UPDATED 9/10/22, 11:30 a.m. ET:The episode is now back on YouTube. Check it out up top.
UPDATED 8/15/22, 11:30 a.m. ET: The Drink Champs episode featuring Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey, and Dave Chappelle has been removed from viewing on YouTube. An explanation for the removal has yet to be provided.
See original story below.
The episode of Drink Champs featuring Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey, collectively known as Black Star, as well as Dave Chappelle, has finally arrived.
According to Page Six, the Drink Champs website teased the arrival of the episode in late May, but it was ultimately shelved at the request of the comedian and his team. Black Star stopped by the podcast to promote No Fear of Time, the long-awaited follow-up to their 1998 album Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, and Chappelle “wanted to pop in and shout out” the duo, which he did.
Chappelle also participated in the conversation, which is allegedly what gave him and his team second thoughts. “When Dave does something, it becomes more about Dave,” a source told Page Six. “It came time to run it, and it was right after [mass shootings] in Buffalo and Texas,” our source says. “[Chappelle and his team] just thought it was ill-timed. … They wanted to approve the timing of it and thought, ‘Hold off, slow down. It’s tone-deaf to release something at this time.”
Chappelle appears at around the 14:45 mark, when he starts talking about the history of The Shack in Ohio where the interview took place. N.O.R.E. asks Dave why he ultimately chose to live in Ohio, to which the comedian jokingly responded, at the 17:14 mark, “That needs its own episode.”
N.O.R.E. then took a moment to give Dave his flowers for always having hip-hop with him. “When I did Chappelle Show and I wanted to do music, I couldn’t get people to come on,” Chappelle said at the 18:10 mark. The comedian refused to get into specifics, but acknowledged that the rappers who turned him down were people they “know and love,” adding, “but in their defense, no one ever heard of the show, anything.”
At the 18:40 mark, N.O.R.E. asked Donnell Rawlings to join in the conversation and find out where they were when they heard Kanye West’s remark that Talib “single-handedly kept baseball caps in business.” Chappelle joked that what Kanye said wasn’t a watershed moment up to par with the JFK assassination.
“Pop culture is a desert right now, and your show is an anomaly,” Chappelle said at the 20:35 mark. “And that Kanye West interview you did was one of my favorite things that I have seen in all of pop culture in recent history. Sincerely. I fuck with Kanye, but man, I ain’t seen him like that in a minute. It was funny. I was engaging. Then this n***a had in on Kweli’s hat.”
“No disrespect, I laughed,” he added.
N.O.R.E. said he knew Kweli was upset over Kanye’s remark two days later. Talib spoke with TMZ shortly afterwards and still seemed bothered by what was said.
Kweli compared the response to Kanye’s remark to “having a hit record out.”
No Fear of Time was released in early May.
