A lot has happened in the last twelve months in the urban industry. Pharrell beefed up his Ice Cream line. Kanye was seen rocking the LRG Dead Serious skeleton hoody. Jay-Z sold Rocawear for $300 million dollars. But what about the year for hip-hop? Was Nas right? Did hip-hop really, really die?
Hip-hop took a lot of hits this year, for sure; with things like the white rapper show on TV, it’s no wonder. None of those guys could spit. None of them. And hell, one of them claimed to be vanilla ice’s biggest fan. Not a good look, guys. Speaking of bad looks, Britney returned with a single produced by Timberlands apprentice dude who I can never remember the name of. Timbo should have said no. Throughout 2007 the bad look continued with Akon throwing a friggin’ kid off his stage as well as performing a sexual kind of dance with a 14 year old girl. Damn. Things didn’t even stop there. An NBA coach was fired for yelling “nappy headed hoes” at a bunh of cheerleaders and then blamed it on hip-hop… After that as you can imagine, the press went crazy and fired at rap from all directions. Did things stop there? Certainly not. Tony Yayo was accused of slapping a 14-year-old boy ’cause he was the son of Jimmy Henchman (head of cezar entertainment). Sigh. I hope these things go away in ‘08.
Let’s move on. Mid ‘07 things started to get hot between Cam’ron and Fiddy. It started with a phone call to a popular radio station and it ended with 50 making several videos dissing him back. Nothing major really happened other than Cam’rom making stupid videos pretending to be fifty on YouTube.
Towards the end of the year we had some pretty big album drops. We had Curtis, and Graduation which both sold quite well but not as well as usual for 50 cent. He stated if Kanye sold more than him, he would retire. He did not retire, surprisingly. We all saw that coming. Anyway, the media blew the whole thing up by creating a false beef between Kanye and Fiddy, when there clearly wasn’t any.
My favorite album this year was probably Jay-Z’s American Gangster
And to end the year of course… We had the hip-hop steroids scandal in which Dr. Dre, Timbaland and 50 (who would’ve guessed …) were all named as people who had purchased steriods. What a nice way to end the year, even though it was totally obvious with Dre becoming super muscle man in just 6 months.
It wasn’t a terrible year (despite souljah boy) but it wasn’t great either. I hope ‘08 will be a lot better. Roll on King Mather’s and Detox.
