Latest by Al Shipley: Part prankster, part Plies fan, part "person with way too much time on their hands," ChangeStyle feels like he can only communicate with the YouTube community by freaking/faking them out.
Please excuse his hands. more »
"While approving the final cut for the Love Lockdown vid, I marvel at the fact that it was written less than 3 weeks ago. I'm very excited about the everything... I guarantee this will be 50's favorite album of mine. This will be gangster's album of the year." Hee hee hee. Oh, nothing gets me going in the morning like a little bit of Curtis-related schadenfreude. [kanYe West: Blog]
Tony Yayo Has Sipped Freely From 50 Cent's Kool-Aid
I was going to say "50 Cent's Vitamin Water," but it would have ruined the image that this sentence immediately conjured up in my mind: "In my eyes, I don't think Kanye will never be bigger than Fif, no matter what his numbers do." Although, wait a second, does the double negative mean that Yayo is actually dissing the G-Unit's head honcho? Somebody call the Grammar/Beef Police! [MTV]
Not content to cede the battle that he lost a year ago, 50 Cent took time out of an appearance in Albany over the weekend to make fun of Kanye West's (admittedly flawed) "Love Lockdown," and not even in a remotely witty way. If Curtis was maybe a more interesting person, I'd feel kind of bad for him, because apparently all he can do these days is shill Vitamin Water and talk about his wealth and continue riding off music-related glories that are receding further and further into the past. Will he ever be relevant for his recorded output again? Judging by the lackluster crowd reaction to the announcement that he'd have a new album, Before I Self-Destruct, dropping this December, I'd say that maybe dude should look into developing a new flavor or two in his beverage line before anything else. [YouTube]
The E.U.: Hot on Fifty while cool on Kanye. Relatively indifferent to Chesney. Warming to German rappers and K.T. Tunstall. Tolerating Ben Harper. Still loves the shit out of some cheeseball Europop. [Billboard]
Over the weekend, some enterprising hackers weaseled their way into the e-mail system of MediaDefender, a Southern California-based company that works with major labels and movie studios to try and make stealing those companies' products a little bit harder. As Douglas Wolk described the company in Spin: "The bread and butter of MediaDefender's business is interfering with unauthorized file-sharing: disseminating fake files, clogging uploaders' queues, disrupting downloads. To advertise their services, they provide record labels and film and TV studios with information on exactly when and where releases have leaked." (And in their off-hours, they go and see Chris Kattan perform!)
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Latest by bedofnails: I find hilariousness in this email dated Sept. 4th:
"Keep in mind the attachment is from our legacy gnutella file distribution system (Ivan's original decoying system). The thing I find interesting is Kanye West's tracks were downloaded from us more more »
So as we noted yesterday, Kanye West's Graduation won the SoundScan battle this week, with 957,000 people across the U.S. so inspired to maybe have a hand in crushing the career of 50 Cent that they actually went out to their local music merchants and plunked down money for West's third album. The high numbers this week for the debuting Graduation, Curtis (691,000 copies sold), and Kenny Chesney's Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates (387,000) weren't, however, enough to rescue the week's overall sales tallies from the crapper; the 9.16 million albums sold last week is, in fact, down 9% year-to-year.
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Latest by Maura Johnston: @blobby: Well, they can't win every week. And All The Right Reasons actually took a small sales hit, while Linkin Park's sales saw an uptick.
And really it's the Fergie record's success that is most inexplicable. Ugh. Some of the songs more »
Hey everyone, do you finally want to know who won the year's biggest non-issue, the battle royale between two overgrown rapping children for the all-but-devalued Billboard No. 1 spot? A hint: even if you're a sourpussed crank who's been talking shit about this media-circus-cum-sales-"beef" from jump, you'll probably still be happy. Keep in mind, however, that these are strictly preliminary numbers until tomorrow:
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Latest by spinachdip: @Kurt's Krap: See, I'm not sure if this has basis in fact. While Chesney's a big draw and country fans do tend be loyal customers, he hasn't exactly shown himself to be Garth Brooks of the new millennium. He's already more »
So now that Kanye West's Graduation looks set to win the sales battle that began last week, 50 "Curtis" Cent is calling shenanigans, saying that the other division of Universal Music Group must have doctored the sales figures somehow and that the label "could have one scan and have it count four times. West's entire career hasn't sold half what I sold on my first album." While accusations like this one have been leveled at Def Jam before, it is kinda weird, though, that 50 is flinging these accusations at the division of Universal that's run by the guy who he just did a much-hyped remix with, no? I'm starting to think that 50 is really under the impression that all press—no matter how career-torpedoing it might seem—is good for him, or at least his "brand awareness."
Apparently it would not only be a nightmare to date 50 Cent because of the greasy, joyless missionary sexing, but also because he's one of those insufferable arguers who's incapable of admitting minor blame for just about anything, even stuff you catch him out on. After every publication in the known universe began carping yesterday that Kanye was set to stand astride the ruins of G-Unit come next week, 50 immediately A.) backpedaled on his wishful thinking "retirement" and B.) patiently explained to the folks at Hot 97 how his now almost universally expected runner-up status is everyone else's fault but his own:
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Latest by spinachdip:
@CaptainWrong: Just to be clear, I didn't come up with the 50-Bush comparison. Now that I think about/Google it, he came up with that himself.
But I think the analogy is perfect. They both dismiss intellectualism as an evil, not a more »
A Best Buy mole reports: "According to the numbers obtained by HHNLive.com, Kanye West has sold 42,438 copies of his Graduation album as of 4pm EST. 50 Cent's Curtis album has moved 32,640 copies as of 4pm EST. The numbers also show that due to its strong first day sales, there are over 10,000 copies of Graduation on order which is 2,000 more than are on order of 50's Curtis." [HHNLive]
In his most recent video blog, Jay Smooth argues that music is "stuck in a dead end relationship with a crackhead" (a.k.a. the music industry) that's so addicted to a sales high that it becomes more and more desperate to get as the high itself becomes harder to achieve, likening those getting sucke(re)d into propping up the Kanye/50 sales stunt to "being an enabler" of this affliction and suggesting that if "you love yourself, you will not buy any CDs this week," whether it's Kanye, 50 Cent, or whoever.
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After monthsandmonths of speculation, insult-hurling, and Hall & Oates album cover re-enactments, the sales showdown between different divisions of Universal Music Group Kanye West and 50 Cent (not to mention country star Kenny Chesney)—an event that may actually lure people into stores that sell albums for the purposes of buying music—is finally here. Aren't you excited, if only because you're getting ever closer to never having to read about this clash again?
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In an interview with Newsday, 50 Cent not only proclaims Eminem "the biggest rapper on the planet" (Curtis, of course, is No. 2), he professes ignorance about the otherthreat to his run on the top spot come Sept. 11:
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Last week 50 Cent was saying that MTV could "suck his dick," but apparently such concerns are pushed aside when the CEO-like rapper has an album to flog. Sort of. In this clip (since removed, but there's an excerpt on MTV.com), he sits down with MTV's Tim Kash and spends a good five or six minutes whining about his lower-than-No.-1 placement on the channel's "Hottest MCs In The Game" list, which was the original reason for his outburst, even though he's also claiming that he's "only in competition with 50 Cent." So confusing!
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Kenny Chesney's Just Who I Am: Poets And Pirates is yet another album coming out on Sept. 11, and he wants people to know that he might wind up sneaking in between 50 Cent and Kanye West and grabbing the top slot on that week's Billboard 200. So much so that he's willing to plead his case in an e-mail to Entertainment Weekly. Yes, really.
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Well, Kanye West has already backed out of the proposed/rumored "debate" with 50 Cent on 106 & Park, despite the high potential for hilarity among everyone involved. (C'mon, it's already given us one of Curtis' best braindead koans in ages: "I accept the challenge. Kanye, he's not going to want to show up. Just don't be asking me if I am a conscious rapper. I know exactly what I am saying—so I am conscious." That's almost as good as when Common was on the 106 & P countdown the other day talking about how hip-hop needed an infusion of originality and Rosci offered Yung Joc's "Coffee Shop" as an example of thinking outside the box. Because it's using coffee puns to mask references to selling crack. Get it?) Kanye explained his reasoning on MTV yesterday:
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Idolator
This morning while doing my YouTube rounds, I found a clip claiming to have as its audio bed a high-quality version of Kanye West's Tears For Fears homage "Coldest Winter," so I—hoping to hear the song without all that peaking and radio static that nearly ruined last week's leak somewhere around listen No. 10—clicked. But instead of "Coldest Winter, however, we're treated to a video that fuses together a photo of Steve Jobs holding a pitcher of Kool-Aid, paparazzo shots of The Game and Snoop Dogg, and gunshot sounds in a way that's seemingly inspired by both Paperrad and ransom notes.
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"While approving the final cut for the Love Lockdown vid, I marvel at the fact that it was written less than 3 weeks ago. I'm very excited about the everything... I guarantee this will be 50's favorite album of mine. This will be gangster's album of the year." Hee hee 
