hip hop
Logic Freestyle On Tim Westwood
Shook Ones Freestyle – Fabolous (@myfabolouslife)
The Hip Hop World Sounds Off On “Empire”
“It shows how viable our culture is,” said Northern California rapper Iamsu.
Even Fab 5 Freddy, one of hip-hop’s founding fathers, is down with it. “There’s going to be things that we disagree with, but it’s just good that they made an effort to put our culture on a world stage,” wrote the legend to me in an email. “Empire affirms the power of this urban culture that grew out of the hood and extreme poverty here in New York.”
With Empire, hip-hop’s past and present, from Sugar Hill Gang to Frank Ocean, have made it to the mainstream not just through abstract stories, but with direct references. “They cleverly alluded to scenarios that have taken place in real life,” Fab 5 Freddy wrote. Even if “at times it’s more like where the business was in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when record sales still dominated.”
Video: 5th Gear – Kwame Katana
Tupac Will Have New Music In The Streets Soon
If you happened to catch goosebumps while hearing the voice of Tupac Shakur on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” as well as in Powerade’s latest commercial, where he is heard reciting lines from “Mama’s Just A Little Girl,” just know that there’s more where that came from. Because as Jeff Jampol, owner of JAM Inc., tells Billboard, this is the beginning of a “total reset of the Shakur estate.”
In early 2013, Shakur’s mother, Afeni, brought in JAM, Inc. to oversee her son’s collection, including everything from “unreleased music, released music, remixes, original demos, writings, scripts, plans, video treatments [and] poems.” Joining forces with Tom Whalley, who signed Pac to Interscope in 1991 and currently sits as the head of Loma Vista Records, the company plans to mirror what its been able to do with the management of estates from Michael Jackson, the Doors, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding— specifically working on the licensing, apparel, and other media ventures.
I Used To – @Dave_East and @AldoeBBM
Got The Drop 