Third excerpt from J-Zone’s forthcoming book, Root for the Villain: Rap, Bullshit, and a Celebration of Failure. What happens when your rap career ends and money is short? You go the Tim Dog route and juice a woman for comeback album money, you go the Hammer route and launch another search engine, you occupy Wall Street while you starve and freeze, or you (gulp) get a J-O-B! A hilarious look at a foray into the foreign territory of the 9 to 5 world, post-rap career.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing after the high school basketball game I had been covering was over.

“Yo man, you J-Zone?” the point guard asked me before I could ask him about his 19 point, 8 assist performance.

I asked him to repeat his question. Not to flatter myself, but to make sure I’d heard him correctly. My ears weren’t bullshittin’.

“Ummm,” I stammered.

“Dude,” he cut me off. “The YouTube videos of you chillin’ in the drive-thru at White Castle and licking whipped cream off those foam titties are classic!”

I was part shocked that someone born after 1985 knew who I was by face, part embarrassed that my attempts to be professional as a sports reporter were trumped by being known as the Onion Ring and Titty Man, and part flattered that an obscure and pseudo-famous rap guy like myself was even remembered years after my modest music career had gone kaput. I guess that’s what happens to the quasi-successful middle ground rap man who’s teetering the top of a fence that separates two universes – he eventually falls over to the “real” job side. And it fucks up folks who fail to realize he wasn’t that famous in the first place.

Don’t get it wrong, DJ Premier doesn’t have anything against Justin Bieber. The story goes like this, Justin Bieber asked if he could join the BET Cyphers ’11 which was cool for Premo and the staff. DJ Premier doesn’t care who joins the cyphers as long as you can spit dope verses everybody is allowed. But then Justin Bieber wanted Ludacris to write his rhymes and that wasn’t allowed by DJ Premier. Thanks to DJ Premier the BET Cyphers are still spitting ryhmes on dope breaks like they used to do it on the streets… Word!

E-mails obtained through a government sunshine request show top government officials were deeply involved in secret negotiations about ISPs punishing Americans accused of illegal file sharing.

As long-term readers recall, the observation of Goldman’s dominant presence in the NYSE’s weekly program trading reports by Zero Hedge back in early 2009 was one of the key drivers that set in motion the backlash against algorithmic trading and HFT which back in 2009 was the pinnacle of fringe topics and has since become a daily talking point and market scapegoat du jour on days when stocks are down (but never up). It also drew attention to Goldman’s prop trading division which Zero Hedge was the first and only vocal opponent of, and has since been demolished courtesy of the Volcker Rule, an event which both Moody’s and Alliance Bernstein now say could cost the bank dearly in top and bottom line, yet which Goldman told us on the record “represents approximately 10% of this year’s reported net revenue.” Guess it was more, huh… Yet the same NYSE weekly program trading update indicates that Goldman, up until now a monolith in NYSE program trading, has just lost its crown in that field as well. The new king. A firm called Latour Trading, which in the last week traded 484.6 million shares in principal strategies. Which begs the question: just who is this Latour Trading which dares to upstage the firm that does god’s work on earth. Alas, their website has been less than forthright. Inquiring minds certainly want to know. From the NYSE:

You asked the questions and Rugged Man Answered.
Mailbag #6

Why is B.E.T. hip hop awards so garbge and narrowed minded in there nominees……Especially for lyricist of the year, come on nikki, Kayne rick ross and whiz what the fuck…

Music and Politics both are nothing more than a popularity contest of persons who are the most heavily marketed and promoted. Did you really think B.E.T., MTV, GRAMMY’s or any other corporate sponsored program is going to go out of their way to find and promote the actual ‘Best’ musician or ‘Best’ lyricist over artists that make the corporations the most money? Wake up. Its shitty but the world don’t work like that.

One of hip-hop’s brightest young stars explains how he learned from his early career money mistakes.

Link

Ed. note: Inside, you’ll find some of Peter Nash’s (formerly Prime Minister Pete Nice) personal memory box from his early days as the cane-wielding MC of hip-hop group 3rd Bass. It’s full of gaudy jewelry, tough-guy posing, unfortunate fades, and candid shots of some of the most famous hip-hop stars from the ’90s before they were legends. Oh, and Gilbert Gottfried. Enjoy.

Starts tomorrow. Link

How Dave Mays and Benzino Got Back in the Game with Hip Hop Weekly
Step One: Take a page from the Bonnie Fuller playbook.

…………

Late one night in March 2006, Dave Mays was asleep in his New Jersey home when he received a phone call from Mr. Scott. They’d been kicking around start-up ideas, and Mr. Scott had had a eureka moment. “He said, ‘I got it!” Mr. Mays recalled. “And he broke down how there were all these celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People, and they were all successful but all featured the same group of people: basically, white celebrities. There was a void in the market.”

Their new magazine would come out twice a month. “We realized that the monthly magazine is a dying breed,” Mr. Mays said. “I’m sure you can do a monthly sewing magazine but with hip hop, there is shit happening every day, second and hour.”

They named it Hip Hop Weekly and began quietly publishing in late 2006. There was no lavish launch party, and the operation ran on a shoestring. Whereas The Source at its height had more than 80 full-time employees working out of a 20,000-square-foot office on Park Avenue South, Hip Hop Weekly works out of a small office in Miami and is put out by 10 part-time employees who mostly work from home. The website is run by a single part-timer. Photo shoots are a rare luxury.

True Master, real name Derrick Harris, escaped after being charged with sexual assault and battery

One final strategic push.

From Adbusters Blog

When asked about the occupation, the mayor of New York City responded, “People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it. As long as they do it where other people’s rights are respected, this is the place where people can speak their minds …”

Anonymous says they will release their new hacktivism tool at 7am in solidarity with #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.

While Michael Moore and the rest of the mainstream left continues to be largely silent about #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, American rapper Lupe Fiasco has been vocal in his support. Lupe has vowed to donate 50 tents to the occupation and has written a poem celebrating our efforts.

President Obama will be in New York City at a private $38,500 per person fundraising event on Monday, September 19th starting at 5:30 p.m. at 820 Park Avenue. Maybe we can go there and invite him to join our people’s assembly?

….

For up-to-date information follow occupywallst.org, nycga.net and @occupywallstnyc

Good luck … Hang in there!

for the wild,Culture Jammers HQ

“Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return To The 36 Chambers Re-Released As Wallet Box”

Link

As it turns out, he’s not alone. A new generation of web entrepreneurs has discovered the joys of charging users cold, hard cash. Along with Pinboard, there’s the read-it-later service Instapaper, private social-network site Ning, and innumerable iPhone apps that require you to lay down coin.

If we’re lucky, this trend will save the Internet from one of the most corrosive forces affecting it—the bloodless logic of advertising.

For years, of course, everyone has claimed that you can’t charge for anything online. If you dream up a cool new tool, your only way to make money is to generate as many impressions as possible for advertisers. This inevitably produces horrid, cynical designs that work against what people want. Consider Facebook: Each year, it redesigns its site to gradually nudge users to make more and more of their material public. This is partly because CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to think publicness is inherently good—but it’s also a rational response to the demands of the ad market, which needs as many people looking at as many things as possible.

In contrast, charging for your service neatly aligns your desires with those of your customers (as a bonus, you can call them customers instead of users). “There’s a magical relationship you have with people who are paying you money,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals, which runs several paid web services like Basecamp. “You worry about doing what they need and request.”

So much of today’s new music is so processed and ‘perfected’ by computer recording technology the true sound of the actual band is completely obliterated.