NPR Scraper Bike Coverage Includes Trunk Boiz Video
An NPR piece on scraper bikes includes a link to the original video for Scraper Bike by the Trunk Boiz.
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An NPR piece on scraper bikes includes a link to the original video for Scraper Bike by the Trunk Boiz.
The latest Chuck Philips news reminds me that I should have pointed out that he was one of those leaving the LA Times as part of extensive staff reductions.
Clarification: Philips was not laid off but, instead, "requested and was given a buyout".
Unfortunately it's looking like Philips' failed work related to the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur will be what's he's known for in the world of hip hop.
In related news from a while back, Jack Shafer took a look at how the L.A. Times could have avoided that embarrassment.
So it's the day after Death Row Records got auctioned for $24 million and TMZ is still the primary source?
I've long pointed out that mainstream media tends to relegate hip hop business news to entertainment sections but this got a lot of coverage prior to the auction. Why wouldn't somebody who plays journalist cover the auction of a historically important record label?
Atonn Muhammad, Founder and CEO of The Real Hip-Hop Network
We're suddenly seeing some decent coverage of hip hop business rather than the entertainment oriented themes of "how much did he make" and "buy the latest hip hop real estate as seen on MTV Cribs" and a lot of it is focused on the web game.
For example, Atonn Muhammad, founder and CEO of the Real Hip-Hop Network, is featured on the cover of Billboard's February 2nd issue.
I haven't gotten a chance to read the article yet but that's a good look for anybody and congratulations are in order!
Press Release:
Billboard Magazine Cover Features Hip-Hop's New CEO
TechCrunch has a great account of the Facebook President hoax which sucked in the French mainstream media like they were entertainment writers taking hip hop money claims at face value.
This story actually goes beyond what I was explaining recently to my youngest bro about the limitations of journalists' education and how that undermines mainstream media coverage.
The short version:
Working journalists typically cover a range of topics that far exceed their education and there is typically little time to make up for that lack of education so they then rely on a limited research system of checks and balances that results in deeply flawed coverage of most topics.
What's amazing in this case is that many major French news outlets didn't even bother to fact check combining insufficient knowledge with misuse of insufficient research methods.
This is quite relevant to ProHipHop because a number of false hip hop business claims that I've participated in exposing have gotten widespread transmission in the media after people saw something and passed it along cause it sounded good to them. What's sad is that MSM journalists have been an integral part of this process and, when questioned, almost always have an explanation of how their methodology makes it ok even when they've obviously misled the public.
While you can probably find plenty of outlets that still say that 50 Cent got $400 million from his cut of the sale of Glaceau to Coke, most have moved on to the $100 million figure originally described by Forbes as an "estimated take" and now simply presented as a fact without any support whatsoever at any point.
Forbes never revealed how this figure was estimated or by whom though "Forbes" sometimes takes credit for the estimate.
Is this another rumor turned fact by simply repeating it multiple times in a mainstream media source that's trying to look hip by covering rap?
Or does it not really matter since we're talking about rappers and that's entertainment news?
Related ProHipHop Coverage:
50 Cent/Glaceau Ownership Figures to Remain Unresolved
Rumor of 50 Cent's 10% Share in Glaceau Likely PR Move
Tim Kash is training for war-zone reportage and all I can say is it sounds like a win-win situation to me especially if "CNN, NBC and Fox’s top producers" go with him!
[Just kidding, Tim! Uh, but not about the producers.]
JR Writer - Being Held Hostage For Bars
I decided to post the above video segment from a REAL TALK TV: DEAD ON ARRIVAL dvd in response to a comment by Malik Soliman who asked:
How does Hip Hop do business Clyde?
Perhaps it was a rhetorical question but, sadly, sometimes the above is the answer.
Hip-Hop Cash Kings
ProHipHop Executive Summary:
Famous rappers make money from lots of stuff that isn't music.
Hip-Hop Hot Rods
ProHipHop Executive Summary:
They spend some of that money on really expensive cars.
Mo' Money Blues
ProHipHop Executive Summary:
After they die, people often fight over their money.
For more such in-depth wisdom and examples of why hip hop is exciting cause it's so different than everything else, visit Forbes.com.
Related ProHipHop Coverage:
Are Stats Killing Hip Hop?
Thanks to BET's upcoming show Hot Ghetto Mess, which is losing sponsors left and right, we can now leave Katrina behind and once again laugh at poor black people.
Of course, like so many people have told me over the years, "it's just a joke." No reason for anyone to be concerned. We're just holdin' up mirrors and stackin' dollars!
And, if you don't like it, you can hold an ineffective burial ceremony and call it a day after reminding people that "We Got To Do Better."
About the Show:
Hot Ghetto Mess
Update:
The Hollywood Reporter takes a look at the situation including the pullout of advertisers:
It is Viacom, BET and even [BET Chairman & CEO Debra] Lee that have been savaged in debates raging on blogs, podcasts and even the Web site's own forums. Leading the charge is What About Our Daughters, a little-known blog and audio podcast addressing depictions of black women in popular culture. In recent weeks, the site targeted advertisers that appeared on a BET.com Web page advertising "Mess", including AT&T Corp., DaimlerChrysler and Target. Two advertisers, State Farm and Home Depot, released statements acknowledging that they withdrew both TV and online spots as a result of the boycott threat.
What About Our Daughters - BET Programming Chief Unrepentant about “Hot Ghetto Mess” - "It's so doggone goood-!"
Ok, all sorts of online sources are saying that Glaceau has denied that 50 Cent got $400 million and this is one version of the statement folks are reprinting saying it came from MSN, though I can't find that source at all:
While 50 Cent and many other world re-known celebrities have very lucrative and fruitful partnerships with our brand, any report stating personal figures of ownership in our company are erroneous at this time. Glaceau and Mr. Jackson have a deal in place that grants him partial ownership in his own brand. Both parties remain excited about the future of our relationship.
Assuming this is an accurate quote, they're not really saying anything. This is the equivalent of saying, "he could have made more or less but we're not telling".
In fact, nobody's going to reveal that information in an official capacity, so the AllHipHop.com distributed rumor that 50 made $400 million will stand in the minds of the general public. What will be interesting to see is how many MSM outlets pick this rumor up. After seeing it on a newspaper blog and in a gossip column, the Guardian appears to be the first to run it in a news article as a straightforward statement of fact.
Thanks to Bruce Banner from Playahata for keeping me updated on developments.
I know Kanye was already a joke in many quarters but now he's becoming a media reference point of the worst kind.
The opening line from a recent Associated Press report on Faith Hill's supposed freakout at the Country Music Association Awards goes: "Faith Hill insists that she's no Kanye West."
Seemingly no big thing in the ever growing mass of Kanye West jokes, my point is that the writer is not discussing Kanye West, he's using Kanye West's name to signify "freaking out in an embarassingly public manner when one doesn't get an award".
After watching the mass media spread the phrase "Pimp My Ride" to every nook and cranny of America, I think it's pretty clear where all this is leading. Even when Kanye's on his best behavior, he's stuck with his nutty perception because now the journalists are turning the perception into a cliche, the kind of cliche that they will use over and over and over again until it simply becomes common knowledge.
Then again, maybe it was already common knowledge and now it's completing the process of becoming an everyday part of the language. Lucky Kanye. Now he might make the dictionary.
Ben Sisario of the NY Times reports on the press conference for the Smithsonian's hip hop collection plans. Gee, I can't wait to see the reports from the New York and New Jersey based hip hop news sites that sent somebody over for this historic event. They should be great!
It looks like the earlier AP report got some more facts wrong since Sisario reports that "Brent D. Glass, the director of the museum, said the project was begun in recent months with seed money from Universal Records."
Although I know I give Russell Simmons a hard time, I also have respect for many of his accomplishments and for his intelligence so I find it incredibly hard to believe that he actually said that hip hop is "the only real description of the suffering of our people." Assuming he means African Americans, as opposed to rich men with expensive wives, he just dissed a lot of great black artists, including numerous writers whose work will tower over even my favorite hip hop lyricists long after they're dead.
Yeah, back that azz up, I'm suffering!
But, man, I wish I could have been at the conference. I know I would have met some great writers from all the news sites we all follow on a daily basis. I'll be sure to add their eyewitness accounts as soon as I track them down!
Recent media reports claim that, "according to research", the easy availability of music via downloading has led to a "generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or performance". Since this announcement immediately appeared to be one of those media items that would return to haunt me via op-ed columns and blog posts and since, as with most scientific research, the research itself was likely to be misrepresented, I thought I would try to check out the research findings.
So I went to the web page of Adrian North, a researcher at the University of Leicester's School of Psychology who is quoted in the BBC article linked above. I was surprised to find no mention of the research on Dr. North's page or on any of the University's press release pages so I wrote Dr. North directly.
North replied with a citation for the research in question:
North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., and Hargreaves, J. J. (2004). The uses of music in everyday life. Music Perception, 22, 63-99.
Since that seemed a bit old for research being reported in the BBC, I followed up and Dr. North stated:
"I did an interview for one of the Scottish newspapers a couple of weeks ago in which I was asked to speculate about how downloading might have affected attitudes towards music. After that it just seems to have snowballed - strange how these things work."
Strange, indeed. What began as some speculations on Dr. North's part about the effects of downloading in light of North's earlier research becomes the media creation of a generational label that can now go on to have a life of its own. Since my copies of Music Perception are in storage, I'll have to hold off on a closer look at the research itself for the moment. If you happen to track down a copy, feel free to respond in the comments below. Otherwise we can simply continue the conversation like most conversations about science generated by media interest, the discussion will have little to do with the research itself.
Kelefa Sanneh shares his take on Jeezy Snowman tees in the NY Times in a piece that builds tangentially on Shaheem Reid's MTV puffery on which I commented making me an interstitial element in the mass media game, though I've moved on to pondering the question, "Is Jeezy dreaming of a White Christmas?"
I wasn't paying a lot of attention to Young Jeezy this summer when he announced a clothing line based on his snowman logo and the connection to cocaine seemed likely but I didn't really follow it up at the time. However, let me make clear that cocaine is one area of exploration I've avoided, primarily because anyone I ever knew who was strongly associated with coke was a total asshole when they were doing it and I do not hang with coke heads, even the cute ones.
But I finally started paying attention to Young Jeezy's branding when I read this disappointingly cynical piece by Shaheem Reid, who I've often given props here at ProHipHop, about the "symbolism of the snowman." Jeezy maintains:
"You gotta understand what it symbolizes . . . It symbolizes a young hustler. . . Snowman is a cool dude . . . He's a gangsta too. There's a Snowman in every 'hood, several Snowmen in the 'hood. You gotta be that dude to look up to with the car and the girl. Whatever you do, be the best at it, because that's what the Snowman is going to do."
I know I'm being naive but MTV occasionally fronts like a real news organization and to print this statement at face value without mentioning cocaine and the long history of the snowman referencing a cocaine dealer, predating hip hop and outside the hood, is a cynical, let's play along with a wink, maneuver.
I recognize that the snowman is a smart marketing move and a great brand for Young Jeezy, but I also appreciate the decision by the manufacturer of the original line to stop making the shirts because of the drug references. He could make a lot of money off those shirts.
Speaking of making money, I'd advise Kate Moss to start looking at hip hop promotional opportunities ASAP and I applaud the bootleggers making money off their versions. It just seems appropriate that hustlers at all levels should be making money off the snowman brand, from the streets to the MTV newsrooms.
The Associated Press covers the 50 Cent/Game truce press conference. The high point appears to have been a quote from Russell Simmons who said, when asked if the truce was genuine:
""Of course it was genuine . . . They stood on stage together."
Did anyone else actually go? Even the New York papers are just rewriting the AP press release.
While I'll definitely be looking at the money angle in today's announcement, an angle already quite evident in media coverage, I can't begin to express how relieved and truly joyous I am at the moment. My typically cynical self is just overwhelmed. I had no idea till now how deeply this incident was affecting me.
Because of this weekend's New York University event focused on the Public Enemy classic, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, a variety of news articles are running about the album. The New York Daily News has one entitled The birth of a 'Nation'. While I'm usually simply annoyed by the weak puns with which editors love to ruin the headlines of their writers' articles, this one is really strange due to the fact that it references the D.W. Griffith classic film The Birth of a Nation. Though an important advance in cinematography, the various alternate titles featuring the term "Clansman" refer to the Ku Klux Klan and the story line is a racist fantasy that elevates the KKK to heroic status. So what was that editor thinking?
On an odd personal note, the writer on whose work the movie was based, Thomas F. Dixon Jr., was briefly a pastor at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC many long years ago. Tabernacle Baptist is where I went to church back in the day and I remember pointing out to my dad that boasting about this guy in church literature was not such a great thing to do, though my objections were never taken that seriously.
I'm starting to think that the phrase "pimp my ride" has become a meme, at least in the mind of the media. I guess it depends on whether or not it gets replicated by future generations of journalists.
But it's certainly invoked regularly when describing such phenomenon as auto customization for NBA players or when considering improvements in bus systems. Even a popup bed for a sports car (I'm not kidding) inspired engadget to suggest a "session" of Pimp My Pop-Up Camper.
Of course, just because you find something that you'd expect to see on Pimp My Ride, like an exhaust flamethrower, doesn't mean that the meme will be invoked or reiterated or replicated or whatever memes do to sustain themselves.
In addition to news of Suge Knight's arrest, a Google News search for "suge knight" currently returns earlier accounts of rumors that Jimmy James Johnson, the man accused of assaulting Dr. Dre at the Vibe Awards show taping, claimed that Suge Knight paid him to undertake the assault. As previously reported at ProHipHop, this report began at the New York Post based upon one of their "sources". However, having worked it's way through the online hip hop press, the story was picked up by Yahoo! Launch who reported that it came from AllHipHop.com.
I meant to address this issue at the time, because it illuminates the sometimes shoddy standards of online reportage. I have a lot of respect for AllHipHop.com. They do more original reporting than most hip hop news sites and I frequently link to them. However, they are often unclear about the source of their articles and will often bury the fact that it's a wire report or from another publication a few paragraphs down. While that's better than some websites, it makes it appear as if they are doing original reporting and then quoting an additional source.
Let's break it down. The Jimmy James Johnson story was initiated at the New York Post. Examination of the AllHipHop.com version shows that it's a rewrite of the NY Post version, plus some closing lines taken from other services, and was posted a day later. Since AllHipHop.com simply ran Nolan Strong's byline, rather than clarifying that the whole article was from the NY Post, as they should have done by basic and longstanding journalistic practices, some sloppy somebody over at Yahoo! Launch or Yahoo! News took that at face value and attributed it to AllHipHop.com. But the screwup at Yahoo! illuminates worse issues in the online hip hop press.
While this is the first example I've seen of a story getting picked up by a major online news source and being misattributed in this way, the underlying practice is quite common on hip hop news sites. Actually, much worse things are going on elsewhere. Of course, hip hop bloggers like Hashim Warren have long pointed to such shoddy practices. Hip hop news services need to recognize that it's time to step up their game. Hungry young professionals are on the move and old guys like me are also trying to break in. Not only are we bringing higher standards to the game, but we're going to be reporting on your lack of professionalism.
In the case of AllHipHop.com, the problem could be alleviated fairly easily but it would reveal how much of their news (like most news) is based on newswire reports and press releases, plus stuff written elsewhere. But a newspaper would state that in the byline and an article such as the one attributed to Nolan Strong would probably not even list his name. Although I dig the way blogging and online publishing in general has opened up the news game, the shakeout that will occur in the next five years will reveal that old school professionalism is a still necessary foundation for real news gathering and reporting.
The theme of hip hop as dominating force is not going away anytime soon as these reports from Engadget and AllHipHop.com about the new T-Mobile Caller Tunes ringback tone charts reveal in their headlines. But there's a good reason that almost everybody that writes about or edits writers who write about hip hop eventually slips dominate or domination into the headline. Hip hop has not only dominated ringtone sales but also album/single sales and awards ceremonies. But it's much bigger than that. I think pretty much everyone is somewhat amazed (or appalled) at the fact that hip hop wasn't just a ghetto fad. The problem now is dealing with the responsibility of popularity.
The Metro Times is a weekly newspaper out of Detroit that publishes quite a few hip hop articles. Often they profile local acts, like Champtown, 9-2-5 Colony and Tone Tone, and their experiences attempting to make it in the music biz.
Brad Hill links to bad news for Oakley's Thump, the futuristic sunglasses with built-in mp3 player promoted with the help of Lil Jon.
In a reasonably lengthy article, Ryan Kennedy claims a divide between baby boomer corporate white males in the box seats and the hip hop influenced young fans of today's NBA in the stands, without actually speaking to any of them.
Kennedy quotes numerous players, writers and an academic without providing any empirical data from the groups he claims to be discussing. And I thought big media had research budgets and competent editors!
AllHipHop.com's coverage of a seating arrangment scuffle involving 50 cent has been picked up by Yahoo News via their LAUNCH Radio Networks.
A Yahoo News piece on Stevie Wonder's Eminem comments is less of a press release template than most in that it clarifies Billboard as the source or distributer of Wonder's statements. And it clarifies by juxtaposition the fact that this reads like a promotional event for Wonder's new album. Maybe he'll later admit that it was, just as Ja Rule has admitted the obvious in the Nov. issue of The Source, that meeting with Minister Louis Farrakhan to supposedly seek peace with 50 Cent may not have been a "stunt" but was certainly "promotional." So much for increasing the peace, my brothers.
But this somewhat longer than most sources version of the story includes issues of which I was unaware, since I haven't seen the full video. Apparently Eminem also satirizes his own 8 Mile character and Pee Wee Herman in the video. My question is, who's got Pee Wee's back? He was one of the most creative people in showbiz at the peak of creating one of the most amazing children's shows I've ever seen, who was then jettisoned for many years due to an incident in an adult movie theater with another adult. Yo, Em, leave Pee Wee alone!
I use a lot of different news searches for ProHipHop and I'm finding that various terms and phrases that are basically hip hop and/or urban slang are being used by everyday reporters all across the U.S. as regular terms and metaphors. If you search Google News for bling, you'll find that it's mostly used to refer to flashy things by people with no connection to hip hop.
If you search for the two terms pimp + ride, it's a closer match due to the current popularity of the show Pimp My Ride. However, if you get a Google News Alert on that term, you get similar results as with bling. But rather than being used like bling as a normal word, one usually sees stories along the lines of someone's son working on something automotive who either wants to pimp his ride or doesn't. Either way, it's rarely about the tv show and only occasionally about someone intensely involved with auto customization.
Such searches have also led me to the discovery that MTV watchers may already know, many of these terms have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. If you're not familiar with the OED, it's the kind of volume that certain nutty literary friends will gesture towards when they want to refer to what a term "really" means.
This must be my day. After all that heaviness, comedy is flooding the room. At this very moment, Yahoo News is running an item from Reuters/Hollywood Reporter (at least that's who's credited with providing the article in whatever agreement they have) that's about Martha Stewart. But I'm guessing they're either using automated picture matching like Google News does or, because Kimora is getting into Martha's space (in terms of product lines), I think it was just one of those moments of serendipidy meant to brighten my world.
But that's really so perfect considering what's to come from Ms. Simmons.
If you really need to see the picture and they take it down before you do. I can send you a screenshot.
[Update: Kimora's picture has been traded for Martha's, but it will always be emblazoned on my memory.]
I've been writing and rewriting this post and have now accidentally deleted it signaling that I need to keep it as short as I can stand to.
Solvej Schou wrote me a nice note that challenged me on my response to her article in my post Personal Response: VH1's Big in 2004 Awards. I've responded and I hope we're talking but my attempts to communicate what it evoked in me have continually turned into an essay of the sort I haven't written since grad school. What I need to address at the moment is the perception that I was insensitive to her gender and possibly to her ethnic/national identity by my use of "Mr. or Ms. Schou" in my response which, by the way, was attempting to mix voices in a manner that led fairly easily to misinterpretation. So much for literary experimention in a quasijournalistic trade blog.
Bottom line: I'm commited not only to gender equality but to gender liberation. If you're aware of the tendency for left/libs to build long lists of such categories that need liberating, you may be rolling your eyes. If that's the case, I hope to help you change your tune in the future, because such concerns are not only useful for improving the bottom line, but for the unlikely possibility of taking human social and cultural development to a really beautiful place.
However that strikes you, don't ever imagine that I'm in support of prejudice of any type. Since you'll need proof of that, keep watching. But I'm as pissed at oppressive attitudes regarding gender and sexuality that I find in hip hop, as I am when I confront them in absolutely every sector of society with which I interact, including left/lib circles that imagine they're past all that. I thank Ms. Schou for pointing out the fact that my stance may still be rather unclear. Don't worry, you'll hear more on such topics in the future, whether or not it costs me my potential ad base.
A note to hip hop heads that might misconstrue certain statements:
I need to make clear that Ms Schou did not attack me and said nothing negative about hip hop in the writing I critiqued or in her note to me. I'm the one that's calling out hip hop on the elements within it that align with other oppressive trends within society. And I'll be the one calling out hip hop homophobes on a regular basis. If you have a problem with that, bring it to me, not to her.
Peace.
Not surprisingly, the spread of hip hop fashions and the numerous artist related clothing lines are popular all over. But this article about urban clothing styles in Arizona clarifies that they haven't picked up on Kanye West's preppy styles or the well established look of Cam'Ron in pink or, for that matter, Ja Rule in preppy gear in the Nov. issue of Source and all those fly urban women who've rocked baggy jeans forever.
Actually you can find all that stuff in Arizona, just not in this article.
This AP report, which currently has a surprising number of misspellings and omitted words, basically takes the earlier link I posted and fills in some of the suppositions. In addition to the obvious fact that Suge Knight is under investigation, probably along with everybody in the room with a criminal record or who appeared on the fight tape, more details are emerging of Knight's status at the event and where he sat:
"Knight entered the awards show without an invitation and sat just a few feet behind Drew [sic], who was receiving a lifetime achievement award."
Up and coming New Zealand rapper Manukau is profiled in STUFF, an online NZ news site. Here at ProHipHop, you may notice more links to articles covering NZ hip hop than to almost any other nation other than the U.S. I'm discovering that, for online news sources in English, NZ journalists cover a lot more about local hip hop than larger countries like Australia. Although no one is predicting a boom in NZ hip hop on the global market, consistent coverage that is readily available online certainly helps set the stage for future growth.
The Pro-Am Revolution is a new manifesto at ChangeThis that considers the impact of "innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards." There are a lot of interesting ideas in this essay and the creation of rap is an important introductory theme. However, the authors are a little weak on the history and combine the traditional story of hip hop's impoverished beginnings in the Bronx with the current justification for gangster rap, i.e. that it's an expression of understandable anger arising from difficult circumstances. I'm not saying early rappers weren't angry, but you should check out lyrics like, "hip to the hippity hop." They tended more towards rhyme play and partying and even potentially angry lyrics such as, "Don't push me, I'm close to the edge," were more about struggling to survive than about blasting caps.
I'm sorry to hear that Tavis Smiley is leaving NPR due, at least in part, to what he terms National Public Radio's failure to "meaningful reach out to a broad spectrum of Americans." Looks like NPR's attempt to move beyond it's core educated white liberal market hasn't gone so well. Though Mr. Smiley has often been attacked in the hip hop conscious comic strip The Boondocks, he has been one of the few high profile journalists to intelligently cover hip hop with an awareness of its many faults without misinterpreting its rich cultural base. As recent events have made all too clear, the vast majority of American reporters do not understand what they're covering when they write about "hip hop culture."
According to the NPR website:
"Host Tavis Smiley has been named by Time magazine as one of America's 50 most promising young leaders. Newsweek profiled him as one of the "20 people changing how Americans get their news" and dubbed him one of the nation's "captains of the airwaves.""
If you're not familiar with the show or want to catch up on shows you missed, you can listen to the shows online for free going all the way back to Jan. '02 when The Tavis Smiley Show premiered. You can also listen to individual segments of the show, which is great because each show has a rich selection of guests and topics.
This is a huge loss for NPR but, potentially, a great opening for Mr. Smiley to take that brilliant mind and that great voice and the incredible Rolodex he must have and shift his game to a whole new level.
Watching the media is lots of fun when you know a lot about a topic. But even I was surprised to see a NY Times editor mispell Lil Jon as "Lil John". Although it may be corrected by the time you click through, you can still compare Kelefa Sanneh's unconvincing argument that New Yorkers aren't responsive to Southern rap in an earlier article to the newer article on Lil Jon, in which Sanneh builds an argument for the popularity of Southern rap, even in NY. However, I generally appreciate Sanneh's writings and insights on hip hop in the Times.
You know, it doesn't surprise me when a blogger mispells Jay-Z as "Jay-Zee" (amid other glaring errors) since they're typically working without fact checkers or editors, but for a NY Times editor to misspell the name of a major artist whose name is spelled correctly in the author's text, well, that's just nutty.
An attempt by Florida Atlantic University to meet NCAA attendance requirements by having the Ying Yang Twins perform at a football game has been stopped short by closer study of the act's lyrical history. This situation is strongly illustrative of the difficulties of using hip hop when marketing to youth and young adults and suggests that closer study of past marketing victories featuring controversial rock artists might be in order.
In news of related failures in the nexus of sports, music and marketing, Ron Artest's new label's first release by R&B group Allure has been a nonstarter. Some news outlets are even reporting that Artest has released a rap album that did poorly and, as it turns out, when everybody was getting upset with Ron for wanting some time off to promote his new album, he meant the R&B release.
However, before sports reporters begin turning their keen powers of social analysis on brawlers like Bobby Brown or running corrections that simply replace "rap" with "r'n'b", I want to be the first to report the, largely unverifiable outside of this office, rumor that Artest was observed furtively ditching the packaging for the recently released deluxe collector's edition Black Sabbath boxed set. You know, the one that comes with a jewel-encrusted spinning dove's head.
Rush Limbaugh is an idiot but the problem is he has media power. Please, those of you that recognize that the NBA brawl was much more about longstanding issues in American masculinity and sports violence, rather than anything intrinsic to hip hop, should let your feelings be known. And, if you've got media power, use it.
It's one thing for those of us within hip hop to put our beliefs on the table in order to change the context in which we work. And we've got difficult issues to face. But it's quite another for someone as despicable as Limbaugh to make the claims he's currently making. If you're not sure how to respond due to personal discomfort over the Vibe fiasco, don't let it stop you now. Limbaugh threatens much more than the commercial viability of hip hop. He's a serious threat to democracy both here and abroad and needs to be countered strongly, at least till his drug abuse finishes him off.
Alternate titles:
Rush Limbaugh, Drug Abuser, Lashes Out
Time to Institutionalize Rush Limbaugh?
What's Rush Popping Now?
As the police search for Young Buck, news editors are displaying their traditionally witty skills with multiple headlines referring to "Bad Vibes." Though I have yet to see anyone "Hunting for Young Buck," I do not expect to be disappointed. However, the ProHipHop award for best headline following a melee goes to azcentral.com for Hip-hopper punched at awards; puncher stabbed, stabber sought.
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