Thursday, June 12, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
New York Times Reviews the Carter III (sort of)
Note: Now that I've been banned from I am no longer bloggging for HHNLive.com, I'd like to do an experiment and see how many people actually read this God awful, hardly updated blog. After reading the article below from the new Hip-Hop bible, the New York Times, I can't tell if I should buy the new Weezy album or not. Truth be told, I have never listened to a Weezy album, although I believe I bought a promo copy of The Block Is Hot from Downtown Records when it dropped and I have the Carter II and Dediction II on bootleg somewhere.
Nonetheless, Mr. F. Babyis the greatest rapper alive the greatest rapper alive from New Orleans with dreadlocks, and I feel compelled to add to his Soundscan totals, even though the mixtape DJs tell me not to. I just can't quite bring myself to do it. "Lolipop" is terrible (yet, somehow, I know every word to the remix - and I don't listen to urban radio anymore) and "A Milli" is arguably the worst song of all time that everyone loves. I think I might've made that beat and freestyled those lyrics when I was 7. I can't even bring myself to listen to the other songs making their rounds through the internet.
So I ask you, my 2 readers that don't post on this blog (and you guys too), should I buy the album? Please comment.
RAPPER'S ROAD TO POP
BY JOHN PARELES
SOURCE
“Mr. Carter,” a song on Lil Wayne’s long-awaited album “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal), brings together Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., and Jay-Z, born Shawn Carter. Since they share a last name — and no rapper would let the sonic coincidence go unexploited — some kind of identity-defining encounter was probably inevitable.
Jay-Z, 38, has been hip-hop’s top honcho and acclaimed virtuoso for a decade. Lil Wayne, 25, has been calling himself the “best rapper alive” for years. Now Jay-Z endorses and anoints him: “I share mike time with my heir,” he raps. “Young Carter go farther, go further, go harder. Is that not why we came? And if not, then why bother?”
“Tha Carter III” is Lil Wayne’s determined push into pop. Without a crossover, he has already gone as far as he can within hip-hop. He got a recording contract when he was 11, and he’s been making albums since he was a teenager, originally with the New Orleans hip-hop group the Hot Boys, which made gold records. He followed through with his own million-selling solo albums, including “Tha Block Is Hot” in 1999 and “Tha Carter II” in 2005. For hip-hop magazines (and, earlier this year, for Billboard), he’s already a cover story. Now he’s headed for radio.
Songs on “Tha Carter III” use lush, string-laden production by big names like Kanye West and Just Blaze, and they often revolve around full-fledged vocal choruses, sung by guests including T-Pain and Babyface. The album’s first single, “Lollipop,” reached No. 1 despite (or more likely because of) its single-entendre lyrics.
“Lollipop” is an insinuating electronic concoction, ticking and blipping, with Static Major (who died earlier this year) crooning the chorus and Lil Wayne’s brief bits of rapping turned into a melody by computer tuning. One of Lil Wayne’s least original efforts, “Lollipop” is just bait, inviting new listeners to notice one of hip-hop’s most free-form rhymers, with a career to match.
Successor or not, Lil Wayne just doesn’t do things Jay-Z’s way — anything but. Jay-Z presents himself as Mr. Organization, from his designer suits to his calm demeanor to the tracks themselves. His rhymes set a meter and stick with it; he chooses a refrain or a topic and works through its variations. He releases his albums methodically, with careful buildup and follow-through tours, and he doles out guest appearances as sparingly as papal audiences. He and his listeners never forget that he’s thinking strategically.
Not Lil Wayne, who treats hip-hop as equal parts career path and compulsion. Since “Tha Carter,” in 2004 — which was his fourth solo album — he has let loose his inner anarchist. “They don’t make ‘em like me no more/Matter of fact they never made it like me before,” he raps on a new song, “Phone Home.”
With the Hot Boys and on his first solo albums, Lil Wayne rattled off strict-meter, rapid-fire rhymes. But on the “Carter” series his phrasing has grown looser, trickier and funnier: “Wittier than comedy,” he raps in “La La.” “But I ain’t tellin’ jokes” — long pause — “apparently.” He drawls to land behind the beat, then casually tumbles through a rush of syllables to end up just where he planned to be. His voice rises and falls in a sly, scratchy singsong — no wonder he calls himself Weezy — that can sound like a cackly old man or a wisecracking kid. His voice holds unmistakable echoes of New Orleans R&B singing: weathered and frisky, jovial and wary.
“Tha Carter II,” released late in 2005, was largely complete before Hurricane Katrina. He raps about that tragedy in a brooding new song, “Tie My Hands”: “My whole city underwater, some people still floatin’/And they wonder why black people still votin’ .” He adds, “No governor, no help from the mayor/Just a steady-beatin’ heart and a wish and a prayer.”
Between albums Lil Wayne rapped an even more bitter reaction in a song called “Georgia ...Bush,” where he rhymed: “The white people smiling like everything cool/But I know people that died in that pool.” The song came out on “Dedication 2 — Gangsta Grillz,” one of the many albums in Lil Wayne’s shadow career as one of the most prolific and widely bootlegged rappers ever.
Major labels and their stars usually equate success with scarcity: completing no more than one album a year (if that), letting anticipation and hype build toward each rare release. But between the installments of “Tha Carter,” Lil Wayne has been ubiquitous, embracing saturation rather than scarcity.
He showed up as a guest on songs by Usher, Lloyd, Chris Brown and Fat Joe; he had his first collaboration with Jay-Z on “Hello Brooklyn 2.0.” He made an album, “Like Father, Like Son,” with his mentor, Birdman. He toured steadily, filling theaters. (He also racked up arrests on marijuana and gun possession charges, including one after his July 2007 show at the Beacon Theater in New York City. He often raps about smoking dope and swigging cough syrup.)
With and without Lil Wayne’s consent there has been a constant stream of mixtapes and studio outtakes, distributed so widely that fans would sing along with mixtape songs at concerts. (It has taken Neil Young up to four decades to release his archives; Lil Wayne won’t have that time lag.)
Many of the mixtape songs are raps over other people’s hit tracks: samples that would be expensive to use on official albums, where Lil Wayne prefers to use newly made tracks. The mixtapes are inconsistent, of course, and the songs fall back more often on the standard gangsta shtick that filled Lil Wayne’s older albums. But even when he’s just spinning his wheels, Lil Wayne has more good material than his albums will ever hold. A deluxe version of “Tha Carter III” comes with “The Leak,” five leaked songs that were officially released earlier this year as digital downloads.
In interviews, Lil Wayne describes himself as a perfectionist. “Dr. Carter,” a song on the new album, diagnoses problems with current hip-hop: “Lack of concepts, originality, his flow is weak and he’s got no style.” And while Lil Wayne is well aware that just about anything he says into a microphone will be online sooner or later, he has clearly worked to make “Tha Carter III” a statement of its own: one that moves beyond standard hip-hop boasting (though there’s plenty of that) to thoughts that can be introspective or gleefully unhinged.
As Lil Wayne’s reputation has grown between albums, he has upgraded his collaborators; “Tha Carter III” is filled with guests. Its production encompasses both the plush and the minimal. There’s suave R&B in “Comfortable,” which sounds like a love song but bluntly tells a woman not to get too comfortable since she can be replaced, and in “Mrs. Officer,” where he has a tryst with policewoman and asks her for her number and she tells him, “911.” There’s bare-bones hip-hop looping in “A Milli,” which is little more than beat, a bass line and a male voice saying “a milli” as Lil Wayne free-associates about being a millionaire, among many other things.
Kanye West gives him gospelly piano in “Let the Beat Build.” There’s rock in “Playin’ With Fire,” which remakes the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire” as a mixture of come-on and death wish, and in “Shoot Me Down,” where Lil Wayne is holding a gun and staring into a mirror. Nina Simone’s version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” accompanies “Don’tGetIt,” in which he raps, “Excuse my French emotion and my passion/But I wear my heart on my sleeve like it’s the new fashion.”
As he reaches for pop exposure, Lil Wayne is tempering braggadocio with a different kind of audacity: he’s showing himself as more vulnerable than ever.
Nonetheless, Mr. F. Baby
So I ask you, my 2 readers that don't post on this blog (and you guys too), should I buy the album? Please comment.
RAPPER'S ROAD TO POP
BY JOHN PARELES
SOURCE
“Mr. Carter,” a song on Lil Wayne’s long-awaited album “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal), brings together Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., and Jay-Z, born Shawn Carter. Since they share a last name — and no rapper would let the sonic coincidence go unexploited — some kind of identity-defining encounter was probably inevitable.
Jay-Z, 38, has been hip-hop’s top honcho and acclaimed virtuoso for a decade. Lil Wayne, 25, has been calling himself the “best rapper alive” for years. Now Jay-Z endorses and anoints him: “I share mike time with my heir,” he raps. “Young Carter go farther, go further, go harder. Is that not why we came? And if not, then why bother?”
“Tha Carter III” is Lil Wayne’s determined push into pop. Without a crossover, he has already gone as far as he can within hip-hop. He got a recording contract when he was 11, and he’s been making albums since he was a teenager, originally with the New Orleans hip-hop group the Hot Boys, which made gold records. He followed through with his own million-selling solo albums, including “Tha Block Is Hot” in 1999 and “Tha Carter II” in 2005. For hip-hop magazines (and, earlier this year, for Billboard), he’s already a cover story. Now he’s headed for radio.
Songs on “Tha Carter III” use lush, string-laden production by big names like Kanye West and Just Blaze, and they often revolve around full-fledged vocal choruses, sung by guests including T-Pain and Babyface. The album’s first single, “Lollipop,” reached No. 1 despite (or more likely because of) its single-entendre lyrics.
“Lollipop” is an insinuating electronic concoction, ticking and blipping, with Static Major (who died earlier this year) crooning the chorus and Lil Wayne’s brief bits of rapping turned into a melody by computer tuning. One of Lil Wayne’s least original efforts, “Lollipop” is just bait, inviting new listeners to notice one of hip-hop’s most free-form rhymers, with a career to match.
Successor or not, Lil Wayne just doesn’t do things Jay-Z’s way — anything but. Jay-Z presents himself as Mr. Organization, from his designer suits to his calm demeanor to the tracks themselves. His rhymes set a meter and stick with it; he chooses a refrain or a topic and works through its variations. He releases his albums methodically, with careful buildup and follow-through tours, and he doles out guest appearances as sparingly as papal audiences. He and his listeners never forget that he’s thinking strategically.
Not Lil Wayne, who treats hip-hop as equal parts career path and compulsion. Since “Tha Carter,” in 2004 — which was his fourth solo album — he has let loose his inner anarchist. “They don’t make ‘em like me no more/Matter of fact they never made it like me before,” he raps on a new song, “Phone Home.”
With the Hot Boys and on his first solo albums, Lil Wayne rattled off strict-meter, rapid-fire rhymes. But on the “Carter” series his phrasing has grown looser, trickier and funnier: “Wittier than comedy,” he raps in “La La.” “But I ain’t tellin’ jokes” — long pause — “apparently.” He drawls to land behind the beat, then casually tumbles through a rush of syllables to end up just where he planned to be. His voice rises and falls in a sly, scratchy singsong — no wonder he calls himself Weezy — that can sound like a cackly old man or a wisecracking kid. His voice holds unmistakable echoes of New Orleans R&B singing: weathered and frisky, jovial and wary.
“Tha Carter II,” released late in 2005, was largely complete before Hurricane Katrina. He raps about that tragedy in a brooding new song, “Tie My Hands”: “My whole city underwater, some people still floatin’/And they wonder why black people still votin’ .” He adds, “No governor, no help from the mayor/Just a steady-beatin’ heart and a wish and a prayer.”
Between albums Lil Wayne rapped an even more bitter reaction in a song called “Georgia ...Bush,” where he rhymed: “The white people smiling like everything cool/But I know people that died in that pool.” The song came out on “Dedication 2 — Gangsta Grillz,” one of the many albums in Lil Wayne’s shadow career as one of the most prolific and widely bootlegged rappers ever.
Major labels and their stars usually equate success with scarcity: completing no more than one album a year (if that), letting anticipation and hype build toward each rare release. But between the installments of “Tha Carter,” Lil Wayne has been ubiquitous, embracing saturation rather than scarcity.
He showed up as a guest on songs by Usher, Lloyd, Chris Brown and Fat Joe; he had his first collaboration with Jay-Z on “Hello Brooklyn 2.0.” He made an album, “Like Father, Like Son,” with his mentor, Birdman. He toured steadily, filling theaters. (He also racked up arrests on marijuana and gun possession charges, including one after his July 2007 show at the Beacon Theater in New York City. He often raps about smoking dope and swigging cough syrup.)
With and without Lil Wayne’s consent there has been a constant stream of mixtapes and studio outtakes, distributed so widely that fans would sing along with mixtape songs at concerts. (It has taken Neil Young up to four decades to release his archives; Lil Wayne won’t have that time lag.)
Many of the mixtape songs are raps over other people’s hit tracks: samples that would be expensive to use on official albums, where Lil Wayne prefers to use newly made tracks. The mixtapes are inconsistent, of course, and the songs fall back more often on the standard gangsta shtick that filled Lil Wayne’s older albums. But even when he’s just spinning his wheels, Lil Wayne has more good material than his albums will ever hold. A deluxe version of “Tha Carter III” comes with “The Leak,” five leaked songs that were officially released earlier this year as digital downloads.
In interviews, Lil Wayne describes himself as a perfectionist. “Dr. Carter,” a song on the new album, diagnoses problems with current hip-hop: “Lack of concepts, originality, his flow is weak and he’s got no style.” And while Lil Wayne is well aware that just about anything he says into a microphone will be online sooner or later, he has clearly worked to make “Tha Carter III” a statement of its own: one that moves beyond standard hip-hop boasting (though there’s plenty of that) to thoughts that can be introspective or gleefully unhinged.
As Lil Wayne’s reputation has grown between albums, he has upgraded his collaborators; “Tha Carter III” is filled with guests. Its production encompasses both the plush and the minimal. There’s suave R&B in “Comfortable,” which sounds like a love song but bluntly tells a woman not to get too comfortable since she can be replaced, and in “Mrs. Officer,” where he has a tryst with policewoman and asks her for her number and she tells him, “911.” There’s bare-bones hip-hop looping in “A Milli,” which is little more than beat, a bass line and a male voice saying “a milli” as Lil Wayne free-associates about being a millionaire, among many other things.
Kanye West gives him gospelly piano in “Let the Beat Build.” There’s rock in “Playin’ With Fire,” which remakes the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire” as a mixture of come-on and death wish, and in “Shoot Me Down,” where Lil Wayne is holding a gun and staring into a mirror. Nina Simone’s version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” accompanies “Don’tGetIt,” in which he raps, “Excuse my French emotion and my passion/But I wear my heart on my sleeve like it’s the new fashion.”
As he reaches for pop exposure, Lil Wayne is tempering braggadocio with a different kind of audacity: he’s showing himself as more vulnerable than ever.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
In the words of the great Paul Mooney....
Fuck Hillary Clinton.
We Win
All I'm saying is that she better not be Veep. Rumors going around that Hillary was quoted as saying, "I'd love to be VP. Remember what happened to Lyndon Johnson?"
We Win
All I'm saying is that she better not be Veep. Rumors going around that Hillary was quoted as saying, "I'd love to be VP. Remember what happened to Lyndon Johnson?"
Friday, May 16, 2008
The New York Times reviews the Kanye Tour
Frequency, you were there. Do you agree?
Ego-Fueled Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey
By JON PARELES
Source
There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.
That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.
Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.
The spectacle is framed as a sci-fi space odyssey, with Mr. West as a lone explorer whose starship crashes on an unknown planet. He’s stranded in a landscape of colored lights, billowing smoke — probably enough dry ice to cool Death Valley — and gorgeous, panoramic video images of clouds, galaxies, fireworks and cosmic eruptions. He converses with his computerized ship, named Jane, and with shooting stars. He raps with barely a respite, and bounds around the stage: striding, hunching, pumping his fist, falling to his knees, grinding against the stage, flailing, shouting his rhymes. It is a show of stamina and lonely self-determination that takes on its own obsessive momentum, like a Samuel Beckett scene staged by Robert Wilson and George Lucas.
Mr. West’s songs — chronicles of his striving, success, fashion sense and media missteps — don’t have much to do with a planet devoid of paparazzi or designer labels. At Tuesday’s show, praying to get back home, he promised God that if he made it, he’d “stop spazzing out at awards shows.” But he wrenched the songs into the concept, turning “Gold Digger,” for instance, into a tryst with a hologram generated by his spaceship.
The music was rearranged (for a band sequestered in an orchestra pit) to sound less triumphal and more melancholy. Mr. West reaches pop audiences with pop hooks, but the concert often held them back, starting instead with drumbeats and reverberating minor chords before allowing sweetness in. The audience joined him every chance it got, and he did eventually get back home, to share an encore with Lupe Fiasco. But in Mr. West’s tour de force, it was lonely at the top. Cosmically lonely.
The other acts were also pushing genre boundaries. N.E.R.D. is led by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who as producers are a hip-hop hit factory called the Neptunes. N.E.R.D., however, is a rock band that ricochets among rap-rock, sardonic new wave and glimpses of Beatles chords. Mr. Williams, who does most of the singing and rapping, plays the perpetual Lothario in songs that dip into wordplay — like the group’s new “Everybody Nose,” about clubbing and cocaine — and make come-ons like, “I just love your brain.”
Rihanna, whose career arrived with dance tunes, keeps broadening her perspective. Her video-ready set flaunted three costumes and revealed her as a full-fledged singer, with a voice biting enough to leap out of speakers but also supple enough to be inviting. Amid Caribbean-tinged dance grooves and ballads, she sang about flirtation and self-assertion, and also tossed in part of M.I.A.’s gun-toting “Paper Planes.” For her biggest hit, the R&B loyalty hymn “Umbrella,” the singer Chris Brown joined her in an unannounced duet.
In the opening set the rapper Lupe Fiasco showed his own ambitions, verbal and musical. He rapped not only about stardom but also about skateboarding, child soldiers and a worldwide plague. And the music in his short set, using three backup singers, encompassed chattering electronic beats, smooth R&B and mournful rock. It was a good start for a concert that insisted hip-hop hasn’t run out of possibilities, even on this planet.
Ego-Fueled Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey
By JON PARELES
Source
There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.
That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.
Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.
The spectacle is framed as a sci-fi space odyssey, with Mr. West as a lone explorer whose starship crashes on an unknown planet. He’s stranded in a landscape of colored lights, billowing smoke — probably enough dry ice to cool Death Valley — and gorgeous, panoramic video images of clouds, galaxies, fireworks and cosmic eruptions. He converses with his computerized ship, named Jane, and with shooting stars. He raps with barely a respite, and bounds around the stage: striding, hunching, pumping his fist, falling to his knees, grinding against the stage, flailing, shouting his rhymes. It is a show of stamina and lonely self-determination that takes on its own obsessive momentum, like a Samuel Beckett scene staged by Robert Wilson and George Lucas.
Mr. West’s songs — chronicles of his striving, success, fashion sense and media missteps — don’t have much to do with a planet devoid of paparazzi or designer labels. At Tuesday’s show, praying to get back home, he promised God that if he made it, he’d “stop spazzing out at awards shows.” But he wrenched the songs into the concept, turning “Gold Digger,” for instance, into a tryst with a hologram generated by his spaceship.
The music was rearranged (for a band sequestered in an orchestra pit) to sound less triumphal and more melancholy. Mr. West reaches pop audiences with pop hooks, but the concert often held them back, starting instead with drumbeats and reverberating minor chords before allowing sweetness in. The audience joined him every chance it got, and he did eventually get back home, to share an encore with Lupe Fiasco. But in Mr. West’s tour de force, it was lonely at the top. Cosmically lonely.
The other acts were also pushing genre boundaries. N.E.R.D. is led by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who as producers are a hip-hop hit factory called the Neptunes. N.E.R.D., however, is a rock band that ricochets among rap-rock, sardonic new wave and glimpses of Beatles chords. Mr. Williams, who does most of the singing and rapping, plays the perpetual Lothario in songs that dip into wordplay — like the group’s new “Everybody Nose,” about clubbing and cocaine — and make come-ons like, “I just love your brain.”
Rihanna, whose career arrived with dance tunes, keeps broadening her perspective. Her video-ready set flaunted three costumes and revealed her as a full-fledged singer, with a voice biting enough to leap out of speakers but also supple enough to be inviting. Amid Caribbean-tinged dance grooves and ballads, she sang about flirtation and self-assertion, and also tossed in part of M.I.A.’s gun-toting “Paper Planes.” For her biggest hit, the R&B loyalty hymn “Umbrella,” the singer Chris Brown joined her in an unannounced duet.
In the opening set the rapper Lupe Fiasco showed his own ambitions, verbal and musical. He rapped not only about stardom but also about skateboarding, child soldiers and a worldwide plague. And the music in his short set, using three backup singers, encompassed chattering electronic beats, smooth R&B and mournful rock. It was a good start for a concert that insisted hip-hop hasn’t run out of possibilities, even on this planet.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Bringing the NY Times to the Hip Hop Community
Just being lazy. However, I'm truly amazed about how often the New York Times runs Hip Hop stories...I'ma see how long I can keep this up.
Source
CHAOS IN COURT HALLWAY AFTER REMY MA SENTENCE
By Alan Feuer
Remy Smith, the hip-hop artist convicted in March of shooting a friend in an angry tug of war over a purse, was sentenced on Tuesday to eight years in prison at an emotional court hearing that touched off violence moments later outside the court.
Minutes after the sentence was imposed, in a hallway outside the courtroom doors, Ms. Smith’s fiancé, Shamele Mackie, flew into a rage, lunging and cursing at court officers, then overturning a garbage can near the elevator banks. Mr. Mackie shouted at the guards, “Go ahead, lock me up!” as a group of his friends surrounded him and forced him, flailing and howling, from the courthouse.
Tension had been building in Room 1123 of Supreme Court in Manhattan from the moment Justice Rena K. Uviller imposed the sentence and delivered a withering appraisal of Ms. Smith, calling her “an extremely angry young woman” who assumed herself to be beyond the rules of civil society.
Ms. Smith’s friends and family seemed aghast at that and began to weep and mutter as a large contingent of officers in the room stiffened visibly at their posts.
An angry crowd soon formed in the hallway around Mr. Mackie, a fellow rapper who was to have wed Ms. Smith on Monday at Rikers Island. The wedding was canceled when jail officials found a key on Mr. Mackie’s key chain that could be used to open handcuffs.
The officers tried to disperse the crowd, when Mr. Mackie, the rapper known as Papoose, tossed his baseball cap to a friend and lunged forward, reaching for the officers and shouting insults.
A court officer, who declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak about security matters, said later that the detail had been ordered to proceed with caution because of Ms. Smith’s fame and her volatility.
Ms. Smith, who performs under the name Remy Ma, is known for her eye-catching outfits — on the day she was convicted she was wearing a version of a Little Miss Muffet outfit, gray bloomers and vest — but also for her easily available emotions, evidenced on Tuesday by the tearful statement she read to Justice Uviller.
In it, she excoriated some of the reporters who covered her trial for calling her a “hip-hop hellion,” saying her aggressive stage persona was precisely that: a “music industry creation” and “a facade.”
“Remy Ma is not even close to who I am,” she said through tears. “I’m not a thug. I’m not a hardcore anything. I have feelings and emotions, and I’m a human being like anybody else. I’m Remy Smith.”
Ms. Smith, 26, was found guilty on March 27 of first-degree assault for shooting Makeda Barnes Joseph, a member of her entourage, after a celebration of Ms. Smith’s birthday at a nightclub in the meatpacking district last July 14. At the party, Ms. Smith asked Ms. Joseph to hold her purse and said that when she got it back, $3,000 in cash was missing.
As they left the club, Ms. Smith pulled her Cadillac Escalade up to Ms. Joseph’s Nissan Maxima, then climbed into the Maxima with a cocked gun and tried to search Ms. Joseph’s purse for the money. During the struggle, Ms. Joseph was shot in the belly, and Ms. Smith fled in a taxi, abandoning her $69,000 Cadillac on the street and her victim in pool of blood.
In her own statement, read to the judge by Michael McIntosh, a prosecutor, Ms. Joseph, who was in the courtroom, said she was baffled how a night “so fun and enjoyable” could suddenly turn so violent. One minute she was hugging Ms. Smith, she said in her statement, and the next she was bleeding in a car.
“After July 14, I stopped existing as a person,” Ms. Joseph wrote. “I am now known as a victim, a gold-digger, a groupie, a liar and thief.” Her statement continued: “I will always be the girl they will whisper about. I will always be the girl who was shot by Remy.”
Before Ms. Smith sat down, she addressed herself to Ms. Joseph and spoke in her direction but did not look at her directly.
“I apologize,” she said, “and I’m sorry for not saving you. I feel so bad for all the physical and mental pain you went through, and go through. Myself, I have a lifetime scar on my face. So I know the pain you feel when I look in the mirror.”
Source
CHAOS IN COURT HALLWAY AFTER REMY MA SENTENCE
By Alan Feuer
Remy Smith, the hip-hop artist convicted in March of shooting a friend in an angry tug of war over a purse, was sentenced on Tuesday to eight years in prison at an emotional court hearing that touched off violence moments later outside the court.
Minutes after the sentence was imposed, in a hallway outside the courtroom doors, Ms. Smith’s fiancé, Shamele Mackie, flew into a rage, lunging and cursing at court officers, then overturning a garbage can near the elevator banks. Mr. Mackie shouted at the guards, “Go ahead, lock me up!” as a group of his friends surrounded him and forced him, flailing and howling, from the courthouse.
Tension had been building in Room 1123 of Supreme Court in Manhattan from the moment Justice Rena K. Uviller imposed the sentence and delivered a withering appraisal of Ms. Smith, calling her “an extremely angry young woman” who assumed herself to be beyond the rules of civil society.
Ms. Smith’s friends and family seemed aghast at that and began to weep and mutter as a large contingent of officers in the room stiffened visibly at their posts.
An angry crowd soon formed in the hallway around Mr. Mackie, a fellow rapper who was to have wed Ms. Smith on Monday at Rikers Island. The wedding was canceled when jail officials found a key on Mr. Mackie’s key chain that could be used to open handcuffs.
The officers tried to disperse the crowd, when Mr. Mackie, the rapper known as Papoose, tossed his baseball cap to a friend and lunged forward, reaching for the officers and shouting insults.
A court officer, who declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak about security matters, said later that the detail had been ordered to proceed with caution because of Ms. Smith’s fame and her volatility.
Ms. Smith, who performs under the name Remy Ma, is known for her eye-catching outfits — on the day she was convicted she was wearing a version of a Little Miss Muffet outfit, gray bloomers and vest — but also for her easily available emotions, evidenced on Tuesday by the tearful statement she read to Justice Uviller.
In it, she excoriated some of the reporters who covered her trial for calling her a “hip-hop hellion,” saying her aggressive stage persona was precisely that: a “music industry creation” and “a facade.”
“Remy Ma is not even close to who I am,” she said through tears. “I’m not a thug. I’m not a hardcore anything. I have feelings and emotions, and I’m a human being like anybody else. I’m Remy Smith.”
Ms. Smith, 26, was found guilty on March 27 of first-degree assault for shooting Makeda Barnes Joseph, a member of her entourage, after a celebration of Ms. Smith’s birthday at a nightclub in the meatpacking district last July 14. At the party, Ms. Smith asked Ms. Joseph to hold her purse and said that when she got it back, $3,000 in cash was missing.
As they left the club, Ms. Smith pulled her Cadillac Escalade up to Ms. Joseph’s Nissan Maxima, then climbed into the Maxima with a cocked gun and tried to search Ms. Joseph’s purse for the money. During the struggle, Ms. Joseph was shot in the belly, and Ms. Smith fled in a taxi, abandoning her $69,000 Cadillac on the street and her victim in pool of blood.
In her own statement, read to the judge by Michael McIntosh, a prosecutor, Ms. Joseph, who was in the courtroom, said she was baffled how a night “so fun and enjoyable” could suddenly turn so violent. One minute she was hugging Ms. Smith, she said in her statement, and the next she was bleeding in a car.
“After July 14, I stopped existing as a person,” Ms. Joseph wrote. “I am now known as a victim, a gold-digger, a groupie, a liar and thief.” Her statement continued: “I will always be the girl they will whisper about. I will always be the girl who was shot by Remy.”
Before Ms. Smith sat down, she addressed herself to Ms. Joseph and spoke in her direction but did not look at her directly.
“I apologize,” she said, “and I’m sorry for not saving you. I feel so bad for all the physical and mental pain you went through, and go through. Myself, I have a lifetime scar on my face. So I know the pain you feel when I look in the mirror.”
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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