Beyonce’s music has always been full of playful lyrics about — or even penned by — her husband Jay-Z, but usually, they’re of a complimentary sort. Her new album Renaissance, though, has a shady line that fans are sure confirms a long-held suspicion about the power couple’s relationship, and they’re reacting accordingly on Twitter. Toward the end of the song “Church Girl,” Beyonce borrows a line from Nelly’s controversial 2000 hit “Tip Drill,” repurposing it to suit a gender-flipped dynamic. “Must be the cash ’cause it ain’t your face,” she crows on the outro.
Naturally, some fans have interpreted this line as a reference to Jay-Z, whose facial characteristics have long been a bit of a target within the world of hip-hop. On Nas’ vicious 2001 diss “Ether,” the Queens native wondered whether Jay was “abused as a child, scared to smile, they called you ugly,” while during a separate beef, Cam’ron joked that the Marcy Projects product resembled the cigarette mascot, Joe Camel. Jay himself even made a self-deprecating reference to this tendency on his own 4:44 track “Familly Feud,” rhyming “Ain’t no such thing as an ugly billionaire.”
All of which have combined to give fans the impression that Beyonce’s new song must be talking about her (very wealthy) husband. I’m sure he’ll be crying himself to sleep on their bed that is presumably made of cash, wiping his eyes with dollar bills, and resting his head on solid gold bricks. Listen to “Church Girl” up top and check out some of the hilarious responses below.
“it must be the cash bc it aint your face” CATCH IT JAY
when Beyoncé said “it must be the cash cuz it ain’t your face” Jay Z must’ve been like, hey now. you don’t mean that. must be a lot of situations like that in their household
That’s all he offered, but that’s enough! It’s definitely a compliment, and many are agreeing.
Lil Nas X is known for being quite the Twitter personality. He’s not afraid to share his opinions; recently, he replied to a fan who said that he milked the success of “Old Town Road” for a while by offering remixes. “i don’t wanna milk any of my songs like that again. it takes the fun out of creating new things,” he stated.
He also used Twitter to discuss receiving no nominations from the BET Awards. “Thank you bet awards,” he wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “An outstanding zero nominations again. black excellence!” He added afterwards, “I just feel like black gay ppl have to fight to be seen in this world,” he said in another deleted tweet, “and even when we make it to the top mfs try to pretend we are invisible.”
Nav returns with the first single from his upcoming album Demons Protected by Angels, tapping collaborators Lil Baby, Mike Dean, Tay Keith, and Travis Scott for “Never Sleep.” Tay Keith provides the beat, with additional production by Grayson and Mike Dean, and the three rappers let loose, calculating their income and detailing their spending through colorful metaphors hailing their wealth. The collaboration marks Nav’s second with Lil Baby after “Don’t Need Friends” from Emergency Tsunami and his fifth with Travis Scott.
Demons Protected by Angels will be the Canadian artist’s fourth studio album, following 2020’s Good Intentions. Since then, however, Nav did release Emergency Tsunami, a joint mixtape produced entirely by Atlanta producer Wheezy featuring appearances from Gunna, Lil Baby, the late Lil Keed, SahBabii, and Young Thug. The working chemistry between Nav and Wheezy started when they worked on a few tracks from Good Intentions together (three songs were placed on the final album).
In addition to featuring many of his frequent collaborators like Gunna, Future, and Travis Scott, Good Intentions also featured appearances from Don Toliver, Lil Uzi Vert, and the late Pop Smoke. It was followed by a deluxe reissue titled Brown Boy 2, adding Lil Duke and Quavo to its list of features.
Listen to Nav’s “Never Sleep” featuring Lil Baby and Travis Scott above.
Post Malone‘s love for geeky games like Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering is no secret. Last year, he announced his partnership with MTG creators Wizards Of The Coast to promote the return of Friday Night Magic, a promotional campaign for the popular fantasy card game, promising “some cool stuff” to come in the following year. More recently, we discovered just what that “cool stuff” would entail. During a live stream next Friday, August 5, Post will select one viewer to fly to Los Angeles to play a one-on-one MTG match with him for $100,000.
The actual match will take place on August 11 at 6 pm local time and stream via the Whatnot app. To enter, fans will need to download the app, create an account, and tune into the live stream on Friday. The winner will be randomly selected. According to the event website, no previous experience is required as MTG champion Reid Duke will coach the competitor ahead of the match (although, let’s face it; it’ll probably help to know what you’re doing ahead of time).
For the past month, Post has been hosting livestreams on Twitch, playing the battle royale-hero shooter Apex Legends and giving money to charity. Looks like mom was wrong about not being able to make a career out of playing video games — too bad I believed her, eh?
Before they released their first single this past April, the only way to discover Domi & JD Beck online was getting lucky on one of those deep YouTube rabbit holes. If you happened to arrive at that layer of the internet, you’d have seen two teenagers with stupefying jazz music chops straight killing it, but with a foot firmly entrenched in the organic construction of melodic hip-hop beat canvases.
One of their relatively newer clips from December of 2020 called “Madvillainy Tribute,” sees the pair recreating Madlib’s iconic Madvillainy orchestral productions on their respective instruments. Domi plays keys and lays down bass grooves on pedals with her bare feet. Beck rips away at his modest drum kit, tapping a snare and cymbals faster than a house fly flaps its wings. The top comment on the video says, “I’m convinced these two made every adult swim bump to ever exist,” and it’s a hilarious albeit plausible assertion. Especially when you consider that a month before, they appeared in another viral YouTube video backing Thundercat and Ariana Grande’s duet of “Them Changes,” as part of Adult Swim’s peak-pandemic virtual festival.
“Thundercat is one of our closest friends. He’s done a lot for us,” Beck says backstage at Montreal’s Club Soda, before the pair’s Montreal Jazz Festival performance on July 6th, where the young audience at the foot of the stage hung on every dizzying note from their set-closing rendition of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”
But lately, it’s another friend who has helped Domi & JD Beck raise their profile considerably: Anderson .Paak. Paak made the prodigious pair the flagship signing to his brand new Apeshit Records label and their debut album, Not Tight, arrived July 29th as a joint release with the storied jazz label, Blue Note Records. Along with appearances from Paak (notably on “Take A Chance,” which the three masterfully performed on Kimmel earlier this month), the album also features Snoop Dogg, Mac DeMarco, Herbie Hancock, Thundercat, and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel; an illustrious cast of guests to say the least. But the magnitude of none of this seems to phase the Parisian, Domi, 22, and Beck, 19, a Dallas native.
“We try not to overthink it,” Domi says. “Some people are like, ‘OMG Anderson Paak!’ And we’re like, ‘Yea, it’s Andy. We make music with him and we hang with him.’ It’s the same with Blue Note. We text and talk with them and sh*t. But we don’t try to make it like, ‘Blue Note! Blue Note!’ It’s still tight, but yea…”
They met Paak in late 2018 over Instagram. One of the members of The Free Nationals (Paak’s backing band and the other artists currently on the Apeshit roster) came to one of their shows. They later hipped Paak to their tunes, who then reached out on the app. They kept bumping into the Silk Sonic star at festivals when the pair were playing early sets or opening for soul multi-instrumentalist John Bap and just hit it off. The way they tell the story is in a ping pong recollection — equal parts nonchalant and frenetic, but always linear — each one peppering in a detail before the full picture comes together, just like their music.
Beck: “We just became friends.”
Domi: “Then we met him at a festival in New Orleans and met him and sh*t.”
Beck: “Like six or seven of our shows were in the same city.”
Domi: “Then he asked us to come through.”
Beck: “We’d play a bunch of jam sessions with them and stuff.”
Domi: “And then went to LA and he invited us to his studio and then dinner and sh*t. And he was like ‘Hey, I’m starting a label…”
Beck: “We met Mac DeMarco on that same tour.”
Everything is so matter-of-fact with them. They barely remember how they met each other in the first place. It was at the NAMM Convention in Anaheim (National Association of Music Merchants) and they can’t recall why they both ended up there, just that the whole experience was a drag, but they bonded over how hilariously bad everything felt.
“I was playing these electronic drums. So fake,” Beck says. Domi laments the in-ear monitor and a bunk keyboard they had her on. It’s almost as if they caught each other’s eye from an opposite corner of a stage and laughed. “We saw each other at a jam session the night before and he was with Thundercat,” Domi says. “That’s the first time I met him and hung out,” Beck adds. “Domi was there and she barely spoke English at all…she dapped me up like this.” [motions a half-assed fist bump]
Tehillah De Castro
They laugh because they remember the experience in the same way. And if there’s a brother/sister vibe to them, it’s because they literally spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week together. “It’s been like that since 2018. But we beat each other up all the time,” Domi says. “We’re more like sumo wrestlers,” Beck adds. “It’s 50/50 on who wins.”
They currently split time between Dallas and LA. Before that, Domi was finishing up her studies at the Berklee School of Music, which the French national needed to do in order to maintain her visa (she graduated in 2020.) “‘I’d do all my classes in one day and then fly right back to Dallas,” she says. “Take a 5am flight, do my classes and fly back at midnight.”
Dallas is where they write, chill, and play video games when they’re not making music. But their writing process can be unconventional to say the least. Take “Smile” for example, a lead single from Not Tight and one of the most mesmerizing pieces of music you’ll hear this year. Domi’s Nord keyboard lays down an impeccable melody, and then no sooner than it starts to bounce alongside her MIDI keys bass, Beck’s snare and cymbal smacks jump symbiotically with it. They sound like Karriem Riggins and Bob James scoring a Quasimoto cartoon in the year 2030.
“JD was on the toilet, singing the melody and sh*t and I heard him scream ‘Domi! You gotta help me out!” Domi recalls of the song’s inception. “And he sang me the melody so I had to play and record it and then he was guiding me through the whole sh*t. We wrote it together, but it started with him on the toilet singing that melody. That’s the full disclosure.”
If jazz musicians ever created on the toilet, they’d never admit it. That’s part of what makes these two unique. But they have dexterous compositional chops as well. Writing melodies, chords, and bass together, but not on their instruments. “We notice that when you write on our instruments, that’s how it gets lazy and you write the same sh*t all the time,” Domi says. “That’s why a lot of people end up sacrificing their playing for writing,” Beck adds. “So we want to do it like composers, flesh out a whole song to write it and then the playing comes after.”
But you can’t pigeonhole what they are. With them, jazz is hip-hop and hip-hop is jazz. It’s the way music has been shifting since Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder sound joined forces with Kamasi Washington’s West Coast Get Down and started bringing it to the masses. Domi & JD Beck embody this paradigm shift in spades. Two Gen Z’ers who don’t give a f*ck, just want to create lasting work, and what they make is so cool and fresh; subversive and enlightening. It’s the same way that Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters was in 1973. A jazz and funk fusion that was as audacious as it was classically on point.
Hancock, who appears on Not Tight in the far-out “Moon,” in fact invited Domi & JD Beck on stage with him at the Hollywood Bowl last September, just after they recorded the song together. On this warm Southern California evening, they joined him for his pioneering fusion standard, “Chameleon.”
“It’s a funny thing because it’s the most played song that everybody just ruins and destroys,” Domi says. “Like every jam session where you can find the least amount of groove ever and everybody just plays like ten-minute solos. But we were playing it with f*cking Herbie Hancock.”
“If you’re ever gonna play ‘Chameleon,’ you have to play it with Herbie Hancock,” Beck jokes. ”Otherwise? Don’t play it.”
“But as we walked out,” Domi continued, “He said, ’Check em out on YouTube!’ ‘Cause that’s how he found us too. And I was like, there’s no way that 82-year-old Herbie Hancock — legendary — just shouted out our YouTube at the Hollywood Bowl.”
Not Tight is out now via Apeshit/Blue Note. Listen to it here.
Today marks the theatrical release of B.J. Novak’s new movie Vengeance, in which he stars alongside Ashton Kutcher. It turns out Kutcher once gave Novak his big break on TV, as Novak appeared in a number of episodes of Punk’d in the early 2000s. Novak talked about that during an appearance on The Late Show yesterday and told a terrific story about pranking Usher.
Stephen Colbert mentioned the Punk’d connection and Novak noted Kutcher “changed my life with that show.” Colbert asked if the celebrities he helped prank ever got mad, and Novak was quick to respond, “Terribly mad, and here’s the problem: So I’m meeting all these celebrities for the first time, right? It’s thrilling for me. I’m meeting Missy Elliott, I’m meeting Usher; It’s the worst day of their life!”
He then got into the Usher prank that was on the Season 2 premiere (that aired on October 26, 2003), explaining the situation and how Usher acted after the reveal:
“My job once, I got to meet Usher, but my job was I was a store owner on Melrose and [Usher’s] little brother had been busted for shoplifting; he was in on it with us. And the only way I would let the brother go was if [Usher] recorded a rap jingle for my store, which I rapped for him. And he was like, ‘First of all, I’m not a rapper. Second of all, why does it refer to ‘Ice?” I’m like, ‘Well, we wanted Vanilla Ice.’ It’s a well-written show, I didn’t write the joke, it’s so funny.
So then he’s furious and then Ashton comes out and he’s like, ‘Bro!’ Like, it’s a huge hug. And I’m like [open arms gesture] and he’s like, ‘No no no no no.’ Like, your first impression of someone sticks, you know, so I have not run into Usher since. I don’t think he’ll be in my next movie.”
Watch the Novak interview above and find clips from the Usher Punk’d episode below.
When Beyonce’s house-influenced new single “Break My Soul” first dropped, there were naturally a few fans put off by the pop-R&B queen’s shift into dance music styles. It didn’t take long for folks to jump aboard though, leading to a renaissance (sorry) of interest in Black-led dance music. Even Robin S. started to receive some belated and much-deserved accolades for her role in pioneering house music in the ’90s.
However, while Beyonce’s genre experimentation is part of a larger movement to reclaim traditionally Black music, that doesn’t mean that fans can appreciate further attempts to transform her work. Enter Ali Spagnola, a social media personality who has made kind of a name for herself with attention-grabbing stunts. Along with her band, she has reinterpreted the song as a pop-punk track in a video titled, “What if Beyonce’s ‘Break My Soul’ was by MGK?”
Obviously, it didn’t take long for the video to get negative attention from Beyonce fans for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s kind of … not good. It’s also problematic thanks to some of the reasons stated above, which makes it a bad look in the eyes of many fans who are left to wonder if Spagnola just didn’t get the cultural subtext or got it and just didn’t care (both options sap the intended humor of the situation, given the historical context here). But attention seems to have been the goal all along, and Spagnola hasn’t had any problem with retweeting the criticism as well as the sporadic praise. She even doubled down, posting a video about “How we turned Beyonce’s ‘Break My Soul’ to MGK punk pop.”
Even before they landed the lead roles on Issa Rae’s new HBO Max series, Aida Osman and KaMillion have been living and breathing this rap sh*t. The new show, appropriately titled Rap Sh!t, tells the story of two estranged high school friends – the poetic, lyric-focused Shawna Clark (Osman) and the confident, sexually liberated Mia Knight (KaMillion) – reuniting to form a rap duo. While this is both actors’ first times starring in a lead role, their TV counterparts are entities the two have been manifesting for years.
Before Rap Sh!t, KaMillion had been putting out independent mixtapes and singles for eight years. Osman had worked as a writer and producer on shows like Big Mouth and Betty, and was initially hired to be a writer for Rap Sh!t. With Rap Sh!t, the two are at the forefront of their own sharp pen game after years of putting in work behind the scenes.
“It’s so complicated and scary and weird to actualize,” Osman says of being a lead on television. “Every time I see the photo of me and Milly in the car that they’re using for the Rap Sh!t art, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s somebody else. That’s not me and her’ But like, that is me and her. That’s me and my friend. When I drive by the billboard now, it’s so weird to see that that’s us. It’s surreal.”
Alicia Vera/HBO Max
Aida Osman plays the lyric-focused Shawna Clark. She is also a writer on the show.
Osman’s affinity for hip-hop began as a secret love affair. Having grown up in a Muslim household in Lincoln, Nebraska, she was not allowed to watch TV or listen to hip-hop, which the TV writer and actress on a hip-hop-centered show admits is “crazy… because look at me now.” As a teenager, she would often take her computer and sit in her room, watching Nicki Minaj videos in secret. She played drums and performed in her school’s choir throughout high school, and by college, she was quietly writing her own rhymes and exploring beatmaking.
Today, Osman’s mother is more than supportive of her work, even if she doesn’t quite get it.
“[My mom] hates Big Mouth so much,” Osman says. “She’s always like, ‘What is this? They’re ugly.’ She thinks it’s all ugly, and she thinks the concept is so stupid. But she always pauses at the credits like, ‘That’s my baby.’ And I’m like, ‘Which is it? Which is it?’ I don’t even know if my mom understands the concept of Rap Sh!t, but we’ll see.”
KaMillion, on the other hand, has always been immersed in the world of hip-hop, having grown up in Jacksonville, Florida, and hearing music constantly playing outside. “I started writing poetry at first,” says KaMillion, “just looking at the community that I was raised in, and everything I was going through. Everything started out as poetry, and then I just put a beat to it. When I felt like I could do it, I started rapping and getting with different producers. Hip-hop has just always been in me just because of how I was raised in the neighborhoods where I came from.”
When we first meet Osman’s Shawna on the show, she is working the front desk at a Miami hotel. She is recognized for one of her viral freestyles, however, it is revealed that she now wears a mask when she records her rap videos, that way people can focus on her lyrics instead of her appearance. She is critical of the hypersexual nature of women rappers and is fed up with being slept on and wants very badly for industry professionals to take her seriously.
KaMillion’s Mia, on the other hand, strives to be a woman’s fantasy in regards to sexual liberation – a la Lil Kim in the ’90s. As an aspiring rapper single mother, a make-up artist, and an OnlyFans model, Mia wears many hats throughout the series.
Sex work is a big component of the Rap Sh!t universe. In the first episode, we see Mia live streaming on OnlyFans, taking requests and tips from men. In real life, KaMillion briefly dipped her toes in the OnlyFans waters during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, though not for what she considers sex work, but rather to share intimate pictures that wouldn’t make it past the Instagram censors. “We’ve all done odd jobs to come up,” KaMillion says. “I danced briefly to make ends meet, so I understood that aspect when it came to my character, because I’ve experienced it.”
While she became well-versed on the platform of her own accord, bringing the OnlyFans action to the screen was an entirely new challenge for KaMillion.
Alicia Vera/HBO Max
KaMillion plays the ambitious, sexually-liberated Mia Knight.
“When you’re recording kinky little videos on your phone, no one’s in there watching you,” KaMillion says, “but now, you’ve got to perform in front of the camera guy and the director. Like they’re up in your coochie, and I’m like ‘Did I shave good enough?’ ‘How’s every angle looking?’”
Although Shawna hasn’t done any sex work in the series, Osman, similarly to KaMillion, said one of her most challenging scenes to shoot was a virtual sex scene in the first episode, in which she is having FaceTime sex with her long-distance boyfriend, Cliff (Devon Terrell).
“There will be a closed set for things like this, so it’s just you, the cameraman, the producer, the main writer, and the showrunner,” Osman says. “But every time that we film a scene, we do a practice round before, where the necessary crew comes in and maps out what the scene is going to look like. So to lay in a bed while Issa Rae is just watching me masturbate is the goofiest thing. I felt funny and stupid, and I couldn’t take that scene seriously. I kept cackling mid-orgasm.”
Throughout the series, the promising rappers navigate the treacherous music industry as their single, “Seduce And Scheme,” continues to go viral. They face challenges like handling personal relationships as artists, remaining couth at industry functions, and the pressures of viral fame. All the while, the two channel the spirit of women in rap to help them get through the titular rap sh*t, both on-and-off screen.
Viewers with a keen ear will catch the characters referencing iconic quotes by female rappers in casual conversation. In the second episode, when Mia and Shawna are brainstorming ideas for songs, Mia says she wants to make “something fun, something for the summertime, something for the girls to get ready and party to,” referring to Saweetie’s 2019 interview for Amazon Music’s Rap Rotation. In a later episode, where the ladies head to New York City, Mia recreates Nicki Minaj’s 2017 viral “you b*tches can’t even spell Prague” video, recording a clip in front of a black Cadillac Escalade, saying, “Attention, this is how a bad b*tch leaves Miami and arrives in Queens. You b*tches can’t even spell Queens.”
Like the hidden Drake-lyrics in the dialogue of the first season of Rae’s breakout series, Insecure, and the Frank Ocean-lyrics in the second, this was something the writers did on purpose.
“It’s definitely about paying homage, and we love that,” Osman says. “It always feels amazing to catch a little easter egg like that. So with our show, it only made sense for the writers to be like, ‘Let’s put in our favorite moments from Black women in rap.’”
As Mia and Shawna become stars on Rap Sh!t, both Osman and KaMillion are becoming stars in real life, alongside their breakout characters. According to Osman, Rae first commissioned her to write “a month’s worth of television” when she was hired onto the show’s staff. She was comfortable working as a writer “for the rest of [her] life,” and even assumed that someone else had landed the role of Shawna before she was asked to do a chemistry read with KaMillion.
KaMillion had been working toward her breakthrough moment in music for nearly a decade, and now, with Rap Sh!t, she feels like the stars are all aligning.
“I think it’s a blessing for me to be able to make a living in hip-hop,” KaMillion says. “And, ultimately, to be on a show like this – that I feel is about to be culture.”
Bad Bunny has rapidly risen from relative obscurity to become one of the biggest artists in the world, accumulating multiple No. 1s, selling millions of records, and making history in the short amount of time he’s been in the spotlight. His latest impressive accomplishment comes courtesy of Billboard, which reports that BB’s new album Un Verano Sin Ti has become the most popular album of 2022 — even surpassing the inescapable Encanto soundtrack.
Un Verano Sin Ti, which was also the second all-Spanish-language album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (the first being its immediate predecessor, El Último Tour del Mundo, in 2020), has earned 1.606 million equivalent album units in the US. Encanto, which featured the immensely popular “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” had 1.565 million units. For those who don’t know, equivalent album units are a combination of straight album sales, 10 individual tracks sold from an album (track equivalent units), or 1,250 streams via a subscription — or 3,750 ad-supported streams (streaming equivalent units). While Billboard’s data doesn’t break down how BB reached his impressive 1.6 million EAUs, previous reports noted his totals were being driven mostly by streams, which kept the album at No. 1 for five consecutive weeks, then reclaimed its spot earlier this month, breaking a record previously set by Adele in the process.
Over the past few months, rap fans have placed more and more scrutiny on prosecutors who use rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials against hip-hop artists. While “hip-hop cops” have long been rumored as a fixture of the justice system, cases involving popular rappers such as Young Thug and YoungBoy Never Broke Again have highlighted how that system tries to turn rappers’ creative expression against them. Using literal interpretations of violent lyrics or shout-outs to alleged criminal groups as evidence is increasingly seen as a violation of artists’ freedom of speech; fortunately, a new development may help to protect that right in the future.
A new bill modeled after New York’s “Rap On Trial” law proposal has been introduced in the US House Of Representatives by Congressmen Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). The New York version, which passed the state senate in May, still hasn’t passed the state assembly or been ratified by the governor yet, but its creation turned out to be instructive on the new federal bill, called the Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act (get it?). The RAP Act would change the Federal Rules of Evidence to limit the use of lyrics as evidence.
In a statement, Rep. Bowman said, “Rap, Hip Hop, and every lyrical musical piece is a beautiful form of art and expression that must be protected. Our judicial system disparately criminalizes Black and brown lives, including Black and brown creativity. Evidence shows when juries believe lyrics to be rap lyrics, there’s a tendency to presume it’s a confession, whereas lyrics for other genres of music are understood to be art, not factual reporting. This act would ensure that our evidentiary standards protect the First Amendment right to freedom of expression. We cannot imprison our talented artists for expressing their experiences nor will we let their creativity be suppressed.”
If passed, the RAP Act could protect artists like Young Thug and Gunna, who are accused of alleged ties to a violent street gang. In the racketeering indictment, both are charged with violations of the RICO Act, but the only evidence tying them to the supposed gang is cherry-picked lyrics. Likewise, NBA YoungBoy was given a reprieve from using lyrics to prove he had knowledge of guns when nothing in those lyrics could tie him to the gun found in his car. The burden of evidence should absolutely be higher than “this guy rapped about this thing on a song once, so obviously he did the crime we’re accusing him of.” Thanks to the RAP Act, it could be.