Young Money Cash Money Billionaires may in fact be true for one of the members of the YMCMB collective: According to Nicki Minaj, who reunited with her Young Money labelmates Lil Wayne and Drake during the latter’s October World Festival in Toronto last weekend, the “Way 2 Sexy” hitmaker may be a billionaire.
In a video shared to Minaj’s Instagram Story yesterday, she is seen boarding a private jet. In the clip, she says, “This is what happens when you got a rich — I’m sorry, a very rich, rich, rich, rich — Canadian friend… who is the only billionaire that I know that don’t want people to know he a billionaire.”
While she didn’t refer to anyone by name, fans immediately assumed the “Canadian friend” was Drake. Later that day, fans immediately caught wind of Minaj liking a tweet reading, “Shoutout to @Drake for being a billionaire too, even though you ain’t want no one to know.”
If this is true, Drake is among one of very few rappers in the coveted billionaires club, alongside Jay-Z, who reached billionaire status in 2019 by way of his $75 million catalog, as well as his stakes in Tidal, Uber, Armand de Brignac, and D’Usse. Kanye West attained billionaire status in 2020, mostly in part to his Yeezy fashion empire. He even surpassed Jay and has reached a net worth of $2 billion.
Minaj is set to drop her much anticipated new single, “Super Freaky Girl,” this Friday.
At some point in the not-so-distant future, Megan Thee Stallion is set to release a new album (which appears to be called Traumazine). Ahead of then, Meg has gone ahead and pulled back the curtain on the upcoming project a little bit via Twitter.
Last night, Megan started responding to fan tweets, with one fan asking, “You said the album was a lot of self-reflection. What inspired you to take this route for the album?” She replied, “I wrote this album for myself… I wanted to start writing in a journal but I said f*ck it I’ll put it in a song.”
Somebody else asked how long the tracklist is and Meg noted it’ll have 18 tracks. Another user wondered, “Was it hard for you to write songs for this project.” Meg answered, “Yes very [pleading face emoji] saying certain things you’ve never said out loud before is hard.”
A user asked if any songs on the album are going to be longer than two minutes and Meg said, “Now y’all know ima 3 verse type of girl so yes lol.”
Shortly after that, Megan decided she had spilled enough tea, tweeting, “Ok wait actually let’s not talk abt this tonight lol.”
So far, Beyoncé has offered plenty of ways to enjoy “Break My Soul,” whether it’s via the original version, one of the four remixes from the EP, or the Madonna-featuring “Queens Remix” of the song. After the latter version came out, Madonna got a nice gift from Beyoncé.
Yesterday, Madonna took to her Instagram Story to show off a note from Beyoncé, accompanied by some flowers. The message reads, “Thank you, Queen. I’m so grateful for you. You have opened so many doors for so many women. You are masterpiece genius. Thank you for allowing me to sing in your song and thank you for naming the remix!!!! Love always and forever, B.”
Madonna wrote on the post, “thank you!! from one [queen] to another [queen]. I love the Re-Mix! @beyonce.” She also shared another photo showing off the massive bouquet of white flowers.
As for the part of Beyoncé’s message about “allowing me to sing in your song” despite this being a remix of her own song, that’s a nod to the remix sampling Madonna’s “Vogue.”
The Breakfast Club is a popular New York-based hip-hop podcast hosted by Angela Yee, Charlamagne Tha God, and DJ Envy. It’s been drawing in a large audience since its inception in 2010, but now it seems like something is going to change.
Yee made an ominous tweet on Tuesday, writing, “The breakfast club as you know it is officially over.” Closing the post with the emoji of hands making a heart makes it less eerie, but fans are wondering what this means about the future of the show. Whether The Breakfast Club is ending or just making changes is unclear.
The breakfast club as you know it is officially over
The Breakfast Club has not been without drama. Earlier this year, DaBaby used his time on their platform to defend himself from accusations of homophobia. “I didn’t mean what you think I meant,” he said. “What you want me to do? Go look myself in the mirror and say, ‘You don’t like gay people?’ Nah. I’m not trippin’ on gay people at all. If I said what I said to get people to raise they cell phones and it was misinterpreted by people who watch a five-second clip at home. You not supposed to understand what’s going on. You could raise your cell phone if you wanted to. You ain’t supposed to be able to digest a clip that’s been altered and shortened with a narrative to go along with it, with enough people driving it, it gonna do what it do.”
Tuesday, August 9 would’ve been the late rapper King Von‘s 28th birthday. In honor of the hip-hop icon, his estate has unveiled a music video, “Get It Done,” featuring OMB Peezy from his posthumous album What It Means to Be King.
Directed by 20K Visuals, it follows other posthumous videos, like “Don’t Play That,” “Too Real,” “Demon,” “Armed & Dangerous,” “Mine Too,” and “Wayne’s Story.” As per usual, the “Get It Done” video has lots of fire, strobes, cash, and scenes with cars. Mostly it watches King Von and OMB Peezy rapping alongside one another.
In Uproxx‘s 2020 interview with King Von, which was conducted just days before he was killed, the rapper discussed the making of his music videos. “It be fun when you putting together the ideas but then when it’s time to make it, I be mad as hell, that I put together all this,” he said. “It’s tiring, man. We would get it out in one day. Sometimes it would drag over to the next day, if that was the plan, but if it was that day, we would just punch the hours in. We out five o’clock in the morning damn near.”
There’s an architectural adage that explains how the sign of a healthy city is an ever-evolving skyline. In San Francisco, the colorfully reflective Salesforce Tower replacing the iconic Transamerica Pyramid as the most prominent pillar in Downtown’s lineup of buildings is a prime example of this concept. A permanent fixture signifying a period of growth.
Lasting music festivals are similar in their nature. The sign of a healthy festival is one that also flashes an ever-evolving landscape and more importantly, one that continues to reflect the city where it takes place in new and exciting ways. Outside Lands, San Francisco’s most significant pop music festival, operates like a city within a city, one that welcomed 225,000 people to an unusually sunny Golden Gate Park this past weekend for its 14th edition. But unlike a skyline, a lot of those changes — besides the new light-up windmill which replaced the double wooden mills of old — can’t be seen from a distance and are only fully appreciated when traversing the festival’s bountiful paths and walkways to “Lands” within Golden Gate Park, one of America’s quintessential music festival venues.
Justin Yee
It’s nothing short of a privilege to be coursing through Golden Gate Park’s meadows and fields for the weekend. It’s an easy walk to the end of the Polo Field to catch Green Day, Post Malone, or SZA’s headlining sets, but walk beneath the cypress tree-coverings of McLaren Pass, and you might just stumble into DJ’s Q-Bert and Shortkut of the famed Invisbl Skratch Piklz turntablist crew throwing down a world-class display at a pop-up stage in a cocktail-themed corner of the fest. Stroll through the festival’s outer edge along the North entrance and you can cross the street into Marx Meadow for the electronic music-focused SOMA Tent. While last year’s 1,000 capacity area was an overpopulated mess, this year’s tent had double the capacity for DJs ranging up to Tokimonsta and Claude VonStroke. Pull open the door to Outside Lands’ only indoor stage and you’re transported into a strikingly large space akin to one of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood underground clubs, complete with LED cubes encrusting the stage. Fine-tuning an indoor electronic music component to the festival was long overdue for Outside Lands and for the club kids and ravers who want to dance in a warehouse-like setting all weekend, it’s a swell function that also funnels away traffic from the rest of the fest.
Justin Yee
You see, every corner of the footprint is built to showcase the beauty of the grounds. At the sweeping, sunken meadow of the Sutro Stage — where Faye Webster dazzled, Wet Leg roused, and Robert Glasper proved once again that he’s one of this summer’s must-see festival acts — unsightly porta potties that lined the outer edge were removed this year in favor of a more concealed and functional facility on the opposite side of the field. To say it improved aesthetics is an understatement and it was one of many functional improvements that Outside Lands is beginning to deploy as it becomes increasingly well-oiled.
Justin Yee
Walk through a tunnel beneath the Polo Field bleachers and you slide into the flowering Grasslands, a legal cannabis wonderland with dispensary booths selling every variant of cannabis product imaginable. Over the last handful of years as cannabis laws have become relaxed, Outside Lands has worked to perfect this unique music festival experience. There are newly expanded “consumption areas” where folks can lounge and puff. A stoner jam band played on Sunday while carving up tiki idols as dispensary hacks hucked “buy one get one” deals like your typical pot shop experience. One dispensary even offered a “FREE GUNNA” t-shirt with the purchase of an eighth (I support this, #FreeYSL).
And for as much of a marketing-palooza as any music festival experience can be, Outside Lands’ corporate interests blended seamlessly into the background, with the exception of the new Music Den by Toyota stage. But to be fair, this was hands down the best addition to the festival’s overall music offerings. Acts who played earlier in the festival got an opportunity to appear again in a natural amphitheater-like setting. If you didn’t get in between noon and 2pm, you could still catch indie acts like The Beths, L’Rain, and Cassandra Jenkins later in the day. It proved a welcome respite to lay on the grassy slope looking at the obscure reflections of ourselves on oversized ornaments perched above on the cypress branches, while the artists played intentionally lowered volume sets.
Justin Yee
And while the transformation of Golden Gate Park into this colorful community is always the star of the show, the music was better than I anticipated compared to last year’s sublime lineup over Halloween Weekend. Green Day broke through across the Bay as an Oakland punk trio in the ’90s and here they were, closing down Saturday night’s slate with the #hits that got them here. “I remember one time we tried to play in Dolores Park. There were a lot of punk bands and then the cops came and shut it down,” singer Billie Joe Armstrong said to the crowd. “Well, they didn’t shut this one down!” The set was also a reminder of how under-appreciated Mike Dirnt is as a bassist. His grooves on “Longview” and “Welcome To Paradise” belong in whatever the equivalent of the punk rock Louvre is.
Justin Yee
Green Day as a local headliner was part of a bigger theme for Outside Lands 2022, one that saw a bigger commitment to Bay Area artists than ever. San Francisco rapper Larry June put down the best party set of the weekend with a prime 5:30 pm slot on the Twin Peaks Stage — the festival’s second largest. The chill, weird, lit Bay Area ethos was blowing through the diverse crowd in clouds of smoke all the way to June rapping “Bitch I feel like I’m dreaminnng…” on set closer “Smoothies In 1991.”
Justin Yee
EDM producer Illenium, who went to St. Ignatius High School in the nearby Sunset district, closed down Twin Peaks Stage on Sunday. But the weekend felt like a true showcase for emerging Bay Area talent too; a “risk” that Outside Lands wasn’t always willing to take. In building this true ecosystem that reflects its locale, sets from Bay Area-bred acts like rising pop singer Thuy, Atlantic Records rapper Symba, flamboyant empowerment pop group Planet Booty, indie stalwart Spellling, and the biggest surprise of the weekend, Odie, bridge the great divide of the stratification of festival crowds. In effect, it hits different when we can all score more than one for the home team.
And then there’s the big ticket stars. the artists most people end up remembering the most. And it’s hard to begin this conversation without bringing up Pusha T first. King Push is bar none of the best lyricists in the game and he proves it every time on stage. Incredible energy, no bells and whistles, just a non-stop flow and series of poised death stares delivered while standing in the cleanest pair of coke white Yeezy Boost 350s you’ve ever seen. He’s the type of dude who can shout sweeping statements to the crowd like, “It’s Almost Dry! Rap album of the muthaf*ckin year. Easy!” And then perform with such conviction that you can’t help but think how right he is when it’s over.
Justin Yee
SZA’s Friday night headlining set was evidence of Outside Lands’ growing continuity in booking. The singer, who came out standing on an elaborate lighthouse erected on stage, first graced the noon slot at Twin Peaks stage in 2015. And even without that long-awaited new album in tow, the crowd was still wrapped around her finger on all of the Ctrl jams, a Doja Cat-less rendition of “Kiss Me More,” and an explosive set-opening “All The Stars.”
The largest crowds of the weekend felt like they were (weirdly) for Weezer and Jack Harlow, but largely a function of people preparing for headliners Post Malone and Green Day, who played right after them, respectively. On Saturday, Harlow made a rare performance backed by a live band, commanding the youngest crowd of the weekend that gradually became older as folks started positioning themselves for Green Day. Weezer playing a sing-along set on the main stage’s penultimate slot of the entire festival Sunday night was a masterstroke of understanding what works and what doesn’t at a music festival in 2022. Organizers Another Planet Entertainment learned from 2016’s debacle of a Lionel Richie closing set that was very sparsely attended. Sure, it’s the legacy act, but look, you can’t please everyone and acting as such is important. So send the aging hipsters home early along with Rivers Cuomo and the Microsoft ball cap he took off (facts only, you can’t make this stuff up) so they can make it to work on time on Monday, and let the rest of the crowd vibe out to Post Malone.
Justin Yee
For those who stayed, they’d have seen an artist on top of the music world showing the crowd exactly why he belongs there. You might’ve not known it right off the bat though. “I’m here to play some shitty music and get f*cked up!” Malone told the crowd at the beginning of his set; red cup in hand. Make no mistake about it, this was a galvanizing performance for easily the most diverse crowd of the weekend and Posty kept us guessing the entire time.
At one point, he straddled a mic with his mouth on the ground to sing “I Fall Apart” (surely making Karen O proud) then got up to take a seat, grabbed an acoustic guitar to play “Stay” and “Go Flex” while never putting his cigarette down. “The world has been such a shitty place and it just feels so beautiful to be out here with you to have a good time,” Malone said, radiating a message of love that was a resounding theme for just about every artist on stage over the weekend. And you know what? This is music to get f*cked up to. And this day and age, when we have no clue what virus is floating in the air around us when we’re surrounded by tens of thousands of people, surrendering to the music is the only way to enjoy ourselves in this environment. And nobody did surrender better than the guy who set his guitar on fire and smashed it, after performing alone on stage for the last hour and a half of an unforgettable weekend.
Justin Yee
Check out some photos from this year’s festival below.
Thanks to legal cases against Young Thug and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, rap lyrics have been under the microscope as fans and critics debate rappers’ responsibility for their rhymes’ relations to reality. From New York drill rappers battling back against Mayor Eric Adams’ plans to ban their genre in public spaces to 300 Entertainment’s Kevin Liles calling for the expansion of New York’s “Rap On Trial” bill — and a similar bill that was recently introduced in the US Senate — the debate, which has raged since hip-hop’s earliest days, has received renewed attention and scrutiny thanks to current events.
Fans and rappers are increasingly being drawn into the discourse on a personal level as well. After 21 Savage tweeted about a rise in gun violence in his hometown Atlanta, some fans called him out, saying that the violent content of his music undermines his calls for peace. “Atlanta We Have To Do Better,” he tweeted yesterday. “Put The F****** Guns Down !!!!!” When a fan quoted a line from his recent Drake collaboration “Jimmy Cooks” at him, though, Savage pointed out that there should be a line between art and life.
Atlanta We Have To Do Better Put The F****** Guns Down !!!!!
“A song is for entertainment it’s not an instruction manual on how to live life,” he shot back. “In real life I give away a lot of money and spread financial literacy to my community. Stop trying to make me 1 dimensional.” It’s likely he was referring to his annual Issa Back 2 School Drive in Decatur this weekend, where he gave 2000 students school supplies like backpacks, notebooks, and shoes and offered services such as haircuts and braiding ahead of the upcoming school term.
A Song Is For Entertainment It’s Not An Instruction Manual On How To Live Life In Real Life I Give Away A lot Of Money And Spread Financial Literacy To My Community Stop Trying To Make Me 1 Dimensional
It’s always great to be with @21savage each year for his Annual Back To School Giveaway in DeKalb! For 7 years, he has put on this amazing event providing school supplies for our precious youth! Keep up the great work pic.twitter.com/vdBdrB6vAw
For what it’s worth, some version of this debate has taken place in movies, television, and video games as well. And while rap has long espoused the “keep it real” attitude, the fact is that rappers have exaggerated their experiences since the very beginning. The moment was a great example of the issue at the core of the lyrics debate. While critics say that rappers’ lyrics encourage violence or depict it in detail, artists themselves insist that the lyrics aren’t to be taken literally or that they are simply recording their lived experiences.
Rapper and podcaster extraordinaire Open Mike Eagle’s last album, Anime, Trauma And Divorce peeled back the skin on some of the most painful experiences of his life. Now, on the newly announced Component System With The Auto Reverse, Mike Eagle is letting himself have some fun digging into his past; a past where he made cassette mixtapes from tracks he heard on his local hip-hop radio station.
“When I was in high school I used to stay up late to tape the hip-hop shows on college radio station WHPK on the south side of Chicago,” the rapper said in a statement. “It was the only way to hear the underground rap songs that changed my world. I still have many of the cassettes, with songs by giants like MF DOOM, DITC, Outsidaz, All Natural, Juggaknots, Organized Konfusion, and more. I named each tape. I named one Component System. This album was made in the spirit of that tape but with new music from me. Some of the people on the original tape appear on this album, I’m so proud of that that it brings me close to tears.”
The album has production from Madlib, Quelle Chris, Child Actor, and others. The new single, “I’ll Fight You,” was produced by DITC’s Diamond D, whose “…Beats and raps have inspired me my whole ass life,” Mike Eagle said.
Listen to “I’ll Fight For You” above and check out the album artwork and tracklist for Component System With The Auto Reverse below.
Open Mike Eagle
1. “The Song With The Secret Name” (produced by Child Actor)
2. “TDK Scribbled Intro” (produced by Kuest1)
3. “79th And Stony Island” (produced by Quelle Chris)
4. “I’ll Fight You” (produced by Diamond D)
5. “Circuit City” featuring Video Dave & Still Rift (produced by Madlib)
6. “I Retired Then I Changed My Mind” (produced by Child Actor)
7. “Burner Account featuring Armand Hammer” (produced by Quelle Chris)
8. “For DOOM” (produced by Illingsworth)
9. “Crenshaw And Homeland” (produced by Diamond D)
10. “Multi-game Arcade Cabinet” featuring R.A.P Ferreira, Still Rift & Video Dave (produced by illingsworth)
11. “Credits Interlude” featuring Serengeti) (produced by Illingsworth)
12. “Peak Lockdown Raps” (produced by Child Actor)
13. “Kites” featuring Video Dave and Still Rift (produced by Kuest1)
14. “Cd only” [bonus track] featuring Aesop Rock & Diamond D (produced by Diamond D)
Component System With The Auto Reverse is out on 10/07 via Auto Reverse records. Pre-order it here.
Atlanta-based upstart Young Nudy has been gaining momentum in his hometown for years. While it’s hard to tell when or if his breakout to the mainstream will come, this week, he launched another salvo in his ongoing campaign to take over the music world. After he won plenty of success by teaming up with Pi’erre Bourne in 2019 on Sli’merre, it makes sense he’d reunite for another go-round with the spaced-out producer as he stands on the cusp of his potential leap to a higher plateau.
On EA Monster, Nudy follows up his 2021 mixtapes Dr. Ev4l and Rich Shooter with 11 tracks of distorted, eerie beats from Bourne featuring Nudy’s signature trap boasts and threats. The bleary-eyed vibe is one of the big reasons why Nudy has caught on with younger fans in Atlanta — vibes over everything — but if they can drive up the streams on this one to a commensurate level to his popularity at home, it could be an advantage as many folks’ first introduction to Nudy when it reaches the Billboard radar. There’s little in the rap world that sounds much like it, and it could grab enough attention to get him to that next level.
saying certain things you’ve never said out loud before is hard 
