Jay-Z is changing his ways. According to NME, the new proud father wrote in a poem that he’s going to clean up his lyrics in honor of his baby girl Blue Ivy Carter. Could it be true? Is the rapper, who once spit that he had “99 problems,” really giving up the B-word?
UPDATE: Jay-Z told NY Daily News that the poem is “fake.” His daughter has not changed his perspective on how he refers to women.
Because if the media is to be believed, Blue Ivy (the obligatorily horridly-named celeb child of Beyonce and Jay-Z) is the second coming of Jesus, the child is already being allowed to take over whole buildings. At least, that’s the complaint of several new parents currently having to share space with the celebs at the Manhattan hospital where Blue Ivy was born.
Without a doubt, 2011 was a year of great music. Wrapping up the year is no easy task, especially with so many new emerging artists hitting the indie scene and settled greats releasing records as good or better than their efforts decades prior. Our picks for the Top 20 Albums of the year cover a lot of ground, ranging from Indie Beard Rock to Spaghetti-Western, Rockabilly to Hip-Hop, and everything in between. Check out our Top 20 Albums of 2011 after the jump …
New York City’s renowned Carnegie Hall is set to hold its first ever hip hop series on February 6th and 7th of next year, as Jay-Z will be holding court with two sure-to-be-sold-out performances. The shows are meant to “aim to bolster the efforts of his Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation, founded in 2003 by Carter and his mother, Gloria.”
Well, gosh, this sure is a case of a guy simply advocating a good cause, and certainly not a millionaire trying to cash in on a legitimate protest movement, as it turns out that Jay-Z is now selling an Occupy Wall Street-based T-shirt “via his Rocawear clothing label, but he doesn’t plan to share any of the profits with the protesters.”
Syl Johnson, soul legend and blues icon, is suing Kanye West and Jay-Z for sampling his 1967 song “Different Strokes” on their album Watch the Throne without permission and failing to give Johnson proper credit. Rolling Stone reports that Johnson filed a lawsuit against the klepto rappers in Illinois federal court on Friday, stating that West and Jay-Z, along with UMG, Def Jam, and Rock-a-Fella Records, used a portion of the song in “The Joy” and released it without his permission, proper credit, or even payment.
Sexual reproduction—homo sapiens have been using this process of meiosis and fertilization to genetically further our species since we first originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago. It is a method of reproduction that has generated such historically and culturally significant human beings as Gandhi, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, William Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, Leonardo DaVinci, Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur, and Charles Darwin. Further, it is a technique that produces 490,000 new babies every day, which equals roughly 179,000,000 new babies every year. And yet, somehow, despite the fact that this process has created nearly 100 billion lives since the dawn of mankind, I have to stop and write about the fact that Beyonce Knowles is knocked up.
Aziz Ansari is everywhere these days—in addition to starring in NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and showing up in the new flick 30 Minutes or Less (dig our compatriot’s review here), the comedian is now popping up in the video for Jay-Z and Kanye’s (a.k.a., Watch The Throne) new song, “Otis.”
Jay-Z has had a nice year so far, having released the insanely popular The Throne as part of his Watch the Throne collaboration with Kanye West, and now he’s rocketed to the top of another chart—Forbes Magazine’s top hip hop earners of the year.
