Good news, comic book (and Vince Staples) fans: This month, after four months of delays, Vince’s Z2 comic book, Limbo Beach, finally arrives. The book, which was announced in June 2021, will finally be arriving in “mid-May,” according to an update sent by Z2 Comics last month, and to celebrate, Vince has announced the Limbo Beach Carnival in his hometown, Long Beach, taking place on Thursday, May 12 at El Dorado Park. Vince’s dedication to The Beach is well-known thanks to his musical shout-outs and a wealth of local events, such as the Limbo Beach Carnival, and his appearance at the Activate Uptown block party in 2016.
IF YOU IN THE CITY IM THROWING A CARNIVAL @ EL DORADO PARK ITS FREE BRING THE WHOLE FAMILY. THIS THURSDAY. pic.twitter.com/zLkIL5WfQp
Staples is fresh off the release of his newest album, Ramona Park Broke My Heart, named for the neighborhood in which he grew up in Long Beach. The project was his most commercially-appealing effort yet, led by the Mustard-produced single “Magic” and featuring introspective but enticing cuts such as “Rose Street” and “When Sparks Fly.” He recently performed the album in its entirety as part of a livestreaming special, Ramona Park Broke My Heart: The Musical on Moment House.
Click the link below to reserve your copy and cop some limited edition merch! See you there!https://t.co/jEI1nsd6eJ
And as far as Limbo Beach goes, you can find out more on Z2 Comics’ website. It’s written by Vince Staples, Bryan Edward Hill, and Chris Robinson, illustrated by Buster Moody, and available in standard softcover and hardcover, deluxe, and super deluxe editions with plenty of goodies for hardcore fans.
This is big for Drake, too, as it makes him the first rapper with ten No. 1 songs and one of just a few artists to ever notch that many. He, Janet Jackson, and Stevie Wonder each have ten, Whitney Houston has 11, Madonna and The Supremes have 12, Michael Jackson has 13, Rihanna has 14, Mariah Carey has 19, and The Beatles have 20.
Meanwhile, this latest entry extends a number of records Drake already held: He now has 262 total Hot 100 entries, 147 top-40 entries, 55 top-10 entries, and 40 top-ten debuts, all of which are the most of all time.
Artists with the most No. 1 songs on the #Hot100 of all time:
.@Drake extends the following #Hot100 records this week:
Most Top 10 Entries: Extends his record to 55 Most Top 40 Entries: Extends his record to 147 Most Total Entries: Extends his record to 262 Most Top 10 Debuts: Extends his record to 40
It’s not just Drake making history, though, as Future is now just the fifth artist in history to have a song debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and an album premiere on top of the Billboard 200 in the same week.
.@1future is the fifth artist in history to debut at No. 1 on the #Hot100 and #Billboard200 simultaneously in the same week.
Future also has a few other songs in the top ten: “Puffin On Zootiez” is No. 4, “712PM” is No. 8, and “I’m Dat N****” is No. 10. All songs from the standard edition of I Never Liked You are actually on the Hot 100 this week, bringing Future’s career total to 149 songs to ever appear on the chart. That moves him to fifth all time, behind Taylor Swift (16), Lil Wayne (180), Glee (262), and Drake (262).
All 16 songs from the standard edition of @1future‘s “I Never Liked You’ debut on this week’s #Hot100, bringing his career total to 149 entries overall.
While Kendrick Lamar‘s surprise release of “The Heart Part 5” caused excitement for many fans all over the internet this past weekend, one person, in particular, feels slighted by the video: New Jersey rapper AK is accusing the Damn artist of stealing the deepfake concept from his 2020 video “Family Tree.”
Much like “The Heart Part 5,” “Family Tree” features AK morphing his face into Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and coincidentally, Lamar himself. In Lamar’s video, he morphs into Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. AK stated in a Monday morning Instagram video, “Maybe I’m fooling myself for thinking that Kendrick saw my video and was like, ‘Damn, that’s so good that I want to do it myself.’”
He continued, “I was under Universal; he is under Universal. I did that video in 2020 with Universal. Obviously, the song didn’t do as good as if Kendrick was to do it, but the concept was so sick and I f*cking don’t know, but it’s the same exact thing — it’s a backdrop, it’s him in front of it, it’s one take.”
AK closed the video by speaking on the challenges independent artists face, as many have come out over the years saying bigger acts have stolen their ideas as well. Kendrick Lamar likely won’t respond to the allegations, but his final TDE album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers does release this Friday, May 13.
Jack Harlow is winning right now. His latest single, “First Class,” is his first solo No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, his new album, Come Home The Kids Miss You is out now and receiving warm reviews from fans on social media, and now, he’s headed off on his first headlining arena tour. His Come Home The Kids Miss You Tour is set to take off from Nashville, Tennessee on September 6 and run through Atlanta, Georgia on October 16 with opening artists City Girls joining him at all but one stop — Fenway Park in Boston. The title’s kind of fitting when you think about it. Naturally, tickets will be available here beginning on May 13 at 10 am local time. You can sign up for pre-sale access beginning on May 11 at jackharlow.us/tour. See the full list of dates below.
09/06 — Nashville, TN @ Nashville Municipal Auditorium *
09/08 — Irving, TX @ The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory *
09/10 — Houston, TX @ 713 Music Hall *
09/11 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center *
09/13 — Phoenix, AZ @ Arizona Federal Theatre *
09/17 — San Diego, CA @ Viejas Arena *
09/20 — Inglewood, CA @ The KIA Forum *
09/23 — Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater *
09/24 — Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena *
09/25 — Portland, OR @ Veterans Memorial Coliseum *
09/27 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Maverik Center *
09/28 — Denver, CO @ 1STBANK Center *
09/30 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory *
10/01 — Chicago, IL @ Credit Union 1 Arena *
10/02 — Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre *
10/05 — Toronto, ON @ Coca-Cola Coliseum *
10/08 — Philadelphia, PA @ The Liacouras Center *
10/09 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
10/11 — Washington DC @ The Anthem *
10/14 — Miami, FL @ PFL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park *
10/15 — Tampa, FL @ Yuengling Center *
10/16 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena *
* with City Girls
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.
Drake’s influence is all over Jack Harlow’s new album, Come Home The Kids Miss You. I don’t just mean in the sense that he appears on the album’s magnetic standout track “Churchill Downs,” on which Jack sounds almost exactly like his hero. But throughout the album, I couldn’t help but feel the same sense I did when I first popped Drake’s mixtape Comeback Season into my car’s CD player 15 years ago.
To be clear, this is a good thing. Harlow has been maligned over the years, perhaps somewhat unfairly, for being kind of, well, goofy. In hip-hop, there’s more or less always been the prevailing attitude that rappers should carry themselves with exaggerated coolness. Even throughout the “keep it real” era, nobody really wanted most rappers to be themselves. Look at who all was elevated to the culture’s upper echelons.
From The Notorious B.I.G’s mafioso raps to Eminem’s serial killer horrorcore, over-the-top personas have been the order of the day. In more recent years, the keep-it-real ethos has been completely blown away by characters like Rick Ross and Future, who couldn’t be realistically expected to live what they rap about and still be alive to rap about it. Tucked somewhere into the middle of all that stylistic evolution, the regular guys who exploded in the noughties were kind of exceptions to the rule.
Drake stood at the forefront of that movement and was its de facto face. When he dropped Comeback Season in 2007, he had yet to become the internationally recognized global superstar he is today or would become on his next tape, the breakout So Far Gone. He sat somewhere between the wordy headiness of his backpack rap heroes like Little Brother and Slum Village and the pop-reaching sensibilities of 106 & Park heartthrobs like Trey Songz and Pretty Ricky.
His rhymes were marked less by the belligerent boastfulness of 50 Cent and Lil Jon’s constellation of crunk associates than by a plainspoken earnestness. Drake just wanted to be successful, and he wanted to do it by making relatable, semi-sincere rap music about having his heart broken and chasing his dreams. Nary a gunshot was fired, not a kilo was sold. No one got stomped out in the club, and Drake himself had a relatively average success rate with women. He felt like an underdog but carried himself with the confidence that he wouldn’t be for long.
On Come Home The Kids Miss You, Jack Harlow bears the same sensibility. He’s sort of always had a similar outlook and an introspective approach. But now, his circumstances somehow match both the confidence and the humility. He’s got multiple No. 1s to his name, but he’s also an outsider in hip-hop (so much as rapping-ass white guys can still be considered outliers in a world where Eminem still tops the album chart and Lil Dicky makes poop jokes on a hit cable TV show).
So when Jack shoots his shot at pop stars as he does on “Dua Lipa,” which not only name-checks the British singer but also accurately predicts the inevitable Twitter backlash for doing so, it does give “heart-eye emojis in the comments” energy — but success doesn’t seem completely out of reach. When Jack titles one of the bouncier tracks “I Got A Shot,” you believe him.
The parallels to the prologue don’t stop there. With every successive generation reaching back a couple of decades for inspiration – Drake famously leaned heavily on ‘90s R&B samples throughout his oeuvre – it might be odd to think that it’s time for Gen Z rappers to begin mining the platinum era. But that time has come – sorry, fellow Millennials, you’re officially old now – as Harlow looks to 106&Park mainstays like Pharrell and Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful” for “Side Piece,” Tweet’s “My Place” for “Lil Secret,” and Fergie’s “Glamorous” for his chart-topping single “First Class.”
In this, Harlow defies convention as much as his new mentor did with Comeback Season and So Far Gone. The defining sound of our modern era is very much “808s and trap breaks”; with Come Home, Jack signals what perhaps could be the next evolution of the sound for the still-young decade ahead – just like someone we know. He’s willing to take the risk of diverging from the mainstream with his glossy collection of synth horns harkening back to the days when T.I. and Bow Wow held radio in a chokehold. But he’s also perfectly positioned to be the one to spark this latest nostalgia wave, what with TikTok being deluged in 2000s hits and radio playing a song sampling Mariah Carey four times an hour.
In my review for Harlow’s debut album, That’s What They All Say (I love his penchant for wordy titles), I pointed to the Kentucky MC’s potential and obvious passion and love for the craft of rap. On Come Home, he certainly lives up to that potential – perhaps even exceeds it – by pairing it with ambition. Before, Jack was satisfied with walking in the footsteps of prior greats. Now, it looks very much like he intends to make some of his own.
Come Home The Kids Miss You is out now on Atlantic. Get it here.
Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
It’s never a good sign when a company has two widely publicized incidents on its hands. Live Nation discovered as much in the wake of Astroworld Festival with the attack on Drakeo The Ruler at Once Upon A Time In LA just a month later, and now, the security company that worked Astroworld is learning the same lesson. According to Buzzfeed News, Contemporary Services Corp. is one of North America’s largest event-security companies — and may face added scrutiny after the recent Netflix Is A Joke Fest show where Dave Chappelle was tackled by an armed man during his set.
Even worse, Buzzfeed’s report found that CSC’s practices may have opened the door for these failures. Due to hiring inexperienced staff as independent contractors, CSC shields itself from liability at the expense of the overall safety of events. One staffer told Buzzfeed, “We were told there was going to be a big crowd and to get them in as fast as possible. There were no details on what that meant and how to do it — just get them in as fast as possible.”
Incidentally, just before he was tackled by the 23-year-old Isaiah Lee, who had a concealed knife on him (in the shape of a gun), Chappelle joked about “increased threats against comedians” as an oblique reference to the Oscars, where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage. Chappelle had brought members of his own security onstage, and it was them who subdued Lee, although Chappelle later joked that he, Busta Rhymes, Jamie Foxx, and (lol) Jon Stewart had “stomped” Lee backstage.
Meanwhile, the venue, the world-famous Hollywood Bowl, is “reviewing its “existing procedures both internally and with the assistance of outside experts.” CSC, which also worked the Astroworld Festival and the Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017, is reportedly named in a number of lawsuits from event attendees and former staff, including those stemming from the Astrowold disaster. In 2020, CSC, along with MGM and Live Nation, settled a lawsuit with 4,400 people impacted by the mass shooting for $800 million.
Though Big L’s career was unfortunately cut short when he was fatally shot in 1999, just four years after releasing his debut album, he has been heralded for decades. The recognition will continue in a big way as the late rapper is set to have a street named after him in Harlem, his hometown.
Big L’s official Instagram page announced this past weekend, with a flyer, that 140th and Lenox Avenue will be renamed “Lamont ‘Big L’ Coleman Way” and an official ceremony will occur at noon on May 28. The caption was full of gratitude, thanking the 500 people who signed the petition to make this happen.
“It took a whole lot of effort and Support to get to this great point but as an collective we made it happen, The Biggest Thank you’s go out to the Dope 500 plus people who signed and passed the petition around so we could get this street renamed,” the caption read. “There are entirely tooo many good people that gave this their Support, so with all my Heart I personally want to say THANK YOU!!!!”
Big L got his start alongside The Children Of The Corn group, which also featured fellow Harlem wordsmiths Mase, Cam’ron, Herb McGruff and Bloodshed. Big L is known for his debut LP Lifestylz Ov Da Poor & Dangerous featuring tracks such as “Put It On,” “MVP,” “Street Struck,” and “Let Em Have It L.” He was shot and killed at the age of 24.
According to Rolling Stone, the “Sicko Mode” rapper made a comeback over the weekend with his first public performance since the tragedy. It was in a Miami club; online pre-sale tickets were $50, while tickets at the doors were $300 for men and $200 for women, as per the doorman.“Travis Scott usually costs half a million dollars to perform at your venue,” the doorman told the magazine. “And he hasn’t performed in seven months, so this one is highly anticipated. We pre-sold all our tables. Reservations were averaging $50,000 tonight.” To skip the line was an extra $200. The writer noted that despite the venue being at full capacity, no one was moshing.
Filmmaker Charlie Minn recently released Concert Crush: The Travis Scott Festival Tragedy, a documentary about the Astroworld tragedy. In an interview, Minn said: “Travis Scott to me is a punk. In my opinion, he is a criminal. Ten people died. How do we get around that?”
This fall, a new docuseries about Tupac Shakur and his mother, Afeni Shakur, is coming to FX and Hulu. Dear Mama offers “an intimate wide-angle portrait of the most inspiring and dangerous mother-son duo in American history, whose unified message of freedom, equality, persecution, and justice are more relevant today than ever.” The series is directed by Allen Hughes and will air on FX and appear on Hulu the next day. Since yesterday was Mother’s Day, FX shared a teaser from the show featuring Afeni explaining her unique parenting style.
“It was my responsibility to teach Tupac how to survive his reality,” she says in voiceover, as black-and-white photos of Afeni with a baby Tupac appear on the screen. “So, Tupac do something wrong: ‘Take your little sorry self in that corner, get the New York Times, and let’s have a debate about it. Not a discussion, a debate. Let me hear what your idea is, stand up, defend it.’” Naturally, Tupac’s seminal 1995 single “Dear Mama” plays over the title card.
Afeni Shakur was a former member of the Black Panther Party and later, after her Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer son’s death, founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation while running a media company also named after him. She was also the executor of his estate until her death in 2016.
Kanye West’s love for his mother is very well-documented, but he will always take any moment to pay more homage to Ms. Donda. This time, he did so through the sentimental “Life Of The Party” video which debuted on the evening of Mother’s Day. The two-minute, 39-second visual functions more as a photo album, showing photos of young Kanye in school or with his family. Instead of static photos, each shows a different iteration of the Chicago artist rapping along to the lyrics of the record via deepfake technology.
Andre 3000 and his verse are noticeably absent, perhaps due to the drama surrounding “Life Of The Party” when the world first heard it on OVO Sound Radio. While that version of the song featured a heartfelt verse from one half of Outkast, West took the opportunity to throw more jabs at his formal rival Drake.
The “Life Of The Party” video is also set to appear in the first TV commercial for Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga. According to a press release, new products from the collaboration will be shown in the commercial before being made available to purchase on May 25 through the Yeezy Gap website, as well as Farfetch, Mytheresa, and Luisa Via Roma.
OUT NOW (@vincestaples) May 9, 2022
