Left To Right: DMX, Small Black, Amerie, Dizzee Rascal, Young Buck
Each day Complex scours the music blogs for 5 fresh songs that you should listen to in our 5 O’Clock Shuffle post. Instead of going crazy trying to keep up with your RSS feeds everyday, just head over to Complex.com to stay up-to-date on important leaks and releases.
Yeah, it’s about time to start putting together that weekend playlist and today’s Shuffle has something that will work for you regardless of your tastes. We got rap from almost every region of the States (and the UK too!) plus some electro and R&B jams. You should already know how we do by now. Get your download-fest started after the jump…
Damn, the future of music is hard to predict. Back in December 1997 (on DMX’s birthday), journalist Touré assembled an all-star line-up of hip-hop’s hottest rookies for a roundtable discussion. Big Pun, John Forte, Mos Def, Canibus and Mic Geronimo—five MCs that everyone expected to usher rap into the post-jiggy era. Luckily, the Shades of Hip-Hop Video Mixtape was there to capture the event (including this spontaneous freestyle session) because the buzz didn’t last long for most of these once promising artists.
John Forte, in particular, hit on some rough times. Two and a half years after this video was shot, the former Fugees affiliate was arrested in the Newark Airport with $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine and sentenced to 14 years in prison. But after being granted a pardon from Dubya, Forte finally has his life back—today his eclectic new EP StyleFREE comes out (click here to buy it for $4.99), his first release after seven years behind bars. And who knows, if enough people cop it, Forte will be back eating mangoes in Trinidad with attorneys before you know it.
So it was reported that DMXgot out of jail yesterday after serving over 90 days for drug, fraud and animal cruelty charges. While incarcerated, X mentioned plans to start a TV show called Pain and Perseverance, which will be about “how [DMX] can reach people that the average person can’t reach” through the words of Jesus Christ.
Despite his un-Christian-like behavior over the years, Dark Man X has always been rap’s most outspoken figure when it came to praising the Lord. But if his Bible-thumping TV series never gets off the ground, we have some better suggestions for DMX’s next job…
Well, it’s official: T.I. reported to the judge today to plead guilty to his weapons charges, and got formally sentenced to a year and a day (which could well end up being less when time served on house arrest gets taken into consideration). Clifford gets to voluntarily head to jail sometime after May 19, which gives him a couple of months extra to finish making the world a better place.
Needless to say, we’re making sad-face emoticons over here at Complex; not only is the civilian population losing one of the South’s finest lyricists and a genuinely smart and likable dude, but it’s just one more objectively great emcee who gets chalked into the “Incarcerated” category. There’s more than 20 rappers locked up right now, but since we don’t really fux with shermhead cannibals, we had to narrow it down to our 10 favorite (including Tip). For a look at the other nine, read on…
Poor Young Buck. Just as everyone started to forget about his embarrassing ousting from the G-Unit camp, we learned yesterday that his clothing line, David Brown, is calling it quits. To keep it 100, we completely forgot dude had a clothing line, which he supposedly launched last April when things were a bit rosier for the Nashville, TN native. But now that the entire country is hemorrhaging money quicker than Ma$e’s time on G-Unit, there’s just no place for up-start clothing lines ran by unsigned hypes.
But he’s not the first rapper to launch an anti-climactic clothing line, and we’re sure he won’t be the last. So in an attempt to dry Mr. Brown’s tears and show him that he’s no so alone afterall, we’re taking a look back at the history of failed clothing lines launched by rappers. Pour a little liquor below…
When CNN.com decided to team up with Facebook for their groundbreaking live stream of today’s presidential inauguration, it meant that they left another popular microblogging site out in the cold. Poor Twitter: as instrumental as you were in bringing details to light about the Jim Jones-Neyo scuffle, no one cared what you thought about I-Day.
No one except Complex, that is. Yes, always at the vanguard of technology, we dispatched our Twitter spies to get a peek at what certain Washington insiders were saying during today’s historic proceedings…
According to Dark Man X, his life is a journey just like everyone else’s. It just so happens that we get a front row seat to his. So we get to see all the high points'like him changing the landscape of rap with his Ruff Ryders crew over a decade ago'and the low points, like him getting arrested seven times in one year.
We caught up with DMX in July while he was working on his seventh and eighth studio albums, Walk With Me Now and You’ll Fly With Me Later, to speak to him for our “Talking Heads” column in our August/September issue. Dude gave us more gems than we could fit inside the magazine, so here’s the uncut interview, where X talks about his scariest nightmares, how to evade the cops in a Ferrari and most importantly, how to dodge groupies…
Oh, Earl, you’ve done it again. Yesterday DMX was arrested Miami, marking the 9,143rd time he’s had a mug shot taken in this year alone. After the confetti and balloons settled down, we pulled together some of jail flicks in hopes of reconstructing the Darkman’s style evolution in 2008…
