Future is days away from dropping his 9th studio album I Never Liked You. Ahead of the hotly anticipated release, he has shared a snippet of a collaboration with Kanye West.
“Cross me so much I got nails in my hand/ City on fire, city on fire, city on fire,” raps Ye over a scorching trap beat, before Future jumps in, rapping “Cookin’ out the bowl, tryna scrape out the paint/ One day I was high, had to pour the whole pint/ Woke up in the sky, same money from the bank/ I’ll take it wrapped in plastic, accept anything.”
The track originally appeared on Kanye West’s 10th studio album Donda 2 under the title “Keep It Burning,” however, was later removed from the stem player. It is unclear as to whether or not the song has since been renamed, or if Future or Ye have made any significant changes to the song’s production or lyrics. Future was Donda 2‘s executive producer.
Earlier this month, Future recalled working with Ye during the early stages of his career in an interview with GQ.
“Me and Kanye always had a relationship,” Future said. “But it’s hard for people to understand because I don’t put everything on Instagram. Kanye flew me to Paris in 2011 or 2012 to work on music. [Discussing] his clothing line before it came, his shoe business before it came. People don’t know I’ve been able to go to his house and pull up right into the crib. We just never talked about it.”
In 2020, controversial rapper Azealia Banks had her Twitter account suspended. It was after a slew of transphobic tweets, which were nothing out of the sort for her. It was also not her first time being suspended; she was known for getting into fights with stars like Lana Del Rey and others.
Well, now that Elon Musk has acquired Twitter and all hell has been breaking loose on the bird app, Banks has made another Twitter account. She shared this news on her Instagram, posting her new handle @Azealiaishere with the caption: “Oh girlssssssssss lmao we are in this b*tch.” She’s yet to make a tweet yet, but surely she’ll be wreaking havoc soon.
Despite Banks’ chaos, the “212” rapper used Instagram to condemn Kanye West’s actions in February: “Y’all are making way too many excuses for Kanye. This is the second time he has publicly bullied North West. First with the abortion sh*t, and now putting her on blast on his Instagram page as if she’s some sort of criminal.” She continued, “Kanye had no problem with that magazine cover where North had on a f*cking belly top and purple eyeliner with her little buds showing thru the shirt, he thought it was fashion. You all said nothing.”
Lawsuits over samples in music seem to be filed all the time. Usually, though, the reason for them tends to be related to the sampled work not being properly credited. However, that’s not the case with the latest lawsuit Kanye West faces, from Declan Colgan Music Ltd (DCM). The suit is regarding West’s sample of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” on his 2010 song “Power.”
Variety reports DCM (which owns the mechanical rights to the King Crimson song, is suing Universal Music Group (UMG) due to payment issues with West’s “Power.” The suit claims the label has been underpaying on streaming royalties. DCM is seeking all sums due along with interest.
After Ye sampled the song without a license, DCM and UMG came to an agreement, allowing West to sample the song in exchange for a 5.33-percent royalty on each copy of “Power” that was sold or “otherwise exploited.” Per the agreement, UMG had to pay a royalty on the same terms West receives royalties from the track.
The lawsuit claims UMG “has failed, and continues to fail, to comply with its royalty accounting obligations in respect of one mode of exploitation, namely the making available of the Power [r]ecording to consumers through so-called ‘streaming’ services.”
So, DCM argues UMG should be paying streaming royalties based on what the sums would be if those streams had instead been physical CD sales, per the royalty agreement. Instead, DCM alleges UMG has been paying a lower amount, being the percentage of what they actually receive per stream.
Sometimes all it takes to get your song noticed is a tweet from Cardi B. Well, it’s not like Lil Shordie Scott didn’t already have a pretty sharp single out with his Cardi B-referencing “Rocking A Cardigan In Atlanta,” but once Cardi herself is acknowledging the song on social media, and her husband Offset is jumping on the remix, things start happening fast.
I wanna take a pic with Cardi B inside my cardigan
Three months ago, the Atlanta rapper uploaded his “Rocking A Cardigan In Atlanta” song to Youtube, and it’s racked up about two and a half million views since then. The song starts off with what Scott himself describes as a long intro, where three friends debate what celebrity they’d most like to take a photo with. Doja Cat and Rihanna are both thrown out as ideas, but Scott is set on Cardi B, who he thinks has a great “big sister” vibe. Then, the home video vibes of the clip shift to a drip genie rather magically making his way to their hang, and setting Scott up with a fresh cardigan. That’s when the song kicks in, and well, it was enough to catch the attention of Offset and Cardi.
Check out the original video below, and the remix with Offset up top.
For his part, Scott is pretty excited to get that Cardi B acknowledgement:
Congrats Shordie, this might well be the beginning of a viral hit, and even if it isn’t, having the subject of your song acknowledge it is still a huge win.
A few years ago, Machine Gun Kelly decided to give pop-punk music a try, shying away from the rap that made him famous. On a commercial level, that turned out to be a terrific idea, as MGK’s two rock albums, 2020’s Tickets To My Downfall and last year’s Mainstream Sellout, where his first ones to go No. 1 in the US. He’s apparently not done with rap yet, though, as he’s now saying he wants to get back to making that type of music.
In a new Audacy Music interview (as Rap-Up points out), Kelly said of what’s next for him:
“I’m going to make a rap album for myself, for no other reason, no point to prove, no chip on my shoulder. If I keep doing things to prove things to people, I’m going to one: drive myself crazy, and two: not make a good product. I made Tickets and Mainstream Sellout because I wanted to make them. I need to now also make people miss that sound. […] I’m going to do this tour and I’m gonna step into where I left Hotel Diablo and expand on my storytelling as a rapper and find a new innovative sound for the hip-hop Machine Gun Kelly. That’s where my excitement is and where me as a music archaeologist wants to explore.”
While pop-punk has brought Kelly his biggest commercial success, he wasn’t exactly slouching in his early rap days: All of his albums were top-5 on the charts, save for 2017’s Bloom, which peaked at a respectable No. 8. Bloom, however, yielded Kelly’s biggest hit song, as the Camila Cabello collaboration “Bad Things” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his only top-5 (or even top-10) single.
Rolling Loud, the traveling rap festival with roots in Miami and branches in Los Angeles, New York, and Portugal, has set its sights on Toronto. The Great White North’s upcoming iteration of Rolling Loud is booked for the weekend of September 9-11 at Ontario Place with headliners Dave, Future, and Wizkid. This marks the first time the festival will be headlined by mostly international artists (not including its Portugal events, where technically all the Americans were the imports), with Dave representing the UK (y’know, England) and Wizkid bringing Nigerian flair.
Further down the bill, fans will recognize some familiar names, including Rolling Loud mainstays like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Central Cee, Lil Uzi Vert, Migos, Nav, Rae Sremmurd, Roddy Ricch, Ski Mask The Slump God, and $NOT, while the new international outlook includes upstarts like AJ Tracey, Baka Not Nice, Haviah Mighty, Pressa, Rema, and Smiley.
Tickets for the festival go on sale this Friday, April 29, with the presale beginning Wednesday, April 27, with American Express cardholders getting their own presale on Thursday. For more info, you can check out the official Rolling Loud website: RollingLoud.com/toronto
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
It’s really rare that you meet a rapper’s mom before you meet the rapper himself. But that’s what happened for me with Tobi Lou, the effervescent Chicago rapper who is building an audience by being something like the antithesis of what rappers have always been. Okay, so technically, it was his girlfriend’s mom, but the point stands: The way I met Tobi is as counterintuitive as his approach to hip-hop – and if anything, his approach to music is even more successful.
To invest in Tobi Lou fanship is to embrace a thousand little quirky artifacts of the quasi fantasy world he’s building for himself. For instance, in 2018, Tobi was joined by St. Louis rapper Smino in his video for “Troop,” a dreamy ode to the cartoons of Tobi’s youth. The video features cameos from characters like the Rugrats and Kanye West’s Takashi Murakami-designed Dropout Bear mascot, spotlighting the colorful oeuvre he’s built over the past few years.
Tobi expanded that saturated fantasyland through singles such as the Adventure Time-inspired TikTok favorite “Buff Baby” and with projects like 2019’s Live On Ice. With each new release, a fervent fan base also grew around Tobi’s equally vibrant personality. Both kicked into overdrive with the recent release of his album Non-Perishable in March, which is part of a three-project suite that grew out of his original plan for a project called Parrish Blue. If his previous projects expanded the canon, Non-Perishable turned it on its head, drawing it into the realm of hyperreal live-action marked by the same cartoonish zany energy.
It also stretched the boundaries of his content, allowing him to delve more into the inner workings of his mind beyond candy-coated hooks and saccharine sing-alongs. “I think Live On Ice was a big show and tell,” he says via a mid-afternoon Zoom call to discuss Non-Perishable and its upcoming related projects. “Parrish Blue is an overwhelming defiant sadness like a really gigantic whole. It’s a lot of devastation and it’s just a lot of emotions and it’s really heavy. And then making Parrish Blue, I realized through the help of my sister that I need to just stop trying to fit all my toys into one box. And then I separated them for the first time. And now I had like three boxes of 10 to 12 tracks.”
Those three boxes are Non-Perishable, April Showers, which is set to release later this week, and Parrish Blue, each describing a different stage of the process of rebuilding and healing from the soul-shattering wounds of the past few years. “The second project, that’s just chaos at its height,” he explains. “That’s the heat of the battle. And then Parrish Blue is like the aftereffect of the battle, just the feeling of sorrow, the feeling of loss and just dealing with that. And the piece of it, knowing this is who I am and not being afraid to be that. And I think Non-Perishable just offered me the chance to get energy off and break out of this sad box that I kind of put myself into while making Parrish Blue.”
In true Tobi Lou fashion, his route into making music professionally was also roundabout and unconventional. Born in Nigeria and raised in Chicago, he originally pursued a career in baseball, even making it to the minor leagues before suffering a career-ending injury. From then on, he focused everything on making and releasing music independently – an arrangement that takes the same sort of commitment, energy, time, and money, but is every bit as rewarding.
Being independent affords him a level of control and freedom that is often out of reach for his contemporaries on major labels. For one thing, he’s shot 11 videos for Non-Perishable and released eight so far, all with the assistance of his longtime collaborator Glassface, who has been a critical component of the Tobi Lou experience so far. If Tobi’s striking visual presentation is the hook, Glassface is probably as integral to his success as anyone, designing Tobi’s cover art and shooting his videos, as well as contributing musically behind the scenes.
“There is beauty in independence,” Tobi says of his situation. “There’s definitely more for freedom, but at the end of the day, it’s a business. Everything’s a business. Whether you’re independent, or you’re with a major label, everything’s a business. You just get more authority over your art, as an independent…. I don’t really feel like anyone’s holding me back. If I’m not dropping, it’s because I don’t want to drop.”
Of course, competing in such a crowded marketplace without the assistance of a massive corporate machine means risking getting overshadowed and lost in the near-constant rush of new music. Fortunately for him, his natural personality and sense of humor provide the best tools to solve this potential problem. Days after the release of Non-Perishable, he joked that he would remove the album from DSPs after a week and that listeners should download it to ensure they wouldn’t lose access. Fans took that as a challenge, running up the album’s sales until it reached Apple Music’s number-one spot.
“I didn’t mean to hold the album hostage,” he laughs. “I think I woke up the day after it dropped and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to say they got seven days.’ Because first-week [sales] matters so much to us, for artists – that’s what we’re judged by. I’m always trolling. And I didn’t really think much of it past that, until the day it started unfolding, and people were getting worried like, ‘Wait, is he serious?’ And I was just like, ‘Wait a minute. I’m actually causing a little disturbance here. People are getting worried.’ And what if things operated like that? We got to see the power of this fan base, and I think we could do some really crazy things down the line.”
For now, he hopes he doesn’t need to hold his albums hostage in the future, but he sees the value in seeking new outlets and avenues and approaches to promoting his art. For instance, outside of music, he’s spent the past year designing his own sneakers and is already working on a second pair. He’s excited to launch them because of all the artists who sell various merch like hoodies, shirts, bags, and so on, he may very well be the first to put out his own shoes independently.
Which sums up his whole approach, really. “I like the fact that people are starting to think in that language,” he says. “It’s really cool to start thinking, yo don’t wait for Nike, you are Nike. We can be Adidas. We can be all these things, and we can just start somewhere. So it’s been cool to see.” The only limit is imagination, and as Tobi’s work so far has shown, his imagination is limitless.
In a recent interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Megan Thee Stallion spoke about the 2020 incident where Tory Lanez allegedly shot at her feet, and revealed photos of the wounds to the back of her feet (up against her Achilles tendon). CBS also showed copies of a medical report that indicated that Meg still has bullet fragments in her feet. Considering how toxic internet culture, social media, and hip-hop pundits can be towards female artists — many of which still don’t believe that Meg was shot at all — the “Plan B” rapper went on the CBS Mornings show to tell her side of the story and hopefully quell any doubts.
“I was really scared ’cause I had never been shot at before,” an emotional Meg said as she detailed fearing for her life and of those around her at the time. However, even this appearance isn’t enough to convince some people that Meg has been wronged. A Twitter user replied to the @CBSMornings account and @theestallion, saying, “crazy how meg gets to speak on whomever platform or song about the situation but tory or he goes to jail being its still an open investigation.”
The user referenced how Lanez has been tight-lipped about the “open investigation.” Meg was clearly was irked by someone questioning her very reasonable agency here, and in a now deleted quote-tweet, she clapped back at the keyboard commando, saying: “So a man can shoot me, chop up horse legs in music videos to taunt me, pay blogs to spread false information from what’s happening in court, record studio albums and make diss tracks… but when I talk to gayle king that’s the last straw… F*CK YALL.”
There’s definitely a double-standard for male and female artists, especially in hip-hop, and this is further proof of it. Just last week, Bhad Bhabie shed some light on the petty social media culture that has rendered her one-dimensional, despite her resume speaking otherwise. And even Megan — who is undoubtedly on the top of the hip-hop world right now — isn’t immune to these mechanisms.
Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Last year, Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free’s new media company, PgLang, found instant success with its first artist, Baby Keem. Keem’s debut album, The Melodic Blue, debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, while the rapper himself garnered a Best Rap Performance Grammy Award alongside his cousin Kendrick for the album’s single “Family Ties.” This past weekend, they capped Keem’s successful rookie season with a performance at Coachella, where Kendrick joined the younger rapper onstage to perform their Grammy-winning hit.
Now, the LA-based label/production studio will aim to repeat its first success with its next artist, Tanna Leone, who made his PgLang debut last month on “With The Villains” and “Lucky.” This week, he announced the release date for his own debut album, Sleepy Soldier, which is due Friday, April 29. To accompany the announcement, he dropped the video for his latest single, “Death N’ Taxes,” which sees him standing stoically in front of scenes from a chaotic life. From schoolyard fights to funerals, Tanna reviews the moments that have left the biggest impacts on him, subtly revealing who he is by depicting what he’s been through.
Meanwhile, his formerly released singles “With The Villians” and “Lucky” won’t be among Sleepy Soldier‘s 14 tracks when it drops this Friday, but with a tracklist that doesn’t reveal any of the features, it’ll be worth checking out to see if there are any surprises. In the meantime, check out the video for “Death N’ Taxes” above.
Most engagement announcements are, let’s face it, pretty corny, but Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly aren’t most couples. In early 2022, the Jennifer’s Body actress shared the happy news that she and the “emo girl” singer are getting married with a post on Instagram that ended with, “And just as in every lifetime before this one, and as in every lifetime that will follow it, I said yes… and then we drank each other’s blood.”
Fox was asked about the Billy and Angelina-like blood drinking in a recent interview with Glamour UK. “Yeah. So, I guess to drink each other’s blood might mislead people or people are imagining us with goblets and we’re like Game of Thrones, drinking each other’s blood,” she said while laughing. “It’s just a few drops, but yes, we do consume each other’s blood on occasion for ritual purposes only.” It’s medicinal blood.
Fox continued:
“I’m much more controlled. I read tarot cards and I’m into astrology and I’m doing all these metaphysical practices and meditations. And I do rituals on new moons and full moons, and all these things. And so, when I do it, it’s a passage or it is used for a reason. And it is controlled where it’s like, ‘Let’s shed a few drops of blood and each drink it.’ He’s much more haphazard and hectic and chaotic, where he’s willing to just cut his chest open with broken glass and be like, ‘Take my soul.’ … Let me tell you. Maybe not exactly like that, but a version of that has happened many times.”
What are the odds that track one on Machine Gun Kelly’s next album is called “Take My Soul” followed by track two “I Am Weed”? I say pretty high. Anyway, mazel tov to the blood-drinking couple. May your wedding feast be provided by the finest Dothraki chefs.
4.29 @1future @kanyewest pic.twitter.com/GfyF2BbIWv
