose of life to the listener’s experience with the album, one already boosted by Mark’s enthralling vocals. Her search for life’s meaning arises on the wistful “What Is It,” where she questions the point of the bad in her life with an emotional plea into the empty skies. “So there goes my heart,” she sings with disheveled spirits on the song. “I fell apart / Trying to love.” She later questions the source of faith as she’ll need it moving forward. “Is it love that proves in our faith? / Or how we move, spiraling?”

As often as Mark questions the ways of the world, she also stays true to what she’s previously learned. Her wisdom propels her far enough to leave her with a moderate and slightly frustrating, but solvable, amount of puzzle-piecing for her to do. She rightfully distrusts the “trifling” ways of men on “Most Men,” while begging for a friend to seek better than the insufficient companion she’s currently with. Mark acknowledges the difficulties behind healing and moving on both “Healing Hurts” and “Bubbles” while overcoming the temptation to fall for old tricks and back into her old pains. Following these anecdotes of hurt and heartbreak, Three Dimensions Deep transitions into a second half that’s both energized by a new wave of happiness and gracefully presented through a worthwhile romance.

Amber Mark won’t find all the answers she’s looking for in life. That’s a feat that goes unaccomplished even by the oldest souls of the world, never mind a 28-year-old. She soon realizes that a life driven by constant searches will leave her feeling incomplete at the end of the day. “FOMO” places this discovery on wax through funky and reinvigorating production that finds Mark high off life as her feet sweep the dancefloor. “Fill up my cup, made up my mind,” she sings. “Won’t miss out on living happily / It’s about time, I’m gon’ lose control.” There’s a time and a place for self-reflection and wallowing in sadness about life’s dealings, but Mark realizes that she should at least make sure to live life through it all.

This leap of faith, which also doubles as a discharge from life’s ankle weights, adds vibrancy and excitement to her life and the album. It also makes her an irresistible magnet to what she craves the most from life. Three Dimensions Deep swings upward from a contextual standpoint during its back half. Mark is consumed by a love that’s far too good to be true in her eyes. She details this behind haunting production that accentuates her disbelief on “Out Of This World” while also comparing the new love to finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. “Pull all this weight kept me out of sight / I close my eyes,” she sings. “And with surprise / I saw the light.” Mark goes above and beyond to describe the beauty of this new romance as she places herself amongst the stars and constellations on “Cosmic” to relay the “otherworldly feelings” it gives her. “It takes me to another planet / It’s all so cinematic,” she sings with a heart bleeding of gratitude as angelic harmonies rain behind her. “Is this some sort of magic? / It seems so automatic.”

Three Dimensions Deep is a testament to letting go and trusting that what is meant to be, will be. While watching Amber Mark get swept off her feet with a perfect love is a heartwarming aspect of the album, seeing her end the album on a high pedestal and free of some of the things that held her down is just as satisfying. Mark’s official debut album is truly Three Dimensions Deep as we watch her confidence grow, her insecurities fade away, and a path open up for her to experience at that’s meant to be in her world. Mark achieves this by letting herself freefall into life’s core where she discovers what to value the most day in and day out. It’s here that she also tackles her most-inner emotions with equal parts grace and feistiness for a riveting and magical album.

Three Dimensions Deep is out now via PMR/EMI. Get it here.

Babyface Ray’s Debut Album ‘Face’ Aims To Bridge The Gap Between Detroit And The World Beyond

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Babyface Ray Face Review
Empire

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Last year, I wrote that Babyface Ray was one of the artists who could have made the 2021 XXL Freshman list. With the release of his debut album, Face, last week via Wavy Gang and Empire, that assessment looks closer than ever to becoming a reality for the 2022 list (not to brag or anything). While it’s not a perfect project by any means, Face demonstrates Ray’s star power, illuminating an artist with all the tools to make the leap from promising underground talent to a bonafide hitmaker.

The word that best describes Ray’s unique approach to rhythm and rhyme is dispassionate. Although he’s very much a product of the frenetic Detroit underground scene, taking bits and pieces from the city’s diverse patchwork of sounds and styles, his cadence is more controlled than the frenetic pace demonstrated by other members of his cohort like Sada Baby or Icewear Vezzo. Likewise, his wordplay is similarly low-key, sans the over-the-top punchlines favored by his peers.

Instead, he sounds not exactly world-weary, but weathered, as though he’s seen and done it all – or near enough to it – and has ceased to be impressed, awed, or dismayed by the facts of the street-worn narratives he relays. Whether he’s getting money on “6 Mile Show” with Icewear Vezzo or patting himself on the back with G Herbo on “Blood Sweat & Tears,” Ray’s disposition comes across as though he’s been on the job long enough to see little change except for the faces around him. The business itself stays the same.

Maybe that’s because he’s low-key a veteran of the indie rap grind himself; prior to his latest, he’d self-released 10 projects dating back to 2015. It took 2021’s Unfuckwitable EP to finally bring him the shine he’s been working toward all that time, so you’ll forgive him for feeling a little burnt out. But there’s a benefit to that level of patience: Ray’s confidence is unshakeable and his consistency is time-tested. He attests to as much on “Overtime” with Yung Lean and “Palm Angels, Palms Itching.”

It’s also left him with an – ahem – self-effacing nature. The album opens with a reflective intro, “My Thoughts 3,” on which he ruminates on the climb to his current leaping-off point. He’s now standing at the precipice which a handful of other Detroit natives reached; the closest analog would be Big Sean, with whom he previously collaborated on the latter’s joint EP with Hit-Boy. With one foot still in the Detroit underground, clinging to the raw, chaotic beats that define that sound, and the other prepared to step into the limelight with radio-ready beats produced by the likes of 808 Mafia, Ray has the potential to be the bridge between his hometown’s insular subculture and the wider world beyond.

If anything, this poses the album’s one drawback. Its split personality holds it back; on one hand, Ray could make hits, he could be a superstar (albeit a very laid-back, iconoclastic one), but he’d have to relinquish – at least to a point – his reliance on the style that got him here. We’ve seen that backfire before when artists make the jump from regional to national stars, pissing off their day-ones by sloughing off their roots. By sticking to his guns, though, he runs the risk of alienating potential new fans and wasting the work he’s put in to reach this point

Should he simply stay the course, doing what he does here, the future is murkier. Like Face’s production, it could go either way. Or, and this is what I think likeliest, he could end up forging a new path, slowly but surely letting more folks in on the secret that is the Motor City underground rap scene, and contributing to the next evolution of rap music past its current stagnant state.

Face is out now via Wavy Gang/Empire. Get it here.

Nicki Minaj Explains Why Her ‘New Body’ Collab With Kanye West Never Got An Official Release

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Of all the projects Kanye West hyped over the past several years, perhaps none was more heavily anticipated than “New Body,” a track featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla Sign that was planned to feature on Ye’s ninth album, Yandhi. When a demo version of the song was leaked in October 2018, it instantly became something of a fan favorite, but despite this, it was scrapped along with the rest of the album after Kanye decided to release Jesus Is King, his first big swing at a gospel album, instead.

Perhaps no one was more disappointed than Nicki Minaj, who allegedly had to re-write her verse multiple times as a result of Kanye’s evolving, spirituality-based insistence on toning down explicit content and language ahead of Yandhi‘s non-release. Nicki, who’s been on a promo/media damage control tour ahead of the release of her new single with Lil Baby, “Do We Have A Problem?” explained just why the original version of “New Body” was never released and how she felt about it.

“The public adored ‘New Body,’” Nicki recalled. “‘New Body’ is the biggest hit record that never came out. So what I thought was interesting was that Kanye made me write my ‘New Body’ verse four times over in order to fit into where he was creatively and spiritually in his life. … I missed it by a year, I guess. Had ‘New Body’ been out when he was not in his gospel era, then it would’ve seen the light of day. But, it didn’t, so it wasn’t meant to be. Everybody knows that’s the hit that got away … I think the ship has sailed for ‘New Body,’ everybody has come to love the original way they heard it.”

The leak of the song actually went viral on TikTok in 2020, prompting Nicki to tell her fans to “pester” Kim Kardashian to get the full version, but considering how things are turning out on that front, perhaps the song will simply have to live on in those memes and memories.

You can watch Nicki’s full interview above.

Saba, 6lack, And Smino Contemplate Long-Term Love On ‘Still’ From ‘Few Good Things’

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Saba’s new album, Few Good Things, is out now after a rollout that included smooth singles like “Come My Way” featuring Krayzie Bone and “Survivor’s Guilt” with G Herbo, as well as a short film touching on the album’s theme of family, home, and finding peace. Although it hasn’t been out long, it’s clear that the fan-favorite standout from the album is “Still,” which features Atlanta crooner 6lack and St. Louis rapper Smino as all three contemplate long-term love in all its forms.

In Saba’s verse, the Chicago rapper touches on his love for his work and how it conflicts with his love for his significant other, while on Smino’s verse, the soulful St. Louisan offers a scintillating take on a long-lost relationship, wondering if she kept his things around. 6lack’s chorus brings things full-circle, as he contrasts his superstar lifestyle with the toll it takes on his home life.

In addition to the videos and short film, Saba is preparing a promotional tour for the album set to run through March, April, and May supported by Dreamville rapper Lute and the Los Angeles singer Amindi.

Listen to Saba’s “Still” featuring 6lack and Smino above.

Few Good Things is out now via Pivot Gang, LLC. You can stream it here.

Kim Kardashian Says Kanye West’s Constantly Attacking Her Is More Harmful Than North’s TikTok

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After Kanye West’s latest jab at ex-wife Kim Kardashian over letting their daughter North use TikTok “against his will,” Kardashian has had enough. On her own Instagram story, she defended her decision to share a joint (adult-managed) account with North and challenged Kanye for his “obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation.”

Kanye’s constant attacks on me in interviews and on social media is actually more hurtful than any TikTok North might create. As the parent who is the main provider and caregiver for our children, I am doing my best to protect our daughter while also allowing her to express her creativity in the medium that she wishes with adult supervision – because it brings her happiness. Divorce is difficult enough on our children and Kanye’s obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation so negatively and publicly is only causing further pain for all. From the beginning, I have wanted nothing but a healthy and supportive co-parenting relationship because it is what is best for our children and it saddens me that Kanye continues to make it impossible every step of the way.

I wish to handle all matters regarding our children privately and hopefully, he can finally respond to the third attorney he has had in the last year to resolve any issues amicably.

In addition to his censuring North’s TikTok, Kanye has claimed that Kim tried to keep him from attending North’s birthday and threatened to beat up Pete Davidson for his public relationship with Kardashian.

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Eminem And Dr. Dre Link Up On The ‘GTA Online’ Song ‘Gospel’

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A couple months ago, some fresh Dr. Dre music popped up on GTA Online as part of a new story, “The Contract,” in which Dre himself was an actual in-game character. Snoop Dogg called it “great f*cking music” and now fans can more easily judge for themselves, as the tunes are available on streaming platforms starting today.

Among those is “Gospel,” a collaboration with Eminem. Both rappers come through with some standout lyrics, like when Dre appears to address his recent divorce settlement by saying, “Lookin’ for my next gold digger / This summer here gon’ be colder than winter.” Meanwhile, Eminem flexes some of his classic wordplay with lines like, “B*tch, I’m badder than cake mix,” and, “Yeah, and me and Dre are like dog hair / We’re both in our lab coats like retrievers.”

Aside from the Eminem collaboration, among the new Dre GTA songs is “Black Privilege”; “Diamond Mind” with Nipsey Hussle and Ty Dolla Sign; “ETA” with Snoop, Busta Rhymes, and Anderson .Paak; “The Scenic Route” with Rick Ross and .Paak; and “Fallin Up” with Thurz and Cocoa Sarai.

Listen to “Gospel” above and check out the other GTA Online songs below.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Nicki Minaj Does An Awesome Adele Impression, Returning The Favor After Adele’s Legendary ‘Monster’ Rap

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James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” segment on The Late Late Show has produced some memorable music moments over the years. Perhaps the most beloved among them is when Adele rapped Nicki Minaj’s verse from Kanye West’s “Monster,” a viral moment that helped the Adele “Carpool Karaoke” episode become easily the most-watched video on the Late Late Show YouTube channel, with over 252 million views as of today. Well, Minaj was on Corden last night, and while there, she returned the favor by showing of her impression of Adele.

The two re-watched Adele’s rap and then Minaj offered a reaction, saying, “First of all, It’s Adele. Second of all, it’s ‘Monster.’ You guys made such an amazing freaking tag team, by the way. I never got to tell you that. That made my day, my year. I probably got a thousand phone calls about that one thing.”

Corden then asked Minaj what her Adele impersonation sounds like, and Minaj replied by doing an Adele voice and explaining her thought process behind achieving the nuanced impression:

“Alright, in order for me to channel Adele, I sort of have to think like a Black lady in London, right? Because the thing is, normally, everybody knows, my British accent is sort of like a posh white lady, a rich white lady, right? But with Adele, I sort of have to, like, transform, like she might have used to sell crack. Like maybe she used to be hustling, like nickels and dimes in the hood, and then she got her big break. That’s what I see when I see her, like she’s always… it’s so expressive, right?”

Minaj was all over The Late Late Show last night, so check out the Adele bit above and other clips from the show below.