What The Hell Just Happened in Music This Week?

Drake's album art, Big Sean's "Hall of Fame" and more.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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The MTV Video Music Awards go down tonight in Brooklyn at the Barclays Center and the place will be packed with crazy live performances, the new KAWS Moonman, and more.

And while the world is waiting in New York City for something crazy to happen tonight, this past week has had its own sort of insanity, all leading up to tonight's festivities.

We watched Drake and Kanye get serenaded by Pia Mia, a friend of the Kardashian clan, and learned Coolio was selling his entire catalog to really kick off his cooking career. Juicy J's Stay Trippy was streamed in full on his site earlier this week, but the only way to access it was through a stripper game. Plus, Drake's Nothing Was the Same album art set Twitter on fire, and Kanye West appeared on Kris Jenner's talk show and revealed a photo of North West.

All that and more in What The Hell Just Happened in Music This Week?

RELATED: Pharrell Is Dominating 2013, and You Probably Didn't Even Notice

The influential critic Albert Murray passed away earlier this week.

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Date: August 18

Writer and cultural critic Albert Murray passed away earlier this week at the age of 97.

His importance to the story of American cultural criticism is difficult to overstate. At the time he released his first collection of essays, 1970's The Omni-Americans: Black Experience & American Culture, he was attacking two dominant American views of the relationship between Black and White culture. White Americans had treated black art as a kind of outsider exotica, even when embracing the music; meanwhile, the new cutting-edge approach from post-war Black American intellectuals revolved around a kind of Black Nationalist separatism, espoused by writers like Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka. 

Murray's book made a bold new argument about the nature of race and culture in America. To quote this 1996 profile of Murray by Henry Louis Gates, the argument made by Murray in his first collection, as well as subsequent books like his Jazz history Stomping the Blues, was simple. Says Gates:

"In its bluntest form, their assertion was that the truest Americans were black Americans. For much of what was truly distinctive about America's 'national character' was rooted in the improvisatory prehistory of the blues.... 

"For generations, the word 'American' had tacitly connoted 'white.' Murray inverted the cultural assumptions and the verbal conventions: in his discourse, 'American,' roughly speaking, means 'black.' So, even as the clenched fist crowd was scrambling for cultural crumbs, Murray was declaring the entire harvest board of American civilization to be his birthright. In a sense, Murray was the ultimate Black Nationalist."

Murray wasn't the only one espousing this particular argument. He and Invisible Man author and literary legend Ralph Ellison, a longtime friend (the two attended Tuskegee University at the same time), had forged many of these ideas together (some of their correspondence was collected in a book called Trading Twelves). In fact, Ellison's 1964 book Shadow and Act, which collected essays he had written, laid the groundwork. Ellison said that although there had clearly been a history of segregation and disenfranchisement, American culture was pluralistic and had been intrinsically black from its beginnings. Murray's essays in Omni-Americans pushed this argument further; because of how Africans had been so violent dislocated, forced to fend for themselves in a pioneer society, being forced to adapt and survive had made black Americans the archetypal Americans. 

[The difference between Ellison and Murray, in Murray's own words: "[In Ellison there is] a certain amount of explanation of black folks stuff for white folks, which I refuse to do. He would say certain things which I wouldn't say."]

There was a patriotism and—yes—a conservatism to these philosophies. Murray disciples like Stanley Crouch would extend those arguments in ways that would alienate fans of hip-hop. But the primary thrust of his vision—that black culture isn't a piece of American musical DNA, but the very essence of it, the basis from which all American popular music springs—is an idea to which we are all indebted. This is one of the long-lasting legacies of Albert Murray, and the basis for our understanding of American culture.

"The omni-Americans are the Americans," Murray said in a 1996 interview with American Heritage. "My conception makes Americans identify with all their ancestors."

Rest in peace. —David Drake

RELATED: Albert Murray, Renown Blues Expert and Social Critic, Has Died

Fan Fiction: Drake has dinner with Kanye West and the Kardashians.

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Juicy J streamed his album and it involved strippers, of course.

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You can buy the rights to all 123 Coolio songs for the low. He's going to be a chef.

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Drake released the album art for Nothing Was The Same.

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A$AP Ferg actually responded to the Kendrick Lamar "King of NY" claim.

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Kanye made his first live television appearance on Kris Jenner's talk show.

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