Chance The Rapper and Kanye West began heavily collaborating with each other back in 2016 as Chance had a huge presence on Kanye’s seventh album The Life Of Pablo. Chance had writing credits on multiple songs including, “Ultralight Beam,” “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” “Famous,” and more. From then on, Chance and Kanye’s relationship would cool off a bit, mainly due to political disagreements. Despite this, things seemed to be okay between the two rappers, until at the top of 2021 when a video of Kanye yelling at Chance surfaced on social media.
The video, which was reportedly from a documentary for Kanye’s Donda album, captures Kanye growing increasingly agitated with Chance during a conversation. One thing led to another and Kanye tells Chance to sit his “ass down and listen to the album or leave.” Eighteen months after that video surfaced, Chance finally addressed it during an interview on The Morning Hustle. He described it as a clip from “a larger moment, like no one’s ever gonna get the full story of what’s going on.”
Chance continued, “I saw people put fake captions under the video to make it look like he was talking about my music or something like that. But in all honesty, this is real life. I have real friends and they go through real problems.” He went on to speak about his true intentions for visiting Kanye at the time and how he felt about people’s reactions to the clip.
“I did come out there to check on my friend,” he said. “Me and a lot of other people still have love for Ye. But he’s human, he’s not perfect. He was obviously going through it at that time … It made me evaluate my friendship with him, for sure. I had never been so close to him going through an episode.” He added, “At the end of the day, I definitely love the dude. That’s my guy. It sucks that sometimes people can exploit a moment that is a genuine moment.”
You can revisit the clip in question and watch Chance’s interview on The Morning Hustle above.
In an ideal world, people will always receive credit for the things they do especially when someone else benefits. Unfortunately, the music industry is anything but an ideal world. Though there are proper platforms for songwriters, engineers, and other contributors to be given their acknowledgment, that process is often bypassed. Just this week, Kelis took issue with Beyoncé sampling her on Renaissance without reaching out to her, and now we see ASAP Bari has a similar issue with Playboi Carti.
A$AP Bari calls out Playboi Carti for not paying or crediting him on “Go2DaMoon”
Yesterday (July 29), Bari took to Instagram story to call out Carti for not crediting him or paying him for “Go2DaMoon” featuring Kanye West. Evidently, the ASAP Mob member played the song for Carti around the time Whole Lotta Red was being made.
“When you play Carti a Kanye song you had in ur phone produce by @wheezy,” Bari said over a clip of Carti listening to the song. “Even tho Carti never paid me or gave me Credit on the album but that go’s to a lot of rapper I’ve helped out but never got Credit for.”
Though this is yet another unfortunate situation commonplace to the music industry, Bari is still in good spirits as Kanye West recently gifted him a brand new Maybach truck days after he wrecked his previous vehicle.
In celebration of the premiere of the third season of Ludacris‘ Netflix children’s series, Karma’s World, the rapper has partnered with Mattel to launch a series of dolls inspired by the show. The collection will feature dolls modeled after three of the show’s characters, whose namesake is based on Ludacris‘ daughter, Karma.
In an interview with Billboard, Ludacris detailed the process of creating the dolls with Mattell.
“Mattel was so outstanding with their pitch compared to the other toy brands,” Ludacris said. “Mattel blew us away with their presentation and one of the things that took us over the top was they hired someone specifically for Black hair…Myself, Mattel and our resources took so much of our time getting the absolute most authentic feel and look of the hair with premium quality. Even the hair roots are top-notch. When you touch the hair and texture, it will blow you away because of the quality developments within the hair fibers.”
Karma’s World is centered around a young named Karma, who is gifted with outstanding rapping ability. The show also focuses on family dynamics and social justice issues.
“As soon as you have kids,” said Ludacris in an interview with The Root, “you start thinking about the next generation and stop thinking so much about yourself.”
The Karma’s World dolls are available for purchase at Target and Walmart stores.
Good Morning America has been on a quest to find the best burger in America. Today, the coveted title was given to Houston rapper Bun B, whose hometown-based burger pop-up series, Trill Burgers, has been making waves across the nation.
Bun was given the honor on today’s episode of Good Morning America, on which, he was gifted a trophy and a $10,000 check.
“H-Town, baby,” Bun said. “We did it, baby, Trill Burgers. It feels amazing. God is good and my team is amazing. You’re gonna get the best burger in America.”
Last weekend, Bun shared his Trill Burgers at Rolling Loud Miami. He is also one of many hip-hop artists who will be sharing their culinary creations in a food court at the upcoming Rock The Bells festival in Queens, NY on August 6. Also sharing their food are Nas, with the Brooklyn-based Sweet Chick, Mia X with the New Orleans-based Team Whip Them Pots, and Ghostface Killah, with the Staten Island-based Killah Koffee. This marks the first ever hip-hop food court experience, and it will be curated by Bun himself.
“For me, it’s the food now,” said Bun in a statement. “I still make music. I still perform, but [food] is my passion and it still keeps me in the culture.”
Bun B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The internet has been abuzz with the announcement of new Nicki Minaj music, as well as a six-part docuseries. Following yesterday’s unveiling of the trailer for the docuseries, titled Nicki, several fans have been sharing what they would like to see throughout the six episodes.
In between preparation for the August 12 release of her new single, as well as her upcoming Rolling Loud and OVO Fest performances, Minaj took time to answer questions from the Barbz in a special episode of Queen Radio.
Before going on air, Minaj instructed fans to share questions on Twitter using the hashtags #NickiDocumentary and #FreakyGirl, and also invited them to call in using the Amp app.
Early on in the episode, she admitted that she’s nervous about putting the documentary out in the world.
“It’s extremely scary to share the lows,” Minaj said. “It makes me very proud to know I inspire my fans. And seeing fans that grew up with, still here with me, always makes me emotional, to be honest. I’ll never get over that, ever ever ever. Because y’all guys are the reason. Period.”
During the session, she revealed that each of the Nicki episodes will run an hour long. She also confirmed to a fan that each of the episodes will focus on a different era of her career, and will stream in chronological order. She promised fans that there will be footage from her wedding in the docuseries, as well as footage of her recording her upcoming fifth studio album, which the Barbz have nicknamed NM5.
As for pregnancy footage, “You just gotta wait and see, boo boo,” she said.
While she did not go into details regarding a release date or even a platform on which the documentary will stream, she did revealed that the documentary is coming very soon.
“We have the month that the documentary is coming,” Minaj said. “We do not have the date, but we have the month. It’s going to be a very exciting month for the Barbz. It’s obviously coming out in 2022.”
In regards to music, she also revealed that “‘Freaky Girl’ isn’t actually going to be called ‘Freaky Girl,’” admitting that she wasn’t allowed to use that title.
We may have to wait until 2024 until the third season of HBO’s teen drama, Euphoria. In the meantime, Labrinth, the man behind the show’s musical score, has shared a new single. On “Lift Off,” his first solo single since 2019, and his first musical offering outside of the Euphoria universe, Labrinth soars outside of the confines of the world, shooting for the stars.
“Lift off / Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, gone / You see my rocket ship / Head up in the clouds / When the spaceship lit, ignite / Hit me from the ground / I’m about to lift off,” he sings on the song’s chorus.
The song is a departure from the darker lyrical themes of his Euphoria music, however, utilizes much of the same organ and synth sounds. In an interview with Okayplayer earlier this year, Labrinth revealed that his upcoming album will be gospel-inspired.
“Gospel will be in everything that I do,” he said. “It’s one of the most consistent anchors in my career, it’s in some way on everything I’ve made.”
One of Spotify’s most buzzy playlists is getting a companion podcast. Launching Tuesday, August 4, RapCaviar will debut their official podcast exclusively on Spotify.
Earlier this month, RapCaviar also announced that an eight-episode docuseries based on the playlist is in development at Hulu.
Hosted by journalist and media personality Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins, RapCaviar will touch on an assortment of topics, with each episode featuring groups of hip-hop tastemakers. In the trailer, Jinx and crew are seen discussing Kendrick Lamar‘s best albums, Jack Harlow’s place in the space of hip-hop, and who will be rap’s savior.
In an interview with Variety, the playlist’s official curator, Carl Cherry, explained why he wanted to add a video and audio component to his iconic playlist. According to Cherry, the podcast has been two years in the making.
“I always had the opinion that a playlist is not enough,” Cherry said. “You look at other outlets that were important throughout hip-hop history, whether it’s XXL or the blog era, there’s always context. They were able to contextualize whatever they’d present to you. It’s different when you go on RapCaviar, you see the songs and that’s it. It’s important to us to create these different channels where we can add context and speak to what’s important to us and the culture.”
Netflix recently released Clusterf*ck: Woodstock ’99, their three-episode documentary series directed by Jamie Crawford exploring the titular music festival. Even though it’s been barely a year since HBO released its own Woodstock ’99 documentary, which you’d think would’ve already scratched this itch, I immediately binged all three episodes of the new version the second they were available. Then I watched them again two nights later when a friend came to visit.
I devoured it all, despite it being largely material I’d already seen, delivering information I already knew. I did it so fast and so reflexively that it forced me to ask myself, why? What is it about this seemingly obscure event from 23 years ago that makes me want to keep reliving it, rehashing it, relitigating it? What answers am I hoping to find this time around?
The last time I sped through two docs about the same thing this eagerly was Netflix and Hulu’s competing Fyre Fest documentaries, so maybe there’s just something endlessly intriguing about watching music festival-goers suffer, cocky festival organizers devoured by their own hubris. And sure, maybe there’s the nostalgia factor. I was 18 when Woodstock ’99 happened, so the time period is etched indelibly in my mind. It’s always luridly fascinating to relive those days of bare breasts, baggy pants, and ICE spiker, when the biggest political issue on most young white kids’ minds was how MTV sucks now and your moms was always trying to tell you what to do.
Yet there’s more to Clusterf**k‘s appeal than simple nostalgia. The music and fashion is safely anachronistic, but the event itself, the way it plays out and is eventually covered, feels like a cultural harbinger. It feels like a coming out party for a certain brand of feckless post-counterculture liberal that’s still with us today. These eternally optimistic yet clueless ex-hippies transform seamlessly into “the man” without even realizing it. Woodstock ’99 feels like a transitional moment, perhaps the first time that people of my generation realized that the counterculture we’d been raised to worship had become the culture, and they were hopelessly out of touch. That they’d keep trying to recycle their youth for new generations without acknowledging that the material conditions that produced it had changed.
Woodstock ’99 was an attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69, when four 20-somethings organized one of the touchstone cultural events of the sixties. 30 years later, some of the same people, notably original Woodstock organizer Michael Lang, tried to do the same thing. Only instead of putting on a cool free party featuring bands they liked for their friends, they’d sell it to their children’s generation, using all the free love imagery that had been floating in the cultural ether for the previous 30 years.
Even in the gesture itself, this self-serving capitalism disguised as pedantic altruism and generational noblesse oblige, you can see the origins of the Silicon Valley messiah complex — the way Google built a sprawling monopoly while espousing “don’t be evil” as a mantra. Instead of choosing acts they knew and understood, it was like Woodstock 99’s organizers just went to radio programmers and invited the top 40 acts, with little regard for how they’d fit with each other or further the stated themes of the festival. In that way, it feels like an early example of trusting “Big Data.”
Chances are you already know the broad strokes of what happened next: the organizers, who hadn’t made enough money on Woodstock ’94 because the fence broke and people got in for free, moved the whole thing to a decommissioned air base. To save more money, they farmed out the logistics out to amoral contractors, confiscated everyone’s water on the way in, skimped on security, and, once 250,000 kids were trapped inside a massive animal pen built atop miles of scorching hot blacktop on the hottest weekend of the year, they gouged them for necessities like food and water while failing to provide the basics like security, trash, and sewage service. All while selling their flesh, exuberance, and eventually, suffering, on Pay Per View. Festival goers watched the price of food and water double and triple during the course of the festival, not yet knowing to call it “surge pricing.”
All weekend the organizers had been stoking rumors of some big closing act surprise — Prince? a reunited Guns And Roses? Michael Jackson? Bob Dylan? — but instead, when the last official act (Red Hot Chili Peppers) came to their encore, the audience received candles for a planned Columbine victim vigil, along with a giant video screen playing old Hendrix footage. At which point the attendees used the candles to torch the venue. Which was, hilariously, treated as a shocking event (Burning Man, which always ends with a big fire, had been chugging along uncontroversially for 13 years already at that point).
It’s funny that the enduring debate of the festival has been “what went wrong?” when it should be blindingly obvious to anyone why a bunch of dehydrated kids who’d been denied water wanted to break shit. And it wasn’t because Fred Durst told them to “break stuff,” no matter how big a douche Fred Durst may be (I understand that talking heads shitting on Fred Durst makes for delightful doc content, but blaming him for a riot that happened a full day and half later ignores a lot of basic cause-and-effect). To its credit, Clusterf**k seems to blame the music a lot less than the HBO version.
What other recourse did those kids have after being sold a false bill of goods, gouged, and then exploited for content? Property damage was just the most obvious way to even the score. The organizers had commodified the “Woodstock” brand, and in revenge the festival goers succeeded in sullying it forever. It’s cathartic to watch, another reason these docs are so watchable.
Of course, the leadership of the time, even 23 years later, seem utterly oblivious to all this (if not prevented from acknowledging it for legal reasons). The fascinating aspect of Woodstock ’99 is less the fires and the riots and the sexual assaults themselves (which, it should be noted, Woodstock ’69 also had lots of) than watching those same organizers continue to deny the basic material conditions that created the disaster. In that way they seem to eerily mirror our current political leadership.
In one unforgettable scene, a veteran of Woodstock ’69 drives around the trash-strewn grounds of Woodstock ’99 (the trash hauling contractors nowhere to be found), trying to hand out garbage bags in the vain hopes of getting the festival goers to clean up after themselves. If her generation could clean up their own trash (citation needed), why couldn’t these kids? When her audience, by and large, look at her like she’s insane, it doesn’t seem to inspire much self-reflection. No acknowledgment that cleaning up food and trash you’ve been allowed to bring in to sustain yourself at a free concert is fundamentally different than being asked to pick up the remains of $4 water ($7.11 water in 2022 dollars) you’ve been forced to buy by a venue that can’t maintain trash, food, or sewage after you paid them $150 to get in. And also, by the way, owns the rights to the images of you passed out naked in the mud in perpetuity.
Even 20 years later, being interviewed in the present, Woodstock 99’s organizers still seem incapable or unwilling to learn basic lessons. Asked to explain why the kids tore down their peace wall and looted their vendor village, they say, seemingly without any sense of irony, things like “I guess they just didn’t have that same spirit.”
Over and over, when presented with material conditions and institutional failure, they blame culture. Organizer John Scher (portrayed once again as one of the main villains of the story) says of the festival attendees, “I think they were entitled and fearful of growing up.”
Michael Lang, Scher’s long-haired flower child partner adds, “I don’t think they were able to embrace the social issues in the same way.”
If the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting the same results, what does it mean to expect people to act just like you did while treating them completely differently? These people will exploit your youth and then call you childish if you object.
It wouldn’t feel so relevant if the people who ran Woodstock ’99 didn’t seem so cut from the same Kente cloth as the people currently running the country. Lang died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma three months after shooting his interview. John Scher (whose name is conveniently scrubbed from the Woodstock ’99 Wikipedia page, and Wikipedia in general, which must’ve cost a pretty penny — and didn’t work that well considering most of his other search results are news articles about him blaming women for their own sexual assault) is still alive (he’s about 71, based on this Billboard article) and still working. Both are younger than both Joe Biden (79) and Nancy Pelosi (82), not to mention half the congressional leadership.
It’s not to say that everyone from the same generation is exactly the same (which by implication would make me responsible for the popularity of Limp Bizkit, a band that once released an album called “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water”), but it is hard not to see echoes of that confused hippie lady desperately trying to hand out trash bags in every dire-sounding fundraising email from the DNC. “Won’t you please help us clean up this mess we created?? All we need is a bit more of your money!”
It’s hard not to see a little of Joe Biden in the footage of John Scher and Michael Lang’s increasingly out-of-touch press conferences, insisting that everything is okay, and even if it isn’t it definitely isn’t their fault. The Chapo Trap House boys once described Joe Biden as “the guy who tells you the ice cream machine is broken” and I haven’t been able to think of him any other way ever since. John Scher and Michael Lang were early harbingers of this, the guys who smile and say the shitters are full but they’re working real hard on it. What was Bill Clinton’s famous catchphrase? “I feel your pain.”
These are all people who have clearly sold out their peace and love and flower power values for a comfortable position in society long ago, but if you point out their hypocrisy in any of this or their basic incompetence in any way, it’s because you’re too selfish or irresponsible. The youths are too entitled! They can’t even appreciate being charged for things we got for free!
It’s not so much their hypocrisy or their incompetence that rankles; my own generation is clearly capable of same, as the aforementioned Fyre Fest example could attest. It’s the refusal to relinquish the cultural conversation, the refusal to stop insisting. Nancy Pelosi is in her eighties and has tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars to her name, depending on who you ask. Dianne Feinstein, widely whispered to be suffering from dementia, is almost 90 and even richer. Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ bete noire, is 74 and also a millionaire. Donald Trump looks like this now.
Nothing against older folks, I hope to become one myself some day. But the majority of the political leadership on both sides is well past the age when we would start to consider them incompetent for other jobs. They could just ride off into the sunset for comfortable retirements, on dopily named yachts eating fancy ice creams from custom fridges, and everyone would be happy for them. And yet they don’t. It seems that they can’t manage the one act even Limp Bizkit was ultimately capable of: leaving the stage.
‘Clusterf**k: Woodstock ’99’ premieres August 3, 2022 on Netflix. Vince Mancini is onTwitter. You can access his archive of reviewshere.
CMG’s 2022 takeover continues with another new release from the Memphis-based label’s Louisville slugger, EST Gee. Collective Music Group shows no signs of letting up this year even though the group just dropped a compilation album, Gangsta Art, two weeks ago. While EST Gee was all over that project, it seems he hasn’t quite satisfied his creative itch, following up today with “Blood.” If you know Gee’s past work like his 2021 mixtape Bigger Than Life Or Death, you know what to expect here.
It’s a good thing EST Gee is on his grind since his “Lurkin” labelmate Mozzy just turned himself in on gun charges today. The Sacramento native is due for a year in prison on those charges, but with his crewmates going so hard in the meantime, he’s set to return to more collective wealth. Much of it will be generated by Gee, who has been a hotly demanded feature artist, collaborating with French Montana on “Keep It Real” as well as a supposed joint project with fellow Louisvillian Jack Harlow.
Meanwhile, the label continues to grow; earlier this month, CMG announced signing Memphis rapper GloRilla, whose song “FNF” has been burning up the streets independently since its release. It’s looking like a CMG summer.
Mozzy has been on quite a run over the last few years, both individually and as part of Yo Gotti’s CMG imprint. Unfortunately, the Sacramento rapper’s momentum will be coming to a halt as he turned himself in yesterday (July 28) and will serve a one-year sentence in prison for a federal gun charge.
The “Famous” artist was originally arrested during a traffic stop back in January 2021. The police then caught the scent of marijuana and went on to search the car, discovering a Glock 26, 16 rounds of 9mm ammunition, and marijuana. Mozzy was then taken in before posting his $35,000 bail.
The case was rejected by the District Attorney’s office and passed on to a local US Attorney. Mozzy was picked up by US Marshals in Las Vegas at an unrelated court appearance, upon which he and his wife split a $1 million appearance bond and he went free from his federal charge. Mozzy pled guilty this past January and aimed for just probation, which was denied. Prosecutors sought a 10-month sentence and drug counseling after he tested positive for marijuana while on pretrial release.
It is clearly an unfortunate series of events for Mozzy and he will now have to sit for a year.
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