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Lil Wayne for Strapped Condoms
Strapped Condoms has switched ads to the above featuring Lil Wayne after the first version below got lots of flak due to the homoerotic vibe on which many bloggers, forum writers and photoshoppers jumped with glee.
Lil Wayne for Strapped Condoms
Strapped Condoms doesn't seem to have a YouTube channel but you can find lots of their earlier shout out video/commercials via this search.
New ad alert via Real Talk NY.
So apparently Eve was a stripper and I recall a variety of sexual documentation of a woman that may be her floating around.
I bet she'll get more flak for legally giving others pleasure than any of these a-hole drug dealers who killed and destroyed so many individuals, families and neighborhoods. I understand that lots of young drug dealers do what they feel they have to do but being grown and proud of the drug game has pretty much runs its course both socially and artistically.
Real Talk NY says, "I mean it isn’t like she was a prostitute."
ProHipHop says, "At least she wasn't a crack dealer."
Crain's New York Business.com has an article about Jermaine Dupri that includes excerpts from Young, Rich, and Dangerous: The Making of a Music Mogul. In particular Crain's found Dupri's thoughts on strip club research worth noting. Check the links at the end of the post for prior ProHipHop coverage of this fascinating topic.
Jermaine Dupri writes about strip club research:
Strip clubs are basically a way into that street life...Magic City and The Body Tap are my special music laboratories. These are the places where artists and records break, especially in the South. In strip clubs the music gets nice and grimy. People can lose their inhibitions so you really get to know how they feel about the music. I'd even say strip air play is stronger than radio air play in Atlanta...
If the girls are requesting the track and shakin' it to the beat you know it's gonna cross over into radio. It's like the girls are hit detectors. That's why guys wanting to get their demos heard try to pay off the strip club DJs to play 'em. They know some cat like me is sitting in the club studying how the ladies and the audience react to their song.
Strip clubs are for real down an' dirty grassroots marketing. Young Jeezy broke in strip clubs. Rick Ross' song "Hustlin'" did well--strippers made money off of it. They moved so well they made their customers happy and got more bills thrown at them.
I'm probably the only top label executive in the world who goes to a strip club at least once a week. Puffy goes once in a while, but you won't see L.A. Reid or Jay-Z in the clubs. But for me it's necessary. That's where I meet people, learn things and see what's happening in other people's worlds. The clubs are like a gumbo of life. All together in one building you can find the straight white corporate guys listening to rap in their suits, alongside the hardest thugs who killed 10 people. You get NBA guys mixing it up with artists as well as regular dudes. It's my chance to be in the thick of it all.
For me musically the strip club is equivalent to the whole mixtape scene in New York. You get exposed to records you're never gonna hear on the radio.
Via Sit Down Stand Up.
Related ProHipHop Coverage:
Jermaine Dupri's Strip Club Research
Hip Hop Research & Marketing in Atlanta Strip Clubs
Hip Hop Research & Marketing in Strip Clubs, Pt. 3
Snoop Dogg Contributes to The Healing Circle
[Photo L to R: JT The Bigga Figga, Sheila Burton, Mattie Scott, Snoop Dogg and Judy Hughes.]
Snoop Dogg has contributed his $45,000 performance deposit for a scheduled appearance at the Exotic Erotic Ball to The Healing Circle:
Snoop Dogg will perform live at a benefit concert at the Cow Palace on Friday evening, October 26, 2007, during the hours of the Exotic Erotic Expo. The Ball's initial $45,000 deposit for Snoop's services was committed to The Healing Circle in a personal presentation made by Snoop on August 12, 2007.
Additional funds for the Healing Circle will be raised when Snoop Dogg performs live on Friday, and then returns Saturday night at the Ball, where he will join Tera Patrick and Danny Bonaduce as judges of the Ball's World Famous Costume Contests.
Also from the release:
The primary mission of The Healing Circle Soul Support Group is to promote sharing, healing, education, and action for survivors of homicide and victims of inner city violence.
Box Cover of Kim Kardashian Superstar
Technically speaking, I guess the sale of an adult video featuring Ray J and Kim Kardashian to Vivid Entertainment for $1 million is more of an RnB thing but I feel it's important we up the sleaze factor at ProHipHop in 2007! Besides, it says right there on the cover he's a "Hip Hop Star".
(Photo courtesy of vivid.com)
Since the issue of adult content will continue to be an important one in both hip hop and in online publishing, I think it's cool that my newsletter service, FeedBlitz, now offers the option of asking subscribers a Yes/No question such as "Are you 21 or over?" in order for them to subscribe. Though folks can always lie, it does give publishers (from bloggers to adult website owners) a basic tool for responding to concerns that I haven't seen before from such a service.
I don't know what else you might want to ask instead but the form of the question is up to you.
Billboard's Gail Mitchell takes a larger view of the practice of breaking and marketing albums in strip clubs than I've taken in my previous entries on the topic but makes it clear that it all goes back to the South and, most likely, Uncle Luke:
Urban music's working relationship with strip clubs dates back to the late '80s, when Luther "Luke" Campbell and the 2 Live Crew first gained notice. The dancers who worked with the censorship-threatened performer onstage and in his videos were strip club dancers. "I didn't have a big budget where I could hire regional people," Campbell recalls. "I had to be creative and use all the different avenues I could think of."
Jermaine Dupri claims that "strip club airplay is (more influential) than radio airplay in Atlanta" and that "strip clubs are definitely a good place to meet people, learn things and see what's happening in other people's worlds. I'm probably the only label president there every other week."
An anonymous exec feels that "you can often gauge how hot your record is by the number of times strippers request the song during a given night."
But the biggest evidence that strip clubs are becoming a more important focus for rap marketing is the organized approaches that are starting to emerge. For example:
Two principal DJ collectives have sprung up that target the strip club circuit -- the Hen House in Detroit and Atlanta-based Hittmenn DJs, a 72-DJ collective established three years ago by Robert "Kaspa" Smith, now president, and CEO Greg Street. "Right now our DJs reach 32 million people in 29 markets," Smith says.
Major label execs involved with urban promotions see strip clubs as fitting into an already existing dynamic. Interscope's Kevin Black states:
When we work records, we work lifestyle venues like barbershops, beauty shops, skating rinks, bowling alleys -- anything with a culture to it. And strip clubs fall into that category.
In a similar vein, Universal Motown's Troy Marshall says that:
Word-of-mouth is still one of the biggest promotion factors out there. . . That has helped turn strip clubs into big business.
Such perspectives allied with adult entertainment's current growth and increasing legitimacy means that more hip hop will be marketed through strip clubs, though efforts still seem focused on Southern artists. For example:
Universal Motown's Marshall is coordinating a promotional strip club tour in June on behalf of "Go Head," a new track by Ali & Gipp. The plan includes visits to venues in 17 cities, including Houston's Onyx.
Of course, Luke Campbell continues his efforts as he promotes his upcoming box set Uncle Luke: My Life & Freaky Times with an Are You Ms. Freaky Soul 2006 competition at strip clubs nationwide.
Interestingly, the article doesn't get into Luke's own plans to start a chain of strip clubs called Luke's Cabaret, about which I haven't heard in a while, but Luke has been very clear in the past that his involvement with such businesses and related projects is not about being a pimp:
Never got in the pimp game. People thought I was a pimp because I always had girls at strip clubs and all my girls hustle. What I do is not pimping because I don't take their money. I pay them to dance for me. What they do on the side while they are at a party, at a club, at a show and what they do on the side is their thing. They pimping theirselves and I aint mad at that. That's their business.
On hip hop "pimps", Luke says:
All they need to do is define what a pimp is. A pimp is a person who prostitutes women. The women sell their body and they make their money and give it to the pimp and the pimp gives the girl what he wants to give the girl. All these guys are claiming that they pimps and their not pimps. On one song they say they a pimp, the next song they say "oh Ima take you shopping, buy you clothes, buy you this. That makes you a trick and a pimp. I don't get that, so I think it needs to be said because aint nobody else saying it.
Word.
Related ProHipHop Coverage:
Hip Hop Research & Marketing in Atlanta Strip Clubs
Jermaine Dupri's Strip Club Research
Though not everyone accepts the idea of the strip club as hip hop research and marketing center it certainly seems to be catching people's attention. In some cases, it's also raising issues as what many see as a Southern phenomenon moves to other locales, for example, when Lil Jon hosted a listening party for E-40 in New York that made some members of the press feel uncomfortable.
Richard Fausset from the LA Times recently took a look at hip hop and strip clubs in Atlanta and discussed the connection between rappers and strippers:
Two decades ago, strip clubs were among the few places that would play the nastiest Southern rap records. As Southern rap went mainstream, the connection between club DJs and musicians has grown stronger. And so, Monday through Wednesday nights — when Atlanta’s professional class most likely is sleeping — undiscovered hopefuls descend on three of the city’s best-known strip clubs, promoting their dreams and demo CDs in the presence of live nude girls.
One such spot is Magic City's "Magic Monday" where hopeful artists are said to have paid the dj as much as $200 to get one play of their song during the evening. At Body Tap’s “Richlife Wednesdays”, fees start at around $50 and "the rates go up as the night wears on and more big shots roll in."
Another Atlanta area spot is Stroker's where Tosha Love, Atlanta's WVEE music director, oversees Tuesday's "Looking for a Hit" night:
The disc jockey plays one song by each of the first 10 unsigned artists who walk through the door, so long as they tip the dancers during their numbers. Then Love gives each artist a free critique. From time to time, she finds a trendsetting song at Strokers and adds it to her station’s playlist alongside the music of more established rap and R&B performers.
As Love points out, a strip club "can feel like an odd place to do business" because:
You have to get used to the strippers walking around, but this industry is basically built on the street . . . You have to get back to the street to know what’s hot, and in Atlanta a lot of times that means the strip clubs.
In fact, Ludacris states, "strip clubs is just the place here. . . It seems they get all the good music first."
Followed by:
Hip Hop Research & Marketing in Strip Clubs, Pt. 3
I'm often surprised to see the interesting sites that link to ProHipHop and usually link back by posts in the Thanks category. A lot of them are really cool and deserve more attention than they get, but I thought it was especially fun to be linked from G-Spot Chronicles, The Book. Many authors have blogs for books in progress and to promote books once they're out, but few have blogs that are this unsafe for viewing in the workplace!
I'll try to update this bit cause SOHH's site is having temporary problems, but DJ Bijal and pornstar Julia Bond are releasing Sex Sells, billed as the "first enhanced mixtape to feature porn."
Blo Records has released The Unexpected, a rap album from pornstar Heather Hunter with production from Scott Storch, Freedom Lyles and DJ Premier. Previous ProHipHop coverage.
Available from Amazon:
Heather Hunter - The Unexpected
In a move that's evoking memories of Tipper Gore, Senator Hillary Clinton has gone on the offensive against what are claimed to be hacker modifications that allow for sexually explicity activity within Grand Theft Auto. However, the Dutch creator of the downloadable code has said that it simply unlocks images embedded within the game. Apparently this controversy began back in June, so I guess the Times and Hillary [and me] are just catching up.
So far the best part seems to be the renaming of Grand Theft Auto, "Grand Sex Auto." It's a fun little controversy that will eventually be unraveled, whether it's a modification or something programmers put in for fun. I'm pressed for time, so if you run into information from gamers and/or programmers that seem to shed additional light, please post it in the comments section.
Adult film star Heather Hunter is releasing The Unexpected, her first rap album, July 12th on Blo Records with production by such folks as Scott Storch and DJ Premier. You can download mp3s and also check out a video in which Wyclef Jean appears and also, I think, Akineleye. There's also some kind of earlier connection with N.O.R.E., though it may have nothing to do with this album.
Freedom Lyles also produces and he and Heather are interviewed at Beat Talk while Heather is also interviewed at ThaBiz.com.
My understanding is that Hunter had an earlier attempt at house music as a singer and this is her first rap release, but I'm running low on research time. I only checked out one track but it was as good as a lot of what I hear on the radio and I like her voice. Given the current marketing of women in hip hop, her past may well be an asset though it's the music that will make her something more than a novelty act. It's really tough for porn stars to make it anywhere else, so best of luck, Heather.
In related news, DJ Vlad is releasing a dvd that explores the themes of hip hop music, porn stars and crack heads called Hot In Here: Sex/Drugs/Hip-Hop. AllHipHop.com has more of the sordid details.
Though editors are scoffing at Kanye West's intention to charge publications for front cover appearances, Playgirl is willing to pay him to pose nude.
On Mar. 8th, a direct to dvd documentary directed by Method Man will be released. The Strip Game is said to focus on what strippers are really like behind the scenes.
The Learn to Read Contest is an interesting pairing of an an important indie label, Definitive Jux, and an alternative pin-up site, SuicideGirls, that features mostly 20 something white female "Punk Rock and Goth" models in a style popularized, to some degree, by photographer Richard Kern. That's actually a really nice fit and the prize is a combination of a signed Aesop Rock limited edition release and a Suicide Girls photobook.
My only question is how many prizes are being given out. I'm going to be embarassed if I'm publicizing a contest that doesn't offer many chances to win. I'll let you know what I found out soon, but my reason of concern is actually fairly old. I once announced a Definitive Jux promotion at Hip Hop Logic and then had to apologize for mentioning it because it was really a joke of a nonevent, for reasons I explained in the post. I was especially disappointed because Definitive Jux has put out some of my all-time favorite records and they just seemed clueless about using the Internet to promote themselves. I guess I'm one of those fans who just doesn't forget being let down by people I respect.
Rick's Cabaret International (RICK), a public company focused on strip clubs and adult internet services, received a stock boost from their report of nearly doubled profits in 2004. The original Rick's Cabaret is now Club Onyx, a hip hop themed adult club, and its renewed popularity helped the bottom line.
The Lloyd Banks' hosted video Groupie Luv was nominated for multiple Adult Video News Awards back in November. Go here for a complete list of nominees for this Saturday's event.
Regina Lynn reports on cell phone sex devices for Wired News. An earlier piece on mobile porn is also of interest for those concerned with mobile channels for the sex industry.
Luke Campbell is developing a chain of strip club franchises called Luke's Cabaret. Clubs will feature ethnically diverse dancers, hip hop and R&B music and an urban perspective.
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