VIDEO: Murs "Who's The Boss"

(swiped via Okayplayer)

Though it's getting more and more hilarious (and petty), we're not really touching that Rick Ross and 50 beef. However, since Ricky did mention an OKP favorite in one of his songs aimed at Fif, we figured we'd post Murs' response to the situation (no diss). "I'm the Black Dana White, I'ma get this money and let y'all n*ggas fight"...not mad at Murs at all for this one. Murs For President is in stores now.

50 Cent Album Now Due in 2009, With Bonus DVDs

(swiped from Pitchfork Media)

Apparently, having your own tired-looking reality show on MTV does not keep your record's release from being delayed, at least if you're 50 Cent. Now, instead of coming out on December 9 as planned, 50's perhaps presciently titled fourth album, Before I Self Destruct, will see release early next year via Shady/Aftermath/Interscope.

Both Dr. Dre and Eminem contribute production and guest verses to Before I Self Destruct, and the record's Scott Storch-produced first single, "Get Up", actually sounds decent. If nothing else, the Curtis follow-up is starting out on the right foot. Also, history would lead us to believe that the disc should contain one all-out banger, a la "In Da Club" or "I Get Money" (we'd also include "Hate It or Love It", but the original track was from the Game's debut album).

But Before I Self Destruct isn't just a 50 Cent album. It's also a movie written by 50 Cent, directed by 50 Cent, and starring 50 Cent. It's a movie about a basketball player who sacrifices his dream of playing in the NBA to a life of crime in order to take care of his academically gifted younger brother and avenge the death of their mother. Perhaps learning from the tepid overall response to Get Rich or Die Tryin' the movie, 50 is including a DVD of the film with every copy of the album.

Early deluxe editions of Before I Self Destruct will also include a second DVD, a documentary called Two Turntables and a Microphone: The Life and Death of Jam Master Jay. In addition to 50 Cent, the movie about the late Run DMC DJ (and 50 Cent mentor) features appearances from Jay-Z, Russell Simmons, and Rev Run of Run-DMC.

• Stream: 50 Cent: Get Up [single; from the forthcoming Before I Self Destruct LP]

Eminem recording new material, but no release set

(swiped from Reuters)

After several years away from the limelight, rapper Eminem may release a new album this year.

During a recent appearance on his Sirius XM satellite radio station, Shade 45, the MC admitted that he has been producing tracks for his Shady Records artists and himself. Eminem also interviewed MC Masta Ace, who he's long noted as an influence.

"I'm concentrating on my own stuff right now -- just banging out tracks," Eminem said. "The more I keep producing, the better it seems I get. I start knowing stuff, learning the boards like the back of my hands."

An Interscope representative said there is no official release date nor a first single but confirmed that an album may arrive before year's end.

Eminem's last effort, "Encore," was released in 2004.

Hip-hop artist 50 Cent, with whom Eminem has collaborated in the past, spoke to BBC Radio 1 this week and said fans will be "seeing (Eminem) shortly. He's working. I spent the weekend at his house. Even though he tries to relax and stay home, it's impossible for him to stay in."

Ja Rule To Release First Album In 3 Years

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Ja Rule is back on the promotional trail, three years after he released his last album to disappointing sales.

The Queens, N.Y.-bred rapper's new album "The Mirror," due November 13, is the follow-up to 2004's "R.U.L.E.," which has sold 658,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. At his peak, Ja Rule sold 3.6 million copies of 2001's "Pain Is Love," his third album.

He describes "The Mirror" as a reflection of a professionally and personally turbulent period that included a public feud with rapper 50 Cent and an FBI money-laundering case against the two principals of his label The Inc. (Irv and Chris Gotti were both exonerated in 2005.)

"When you've been in this business a long time, things sometimes spiral into something bigger than you expected," he says. "Coming through that has made me wiser and more open-minded. Such situations not only build character, but show other people's character."
The album is "very grown-up ... expressing a lot of true feelings. But it's a fun album as well -- a dramedy."

Tracks include the self-explanatory "Judas," which samples the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" ("We got the clearance -- that's a win in itself") and "Damn," a song Rule says he wrote with Mary J. Blige, Jennifer Lopez and Christina Milian in mind. "I did it in a way that's real subjective but clever," he says.

Playing now on the video circuit is a clip for "Body," the album's formal first single featuring R&B newcomer Ashley Joi. The sex-sizzled track ("There are a lot of women in the video so I'll probably take some more heat," Rule says with a laugh) follows on the heels of "Uh-Ohhh!!" featuring Lil Wayne, which stalled at No. 69 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.

"I leaked it to get people used to hearing my voice again and hearing good music," Ja Rule explains. "People loved 'Uh-Ohhh!!,' but because of budgets you can't push records the way you want to sometimes. So you choose your fights."

Frank yet jovial, Ja Rule waxed philosophical on other subjects:

- The feud with 50 Cent (addressed on Rule's 2003 album, "Blood in My Eye"): "It wasn't really a beef, just something he was doing on record. It didn't phase me except when the public reacted. Then it was like, 'I've got to talk back.' But I never felt threatened; it was just words. People didn't understand that."

- On still using the b- and h-words: "We have freedom of speech and expression. I don't think those words are hurting people as much as the media makes them out to be. There are bigger issues -- the war, Jena 6, the election -- than rap lyrics."

50 Cent Scraps Appearances

(swiped from Reuters)

LONDON (Billboard) - Just hours after losing out to rival Kanye West on the U.K. albums chart, rapper 50 Cent has shelved a string of European appearances.

"50 Cent is very sad to confirm that due to a last minute, unforeseen and unanticipated change in his schedule, he will have to postpone his European promotion trip from September 18-25," his Interscope Records label said in a statement.

Among the events he will miss are the Music of Black Origin Awards and the Live Music Awards, both in London.

The competition between both rappers ratcheted up a gear when 50 Cent -- whose real name is Curtis Jackson -- claimed in the press that he would retire from making solo albums if West won the sales battle.

West's "Graduation" (Roc-A-Fella) bowed at No. 1 on the latest Official U.K. Albums Chart, published Monday, ahead of 50 Cent's No. 2 "Curtis." Initial data in the United States also showed him trailing West; official sales will be published Wednesday.

And the winner is.....

Kanye West easily bested 50 Cent in their much-hyped SoundScan clash, pushing 957,000 copies of Graduation against 691,000 copies of the G-Unit star's Curtis in its first six days of sales, according to Billboard. Both albums are the artists' respective third solo projects.

Early projections last week had West moving 800,000 copies to 50's 600,000. A late surge over the weekend, perhaps, created the distance that left the battle pretty much one-sided in the producer's favor. (Sales tallies ended on Sunday when SoundScan closed for the prior week.)
Both artists did last-minute campaigning over the weekend, with West stopping by the Emmys and Fif hitting NYC for his 5 Borough Tour.

In interviews leading up to the September 11 release date, 50 claimed he would retire from making music if West outsold him in the first week, although he later qualified those remarks.
50 also seemed to be in disbelief by the comparisons drawn between his sales prowess and West's. He claimed he was the bar against which the first-week numbers should be judged in the current climate of sagging CD sales.

The G-Unit rapper later began lashing out at Def Jam, claiming West's label was purchasing copies of this Graduation to boost sales. As it turns out, West's Graduation posted the biggest opening-week numbers for an album since 50's The Massacre pushed 1.1 million copies in its first week in March 2005, according to Billboard.

Country-music star Kenny Chesney, who made his own bold prediction to Entertainment Weekly about his project landing atop the charts, will debut at #3 on the Billboard albums chart. His Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates moved a reported 387,000 copies.
The rollouts for Kanye's and 50's albums weren't exactly smooth. West released two singles before finalizing an album date, which coincided with 50's date.

50, by contrast, had a much more difficult time, which was documented by tirades and temper tantrums. Most infamous was his meltdown in G-Unit's office in midtown Manhattan, New York, where 50 tossed his cell phone out the window and ripped a flat-screen TV from the wall after learning the video for his Robin Thicke collaboration "Follow My Lead" leaked to the Internet. The clip wasn't planned for release until much later in the album cycle for Curtis.

50 most recently revealed plans to release his Before I Self Destruct album early next year. And he has also vowed to release one G-Unit project for every Def Jam project if West's first week sales top his.

In Praise of Assholes: An Analysis On 50 and Kanye's Releases

(Swiped from The Village Voice)

Kanye can't rap. 50 is retrograde. Both are absolutely necessary.

by Greg Tate

Kanye West and 50 Cent are the two biggest drama queens to hit pop music since Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, and that's not a bad thing. Hiphop, still the voice of Young Black America, is only going to get louder and prouder as it goes along, if only because that demographic's voice is so hushed elsewhere. Barack Obama's campaign manager claims his candidate's currently muted campaign voice is the product of his belief that America isn't ready for a fire-breathing Black man, and our nation's prisons and graveyards are full of the proof. But nature abhorring a vacuum, Kanye and 50 have rushed in to fill the void in that last safe space left for such characters. A sister I know once told me she had no respect for a Black man who wasn't arrogant. Maybe the advent of Mr. West and Mr. Cent warms her heart, maybe not. Regardless, there is, of course, that bothersome question: loud and proud and arrogant in the name of what? Wealth, fame, and gossip? Hmmm. While traveling about the country speaking in the 19th century, Sojourner Truth, our beloved godmother of The Struggle, used to sell postcards of herself, rationalizing this enterprise thus: "I use the shadow to support the substance."

These are the days when we ask whether there's anything but shade being served up as Black Popular Culture. With respect to West's new Graduation and 50's new Curtis, one could easily come to feel that hype is being sold to support hype, so please don't believe the hype. But as Melville, another 19th-century godmother of truth, set forth in The Confidence Man, America is nothing if not a land where hustlers, grifters, con artists, and slicksters grease the wheel of populism, where the shadow often is the substance and where even those who've come to peddle the righteous Truth realize they need to get some hustle up in their game, too. On a recent PBS report about Europe's love-hate relationship with America, a bizarre sidebar hustled us into the studio apartment of two French rappers of Arabic descent. Dudes wore fat gold chains, shined diamond grills, and gushed repeatedly about how they viewed both American MCs and Herr Bush as idols because their "game was so tight," repeatedly and ferociously invoking that phrase. They believe the hype, conflating Bushology and bling-ology as the new-model American Dream. Mr. Cent has also spoken admiringly of Herr Bush's aggression. Real knows real.

Mr. West and Mr. Cent are both now as well-known for inciting beef as for recording and performing. You could think they both make records just to sell hype as opposed to the other way around, but they're also both formidable, state-of-the-art 21st-century pop tunesmiths who take the job of writing delectable hits as seriously as any Brill or Motown scrivener ever did. One old-school hiphop maven recently lamented how she can't believe she lives in a world where "Kanye is even a factor," largely because he can't really rap. (Mr. Cent she loves, reminding those of us less titillated that the man does have charms to stir the distaff breast.) But while it's true that Mr. West will probably never end up on anybody's list of even the 100 greatest MCs of all time, he's clearly got an exceptional ear for hooks, both musical and lyrical. Furthermore, he's got stuff to say that isn't the standard fare, stuff that still has undeniable mass-ass appeal. He also has a unique personality and a confidently outsized opinion of same—that combined with moxie will still get you somewhere in this country.

Mr. West and Mr. Cent share in being two of the most unrepentantly obnoxious figures to arrive in American pop culture since Cheney and Rumsfeld. The difference between them being, Mr. West is loud, bratty, obnoxious, but seemingly harmless, while Mr. Cent is laconic, bratty, obnoxious, but genuinely sinister. His now-legendary Hot 97 interview, calmly warning a histrionic, hyperventilating Cam'ron about the dangers of his mouth writing checks his ass couldn't cash, was as surgical, chilling, and devastating a threat as you've heard since Pacino played Corleone. But somewhere during 2005's The Massacre, Mr. Cent realized he didn't have to make records for gangsters, wanksters, or even guys anymore, that he could just be the lone NY kingpin who made records strictly for the ladies. Those with truly savage breasts and literal cojones would have to find their high-testosterone hiphop elsewhere—Mr. Cent could care less for your love anymore. Certainly not after cashing in those Glaceau stock options; if hiphop is now more defined by the corporate game than the street game, that lucrative little coup just might be the definitive hiphop act of 2007.

After all, brothers like Mr. West and Mr. Cent can sell hype to support hype and thus generate as much personal wealth as many African nations can with all the diamonds, gold, and titanium in their sovereign ground. African-American entertainment is our De Beers, our Nokia, our Lockheed—the only bloodsucking industry we (sorta) (symbolically, at least) got, and likely the only nation-state (figuratively, at least) we'll ever have as well. Meaning that in some perverse Black Nationalist way, you have to admire the loot Mr. Cent, Mr. Combs, Mr. Simmons, and Mr. Carter have hustled out of corporate America by wearing little more than their well-hyped shadows. Meanwhile, back in the real jungle, real Africans—Rwandans, no less—are slaughtering one another to corner the market on the colombite-tantalite-laced mud (known as coltan) that keeps your cell phone ringing. (For more on this, see Black Brit artist Steve McQueen's upcoming exhibition Gravesend.) Mr. West and Mr. Cent may indeed be assholes, but they're symbolic assholes who remind us that American Darwinism has produced a species of Negro Male who can now exploit his fetishized vernacular aura as profitably as multinational corporations can the minerals in your whole damn ancestral homeland. Mr. Cent will never win the NAACP Image Award he deserves for this achievement, mainly because that lot's more interested in "burying" the word nigga or "redeeming" Michael Vick's dog-mangling ass than applauding or even analyzing it.

Oh yes, BTW, FYI, Mr. Cent and Mr. West both have new albums out. Of course, Mr. West's previous effort, 2005's Late Registration, belongs in the pantheon of superlative hiphop albums, despite his being a mere step or three above Mr. Combs in the "least enchanting rhymers of all time" category. To his credit, though, he's far wittier than Diddy, with reams of jokes and edgy one-liners ("I'm like the Malcolm X of fly/Buy any jeans necessary"), and something like a social conscience, too—see his blood-diamond confessions on Registration's "Diamonds from Sierra Leone." What he lacks in ferocious flow, he makes up for in plaintive verbal harassment—he's kinda like the guy who will beg his way into your panties if he has to, the one who will simply not shut up or back off until your ears give him the equivalent of sympathy punnani. He's the Rodney Dangerfield of rap, in other words, and fortunately for us, what he lacks in MC finesse he makes up for in musical panache. Registration had a jillion snappy ideas about what a hiphop song could be—from show tunes to power ballads, from symphonic airs to Curtis Mayfield elegies—and mucho ear candy to burn. Mr. West proved he knew a ripe, juicy hook when he stole, borrowed, or chipmunked one, and he knew how to attach himself to it like a writhing, self-aggrandizing barnacle to boot. Graduation builds on this formula, even if this time around his lyric conceits prove less galvanizing than his purely musical snatches.

Let's take "Drunk and Hot Girls," for starters. Ostensibly Graduation's "Gold Digger," its similarly breezy girl-bashing never achieves the deadpan hilarity of that Registration highlight because, like too many other moments this time, Mr. West presumes our sympathy for his rock-star pain—here, specifically, the downside of being entangled with intoxicated hotties. (The track does, however, prove he can mire himself in lounge music as seedy as any Tom Waits has trawled in.) The folly of his pathos, though, reaches its nadir on "Big Brother," a song about how much he loves and owes his big bruh Jay-Z, and how little love and respect lil' bruh Kanye feels he gets in return. Not exactly Cain and Abel drama here.

Now, if there's anything Kanye and 50 both want and will never, ever have, it's the genuine Vito Corleone–Muhammad Ali love and respect Mr. Shawn Carter has out here on these streets, a love I never truly appreciated until around December 4 of last year, when I was on Harlem's 145th Street A-train platform and overheard a young sister, about 17 or so, tell her homegirl she was on her way home to bake a birthday cake, like she always did for her "big brother" Jayhova. Both these guys could give away every dime they make from now until perdition to homeless orphans and not get that kind of unabashed 'hood love in return. Of all the things Mr. Carter has that other high-rolling hiphop brothers might covet, the thing they covet the most can't be bought or sold: his "big man on campus" affability. In recognition of this lack, Mr. West and Mr. Cent take an opposite tack, seeing how far they can push straight-faced arrogance as an icebreaker, if not a virtue.

When Mr. West's braggadocio turns whiny, Graduation proves why he's so easy to loathe, but also why he's so easy to applaud as the most genuinely confessional MC in hiphop today. (Some would say "narcissistic," but c'mon, this is hiphop, not emo, yo.) On "The Glory," he congratulates himself for raising the thematic bar in hiphop, and also for buying clothes with haute logos. On "Everything I Am," he congratulates himself for not being more gangsta, notes the number of caskets in Chicago last year (600), and speaks up for the down-and-out brother in the 'hood who can't even get the church to give his depression the time of day. And grating bouts of narcissism aside, Graduation contains killer pieces of production: "Stronger" uses Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" to practically revive Eurodisco, while "Champion" snarkily snatches its hook from Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne" and allows Mr. West to declare how much he's an idol for the kids, if not the ages.

For Mr. Cent's part, he and his Curtis co-producers continue to perfect a style of lean, sleek, bubbly, robo-industrial hiphop that nearly qualifies as a modern form of visual design, each track the equivalent of watching a Maserati roll off the assembly line. We're talking a form as sleek, dark, and aerodynamic in form as a Mirage fighter—one that allows Mr. Cent to shadily blend and disappear into the music like a grinning, evil Cheshire cat and thus maintain his Zen profile as the anti-Kanye: the least excitable prime-time rapper this side of Snoop. An extremely limited thematic palette of sex, money, and dissing still wets his whistle, even if, on "Straight to the Bank," he reminds us that he's so rich he doesn't have to rap anymore. But even if you have no ears for his lyrical swagger (I don't have much), can't anybody say he makes indifferent, lazy albums. Curtis is stuffed with tightly wound 21st-century pop songwriting, full of that invisible craft and flow that renders a thing eminently listenable even if it's gratuitously raunchy, politically reprehensible, and sexually retrograde. America wouldn't be America if pro-capitalist assholes and con men couldn't run roughshod over the body politic, and the day there's no room for two full-time careerist drama queens like Mr. West and Mr. Cent will be the day the revolution comes, the day of al-Kebulan, the Taliban, the tsunami, the asteroid, the omega, man.

Kanye West Vs. 50 Cent: Rivalry?

Let the games begin.

Several wagers in TV appearances by 50 Cent calling Kanye West out. From a televised debate to 50 going so far as to proclaim that if West outsells him, he will no longer write music.

I mean really, both are totally different artists. Real talk, Kanye is definitely doing something wonderful, but it's not all THAT different. In addition, we should all come to the realization that both are mainstream artists, and are therefore sales driven. Now I would be of the notion that healthy competition is very existent within today's society without having to damage another person's career. But this has seriously gone too far.

I personally plan to buy both albums, cause I'm one who shows no bias between 50 nor Kanye. At the same time, the true decision is gonna come down to the consumer who goes out on 9/11 to purchase either one of these albums, and in the end it's all a matter of personal preference. Better opinion? DJ Muggs & Sick Jacken is coming out on 9/11 as well. Again, I'm buying all three. But to all those who choose to follow the hype, a word of advice from me. Don't make it more serious than it is. There are people dying in far worse situations for us to worry about a simple beef between two successful artists.