State Champ Radio Hip-Hop
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Kanye West is facing a copyright lawsuit over allegations that his “Life of the Party” illegally sampled a song by the pioneering rap group Boogie Down Productions – the latest in a string of such infringement case against the embattled rapper.
In a complaint filed Monday in New York federal court, Phase One Network (the group that owns Boogie Down’s copyrights) says Ye incorporated key aspects from the 1986 song “South Bronx” into “Life of the Party,” which was released in 2021 on West’s Stem Player streaming platform.
How do they know he did so? Phase One says West’s people reached out to clear the use of the Boogie Down song – and then released it anyway when a deal was never struck.
“The communications confirmed that ‘South Bronx’ had been incorporated into the infringing track even though West had yet to obtain such license,” Phase One’s lawyers wrote. “Despite the fact that final clearance for use of ‘South Bronx’ in the infringing track was never authorized, the infringing track wa nevertheless reproduced, sold, distributed, publicly performed and exploited.”
Amid his many, many other problems over the last year, West has been repeatedly sued for illegally sampling or interpolating in his tracks. In May, a Texas pastor named David P. Moten accused the rapper of sampling from his recorded sermon in “Come to Life.” In June he was sued again, that time for using a snippet of Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 house track “Move Your Body” in the song “Flowers.”
Though they’re coming at a faster clip in recent months, such lawsuits are nothing new for West. In 2019, he and Pusha T were sued for sampling George Jackson‘s “I Can’t Do Without You” on the track “Come Back Baby.” That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio snippet of a young girl praying in his 2016 song “Ultralight Beam.”
Further back, West was hit with similar cases over allegedly unlicensed samples used in “New Slaves,” “Bound 2,” “My Joy.” And thought he isn’t named in the case, Universal Music Group is currently facing a lawsuit that claims West used an initially-unlicensed sample of King Crimson’s 1969 “21st Century Schizoid Man” in his 2010 track “Power.”
In the new lawsuit, Phase One’s lawyers say West used an “exact reproduction” of “South Bronx,” featuring the song’s horn hits, a melodic figure and a drum fill. The company says it controls both the publishing and recording copyrights to the song, and accuses West of infringing both.
A spokesperson for West could not be located to comment on the new lawsuit. Multiple former press representatives for West have recently told Billboard that they no longer work with him.
Read the entire lawsuit here:
Eminem has famously taken a number of pretty vicious swipes against his mother Debbie on songs such as “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” and “My Name Is” (before offering a mea culpa on 2013’s “Headlights”). But that all appears to be water under the bridge now that Marshall is officially a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
After the Detroit Don took his place among the rock gods over the weekend at the 2022 RRHOF induction ceremony, Debbie Mathers recorded a congratulations video that was pure proud mama. “Marshall, I want to say, I could not let this day go by without congratulating you on your induction into the Hall of Fame,” said Debbie in a video shared on Monday (Nov. 7) by a friend.
“I love you very much. I knew you’d get there. It’s been a long ride. I’m very, very proud of you. And also I’m very proud of [granddaughter] Hailie Jade, my big girl. I want to tell you Hailie, great job on your podcast and God bless you guys. I love you very much.”
After years of contentious back-and-forth — including a 1999 $12 million lawsuit filed against her son accusing him of slander, which they settled two years later for $25,000 — the sweet message was the perfect cap to a big weekend for Slim Shady. The rapper, joined by daughter Hailie at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles for his big night, alluded to his unusual rise to the occasion in his acceptance speech.
“So I’m probably not supposed to actually be here tonight because of a couple of reasons,” he told the crowd. “One of them that I’m a rapper, and this is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And there’s only a few of us right now that have been inducted in already, but there’s only a few of us… I had to really fight my way through man to try and break through in this music, and I’m so honored and I’m so grateful that I’m even able to be up here doing hip-hop music, man, because I love it so much.”
Em was inducted by his longtime mentor and producer, Dr. Dre, who said he never lost faith in the MC, praising his “raw, dark and humorous lyrics coupled with an impeccable cadence.”
Check out Debbie Mathers’ sweet congratulations video below.
The funeral for Migos member Takeoff will take place on Friday (Nov. 11) at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. According to a release announcing the Celebration of Life, it will take place at noon, with free tickets available to Georgia residents only beginning Tuesday (Nov. 8) at 2 p.m. through Ticketmaster: there is a two-ticket maximum, the tickets are non-transferrable and guests must enter the venue together. Takeoff ( born Kirshnik Khari Ball), 28, was gunned down at 810 Billiards & Bowling in Houston, Texas in the early hours of Nov. 1 at an afterparty he attended with his uncle and Migos bandmate, Quavo.
The Rev. Jesse Curney III, senior pastor of New Mercies Christian Church will deliver the eulogy at the service, according to ATL radio station V-103. Guests are encouraged to arrive early, with doors slated to open an hour before the funeral.
According to TMZ, in a statement, Curney said, “I was really sad to hear the news. Kirsnick has been a faithful member since he was ten years old. He and his family were active and avid supporters of the church and the community as a whole.” The public memorial will have a strict no photo/no video policy, with all devices subject to gate check in Yondr bags prior to entering the arena. The rapper’s family requested that in lieu of flower or gifts, donations should be made to The Rocket Foundation, recently established to support programs supporting community-based solutions to prevent gun violence.
Friend and collaborator Drake announced on Monday that he was postponing his planned show at Harlem’s Apollo theater to mourn Takeoff. “The Apollo show has been moved to allow us to pay respect to our dear friend this weekend,” the superstar wrote on his Instagram Stories beneath an updated poster announcing the new dates of Dec. 6 and 7. “We have added a second date for the fans.”
Last week, Drake memorialized the late Migos rapper — who was gunned down at a Houston bowling alley in the early morning hours of Nov. 1 — during the album release party for Her Loss, his new collaborative LP with 21 Savage.
“I’d just like to send our deepest condolences from the family to the entire QC, to our brother Quavo, to our brother Offset, to the friends and loved ones of the legendary, unprecedented Takeoff — a guy that I knew for a long, long time,” he said, adding, “I always talk about the fact that this was one family. My friends in the music industry are not friends, they’re family. So, our deepest condolences — tragic loss for all of us and, you know, a dark cloud over this business that we love so much.”
Takeoff was killed by “penetrating gunshot wounds of head and torso into arm” according to a report from the Harris County coroner’s office. He was hit when shots rang out during an early morning private afterparty attended by several dozen people, where he was pronounced dead at the scene.
In addition to the many heartfelt eulogies from fellow musicians, Takeoff was honored in a funeral service and afterparty in the Grand Theft Auto community that took place on Monday.
Check out images from the GTA funeral below.
GTA players held a private funeral for Takeoff today🕊 — “You must wear all white for the funeral and all black for the house party” pic.twitter.com/1tt5NRt0VC— 44vibe News (@44vibeTV) November 7, 2022
Post Malone is seriously stacking up the side hustles. After helping a couple with their gender reveal during a Tulsa tour stop on his Twelve Carat Tour last month, Posty was at it again over the weekend when he stepped in to officiate an onstage wedding during a Saturday tour stop in Seattle.
Couple Jana and Randy’s friend Heidi Lavon posted video of the blessed event that appeared to take place near the end of the show, with the couple nervously exchanging vows and then Malone pronouncing them universal partners in his own unique way: “You may kiss your partner right now… In the eyes of space, I declare these two lawfully wedded,” the rapper enthused while raising the newlyweds’ hands in triumph as audience members howled in the background.
“Dude, I am shook, Post Malone married my best friends yesterday,” Lavon said in a TikTok video that featured footage of the on-stage nuptials. “But it doesn’t end there,” Lavon added in her clip. “We need everybody’s help to see if we could get Posty to come to the wedding in March.”
During a meet-and-green last month, Malone helped a couple with the gender reveal for their baby after they asked him to open an envelope taped to one of his posters. “You want me to just tell you?” Post asked them, before confirming, “You didn’t see it? Y’all didn’t see it?” He then opened the envelope and his jaw dropped as he excitedly help up a piece of paper that read “It’s a girl!”
“You’re going to be a girl dad!” the star — who welcomed his first child, a daughter, earlier this year –sweetly told the father-to-be. Malone will wrap up the North American swing of his Twelve Carat Tour in Los Angeles at Crypto.com Arena on Nov. 16 before heading overseas in December for a run of shows in the Middle East.
Check out images from the wedding below.
Drake and 21 Savage kept their April Fools-like promo tour for joint album Her Loss by dropping a low-key video for the album’s “Privileged Rappers” in a studio faked-up to look like the one used in COLORS. It came on the heels of a deepfake Howard Stern “interview” that the legendary SiriusXM host raved about on his show, as well as a never-happened NPR Tiny Desk concert and a totally fictitious Vogue magazine cover.
The pair also didn’t appear on Saturday Night Live together, in a clip for “On BS” introduced by actor Michael B. Jordan. “Privileged Rappers on @colorsxstudios,” Drake captioned the his tease of the performance with the Colors Studio account commenting, “Wait…hold up” alongside a side-eye emoji. In the two-minute clip the rappers perform the low-key track from inside an all-gold room, with Drake rocking cornrows and a wheat-colored leather Duster.
On Monday (Nov. 7), Stern reacted to the deepfake interview during his show, joking, “Whenever I have to visit my mother, I wish I could do this… “Drake did such a good job that news outlets are reporting on it as if it’s real, and that’s sort of the weird thing about our lives now,” Stern said before playing a clip from Good Day Atlanta, in which the two reporters discussed Drizzy’s comments on settling down and marriage.
“We have enough material from all the shows we’ve done, we could do a whole show like that,” Stern said. “How great is that?” Drake postponed his planned show at Harlem’s Apollo — his first date since the release of Her Loss — to mourn the death of Migos’ Takeoff. “The Apollo show has been moved to allow us to pay respect to our dear friend this weekend,” the superstar wrote on his Instagram Stories beneath an updated poster announcing the new dates of Dec. 6 and 7. “We have added a second date for the fans.”
Check out the video below.
Tame One, veteran New Jersey rapper and member of hip-hop groups Artifacts and The Weathermen, has died. He was 52.
His death was confirmed by Pitchfork and on Facebook by the late rapper’s mother, Darlene Brown Harris. “What’s on my mind….I cant express this any other way. My son, Rahem Brown, Tamer Dizzle Is Dead,” she wrote on Sunday. “The medical examiner says the six pharmaceutical drugs … prescribed to him last Friday, combined with the weed he smoked over this weekend … his heart simply gave out. He will know better after the autopsy. I will not be responding to all the posts for a bit, but the hardest words I will ever post or say is, my son, my heart, is dead.”
Tame One, born Rahem Brown, expressed himself as a teenager by way of music and graffiti. Tame One’s 1994 debut alongside Artifacts groupmate El Da Sensei, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, was an ode to the influential art form and broke the duo into the mainstream. The album appeared on both the Billboard 200 and R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts. Despite their collective success, Artifacts only went on to release one more album together, That’s Them, in 1997 before moving on to solo careers.
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After the group’s initial split, New York hip-hop group The Weathermen, founded by a handful of East Coast producers and rappers, was formed. Tame One rapped alongside a number of co-members, including Cage Kennylz, Masai Bey, Aesop Rock, Yak Ballz, El-P, Jakki Tha Motamouth, Vast Aire and Breeze Brewin. The group released one mixtape in 2003, titled Conspiracy.
After 25 years, El Da Sensei and Tame One came together with producer Buckwild for their third album as Artifacts, No Expiration Date, which released on Aug. 20. “[In 1979], we would walk miles with markers and cans, taggin’ up everywhere,” he said in his final interview before his death. “I was influenced by my surroundings, I’m a product of my environment, and I capitalized upon what I saw. It’s a blessing to transform that energy and give back.”
Brooklyn rapper Gloria “Hurricane G” Rodriguez has died at age 52. The passing of the Puerto Rican MC best known for her 1997 No. 10 hot rap singles hit “Somebody Else” as well as binlingual songs including “Underground Lockdown” and “El Barrio,” was confirmed by EPMD’s Erick Sermon, who had a daughter with Rodriguez.
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“My heart is hardened today. One of my good friends…. my oldest daughters mother passed away today #HURRICANEGLORIA was also a legend in her own right in the Hiphop community,” Sermon wrote in an Instagram tribute posted on Sunday (Nov. 6). “One of the first puertorican female rappers She rapped with me. @redmangilla she paved the way @keithmurray @diddy she was in all the Hiphop magazines with all the top females at the time.”
Rodriguez first gained fame in 1992 when she appeared on Redman’s “Tonight’s da Night,” then teamed up with him again two years later on “We Run N.Y.” from his Dare Iz a Darkside album. Her debut full-length Spanglish album, All Woman, dropped in 1997 on the New York-based H.O.L.A. Recordings after she’d logged spots on songs by everyone from Xzibit to Funkdoobiest, Keith Murray and Puff Daddy. She also became the first female member of the East Coast hip-hop crew the Def Squad, which included Sermon, Redman, Murray and Jamal.
Though her output was sparse, Sermon noted in his tribute that legendary underground hip-hop radio due Stretch and Bobbito “loved a song that she did called ‘MILKY,’” adding, “She will be missed all around the world. I can’t believe this. Pray for us. Beautiful blessings. She was a beautiful person a wonderful mother as real as they come.”
At press time no cause of death was revealed, but according a FB post on May 20 from Rodriguez’s daughter, Lexus, her mom was suffering from advanced lung cancer. “My mom has stage 4 lung cancer,” she wrote at the time. “I dont know how many of you understand what that means but even after 30 years of life Im still trying to process it myself. I have never cried so much in my life I have never felt so disconnected from reality in my life. Yet my mom still manages to be the one to hold it together and say “dont worry baby everythings gonna be alright”. S–t im crying right now but today is a blessing.”
Hurricane G’s last released album was a 2013 collaboration with Thirstin Howl III entitled Mami & Papi.
See Sermon’s tribute and listen to “Somebody Else” below.
If you recently read a headline quoting Snoop Dogg‘s professional joint roller claiming that the 51-year-old rap icon smokes up to 150 joints per day, take that news with a pinch of Sour Diesel. The quote from Snoop’s “professional blunt roller,” Renegade Piranha, had her saying that she rolls up about half a pound of sticky icky per day, which equals around 75-150 joints every 24 hours, or more than 450,000 to date.
Snoop has never been one to play down his love of the flower, but in a video posted on Sunday (No. 6) the “Smoke Weed Every Day” MC corrected the record… and not in the way you might expect. “B—h said I smoke 450,000 [joints on her watch]… B—h, this is all in a day’s work,” he said in an Instagram video entitled “Stop Lyin’” in which he pointed to a pile of a mere nine blunt roaches.
“Stop lyin’. How the f–k am I gonna smoke all that weed in one day?” he said. “What am I a f—in’ machine? B—h this is the roaches. See? Roaches.” He, of course, followed that video up with another one a short time later in which he’s cruising in his car while staring into the camera and puffing on a fat blunt while rocking a Death Row Records jacket and listening to Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly.”
Snoop will need some extra lung capacity next month when he drops the latest from super-stacked California rap supergroup Mount Westmore, which also features such West Coast legends as Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort. The long-awaited debut is slated to drop on Dec. 9 and feature the just released bouncy single, “Too Big,” featuring P-Lo. The Bigg Dogg also recently revealed that he’s working on a sequel to his 1993 Dr. Dre-produced solo debut, Doggystyle, which he’s calling Missionary.
Check out Snoop’s smoke-and-tell below.
Nandi Bushell picked the perfect time to pay tribute to a rap god. In fact, on the eve of Eminem getting formally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the 12-year-old British drummer phenom tipped her hat the only way she knows how: by ripping through a killer cover of Slim Shady’s 2013 anthem “Rap God” just hours before Marshall Mathers joined the ranks of rock royalty.
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“Guess who’s back? My first new cover in almost 6 months! #rapgod by @eminem!,” Bushell tweeted, noting that her stick-spinning, booming version was inspired by HAL, the drummer for Japanese rockers CVLTE. But there was even better news. After years of expertly covering other people’s songs — and picking up new pals like Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl in the process — Nandi said she’s got big things in store.
“I am still working on my original songs. Coming soon!,” she added. “I can’t wait for you to hear them. Working on my speed and consistency.”
In the video, a smiling Bushell bounces her sticks off the floor, hits a pummeling double-kick drum and blasts out double-time beats to go along with the track of Em’s verbal blitzkrieg.
Longtime friend and collaborator Dr. Dre inducted Eminem on Saturday night, recalling how just about nearly everyone tried to discourage him from working with the then-unknown rapper, saying no one believed or saw the vision. “I knew that his gifts were undeniable,” Dre said during his speech. “Each of us was what the other one needed — and I was willing to bet my entire career on it.”
Em took his place this weekend alongside a 2022 Hall of Fame class that also included Dolly Parton, Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Lionel Richie and Carly Simon.
In September, Spin spoke to Bushell about her upcoming debut EP, Into the Abyss, which will feature her first collection of original songs after years of posting viral cover videos and jamming with the Foos on “Learning to Fly” at the London Taylor Hawkins tribute concert earlier in the month. She’s already released the first single from the five-song effort, “The Shadows,” as well as “Forsaken,” which was inspired by a song she was invited to sing on by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello to help Afghan girls and young women at a school learn to play guitar under the repressive Taliban government.
Bushell said her originals are inspired by everyone from Billie Eilish to Slipknot and Twenty One Pilots. “I also wrote everything and I played everything,” she said.
Check out Bushell’s cover below.
As Steve Lacy took the real SNL stage, Drake shared a performance with 21 Savage on what looked to be a replica of an SNL stage via Instagram Saturday night (Nov. 5).
Drake and 21 Savage, who just dropped the joint project Her Loss, were introduced by actor Michael B. Jordan in the clip.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jordan said, “presenting your musical guest for the evening: Drake and 21 Savage performing a song off of one of the most relatable albums of all time, Her Loss.”
Their performance ended with an outro sounding like a live television studio audience cheering for the duo.
The SNL spoof is the latest stunt in a series of phoney but fascinating Her Loss promo spots. It follows a rollout that’s included a fake Vogue magazine, a Tiny Desk Concert teaser that won’t be on NPR anytime soon and a sham interview with Howard Stern.
The 16-track Her Loss arrived Friday (Nov. 4) after being delayed for a week due to producer and engineer Noah “40” Shebib contracting COVID-19 shortly before the original release date.
Watch Drake and 21 Savae perform “On BS” a la SNL in the video below.
