Drake drops a new project titled 'Scary Hours 2'. This project features 3 new tracks featuring Lil Baby & Rick Ross. Stream Drake Scary Hours 2 Below...

Although he's played a role in the careers of many of today's icons, we take a look at the varied fortunes of those who've actually signed to Gucci Mane's 1017 label, and why it might all be about to change. Whether he’s adding new additions to his own expansive catalogue or keeping up with new waves of hip-hop as they happen, Gucci Mane is never one to stay stationary. Instead, the man that’s often cited as a pioneer of trap music is always trying to push himself forward and bring an entourage of budding talent along with him. Built from the ashes of the original, Mizay Entertainment-backed So Icey Ent, Gucci’s 1017 Records is now a well-established brand name and has an illustrious distributor in Atlantic. As Gucci told XXL in July 2020, his primary goal with the label is to equip new rappers with everything they require to escape adversity and succeed. "I wanna share [with new artists]. I feel like I got a lot of knowledge," he revealed. "That what you can be charitable with.... I always embraced the hardcore rapper that don't nobody want to fuck with, that everyone blackballed or whatever. Those be the people I open my doors to." Full article at HotNewHipHop.Com

By: HotNewHipHop Bobby Shmurda is already plotting his comeback, heading South to cook up some new music with Zaytoven and Mike WiLL Made-It. Following Bobby Shmurda's release from prison after a six-year bid, many of his loyal fans were simply excited to see him happy and healthy upon touching down. And while he certainly wasted little time in connecting with friends and family, not to mention taking a slight detour to the club, Bobby Shmurda has made it clear that bouncing back with some new music is the priority. As it happens, Shmurda has already moved to get the ball rolling, heading down to Atlanta to connect with two of the South's most prominent producers. Yesterday, Zaytoven revealed that he was locked in the studio with Bobby Shmurda and Mike WiLL Made-It, sharing a glimpse at what the trio cooked up. Though it's not exactly the clearest snippet in the world, the track itself appears to be bass-fueled and relatively minimalist, which should go a long way in placing emphasis on Shmurda's presence and charisma. The new track isn't the first time Shmurda and Zay connected on wax, having previously linked on the Rich The Kid and Rowdy Rebel-assisted "On My Way," as well as the Migos collaboration "Shmoney Never Stop." Consider this a promising sign that Shmurda is picking up where he left off, and it should certainly be interesting to hear his first big single since touching down as a free man. Check out the snippet below, as well as an IG picture from the studio session. Are you excited for Shmurda's musical return? Full article at HotNewHipHop.Com

By: Mark Mulligan of MIDiA and the Music Industry blog The analysts at MIDiA have identified and tracked three disruptive trends shaping the music and entertainment industries in 2021 and beyond. Late last year, MIDiA published its latest predictions report (clients can read the entire report here). The central theme was the Immersive Web, which we summarised as follows: “The immersive web is characterized by environments in which we do not simply conduct extensions of in-real-life activity (e-commerce, video calls) but ones that create behaviors and relationships that only, and can only, exist within these environments. Apps and platforms like Roblox, TikTok and Discord are early iterations of the immersive web, but merely hint at what will come.” Our analyst team has been developing this theme and thinking about how its impact will shape digital entertainment in 2021 and beyond. These are our three identified disruptive themes that will flow from the Immersive Web: 1. Lean in: One of the dominant discussions concerning on-demand entertainment is the balance between lean forward and lean back experiences, i.e. the degree to which audiences actively choose what they are engaging with versus what they sit back and consume. But that framework does not capture the emerging shift towards audience participation, of consumers actively engaging with and modifying the content. We term this behavioural paradigm as lean in. Whether that be a teen creating a TikTok video, a consumer creating a meme or a gamer making music on Splash in Roblox, digital audiences increasingly expect to be a part of the content itself. We think audio will be the next frontier for lean in. MIDiA’s Cultural Insights analyst Hanna Kahlert will be developing this theme. 2. The insurgent opportunity: The competitive marketplace of digital entertainment companies is becoming static. Though there is still lots of growth and in many cases – e.g. podcasts, video – accelerating investment, innovations in user experience have slowed. The likes of Apple, Warner Media and ViacomCBS are shaking up the video subscriptions marketplace, yet they are differentiating around content, not features. Incumbent Netflix has done relatively little to innovate its user experience. The same story plays out in music (with the exception of layering podcasts into the mix, which is of course not innovating the music experience but instead the wider audio experience). Across all of digital entertainment, big incumbent players (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify etc.) are becoming so mainstream they are having to slow their innovation so as not to alienate their newer, mainstream audiences. This is exactly what happened to Apple once the iPod and iPhone thrust it into the mainstream. This creates a huge opportunity for disruptive insurgents who do not have to cater for older, mainstream audiences and can focus on disruptive innovation rather than sustaining innovation. Asian-origin apps like TikTok and Weverse are beginning to chip away at incumbent stasis. This trend will aggressively accelerate, driving the next major chapter in digital entertainment. 3. Entertainment internets: A number of the biggest platforms on the planet have become so dominant and so exhaustive that they are effectively creating mini-internets. YouTube is the internet of video, Amazon the internet of commerce, Facebook the internet of social. Each has succeeded in this all-encompassing impact by delivering so much to diverse audience segments and use cases. They have then used this audience to pull the majority of the partner and creator value chain into their orbit because those parties simply cannot afford not to be there. The internet itself has continued to prove largely immune from wholesale regulation, but these entertainment internets may prove easier targets for regulators as they are owned by single corporate parents and thus risk falling foul of anti-competitive behaviour oversight. Other than regulation, in the near to mid-term, these entertainment internets will face relatively little disruptive threat other than their own hubris. The rise of insurgents will hit the incumbent pure plays harder and first, though over time even the entertainment internets will also find themselves under fire. Full article at Hypebot.com

By: Madrid About ten years after its inception around 1970, graffiti culture started to be linked with hip-hop, a concept coined by the media to facilitate the commercialisation of graffiti and other contemporary cultures. This artificial link is still seen in the media, and therefore also in the mainstream view of graffiti. In 1980, media began to link graffiti with other emerging urban cultures – those of breakdance and rap music – also produced by youths from the most neglected areas of New York, creating a concept called hip hop. The new cultural object took form in press articles, performance shows and, in particular, in movies, some of which had wide international distribution. Because of this, the public began to believe, as it still does so today, that graffiti in the New York tradition is, from its very inception and by its own nature, a part of hip hop. This conception is so widespread that the term “hip-hop graffiti” is often used to differentiate this type of graffiti from others. However, this link is in fact a myth. As we have already studied here, the phenomenon of New York graffiti appeared in 1968 and was mature by 1973, years before Richard Goldstein would link it with rap for the first time in a 1980 article in the Village Voice.1 An influential journalist and cultural critic, Goldstein had published, seven years earlier, the first mainstream article to speak favourably of graffiti. The cultural and musical backgrounds of the graffiti writers of the seventies were as diverse as those of the local youths and spanned from psychedelic rock to music with ethnic roots. In the words of Coco144, one of the first writers: “I was listening to jazz, Latin jazz, and rock. This was before hip-hop was created. Anybody that does their homework would know graffiti came first.”3 The movies «Wild style» and «Beat street» were the main factors responsible for the conception of hip hop. The culture of rap and the DJ, which would eventually become the musical component of hip-hop, had also existed as an independent phenomenon – a party scene – for some years before the link was created. Phase II, the most influential pioneer of graffiti, observes: “Just like aerosol culture was there before anyone even concieved of a thing called hip-hop, the party scene that existed before hip-hop basically got flipped into hip-hop.”4 Hip-hop pioneer Fred Brathwaite, known as Fab 5 Freddy, corroborates: “no one really called it hip-hop either. It was just a party, or a jam.”5 Aside from Goldstein’s article, shows of diverse types also contributed to the creation of the link. In 1981, Henry Chalfant, who had been photographing the graffiti on the subway cars for some years already – images he would publish shortly afterwards in Subway Art, the bible of the culture – organized a performance that showcased graffiti, rap and breakdance, the last one something new for him. The piece was called Graffiti Rock in which I brought together graffiti slides; breakdancers in the form of Rock Steady Crew and Fab Five Freddy and Rammellzee as the rappers. […] So, I’d heard about it because Marty [Martha Cooper] had stumbled upon breaking in her search for interesting stories. […] So, I asked one of the writers I knew, Take 1, and he said ‘oh yeah’ he knew the best crew in the city. Another important event was the New York City rap tour, which in 1982, brought to London and Paris some of the most prominent rap musicians, breakdancers and graffiti writers together in a show that was for many Europeans the first contact with these cultures. According to Phase II, one of the participants: “We went to France and London. That influenced people in a major way, because it was the first time that all the so-called elements of hip hop were seen under one umbrella.”7 Additionally, many of the music videos that exported rap music included scenes of graffiti. The most significant of these was Buffalo Gals, produced by Malcolm McLaren in 1983, which gave the world the chance to see for the first time the live creation of a graffiti piece, by legendary writer Dondi. Fab 5 Freddy was a main instigator of the media-based link between the so-called “elements of hip hop.” Raised in Brooklyn by culturally aware black parents, Freddy was both a participant in the subcultures and fluent in the codes and contexts of the dominant culture. This enabled him to act as a bridge between the ghetto and the media that was creating the link. Fab 5 Freddy has referred to the bringing together of the different cultures into the single concept of hip hop as a personal vision: “I developed these theories that all these elements of our urban culture were beginning to seem like one big thing. This is in 1978.”8 In a different interview, he says: “I helped explain to people that graffiti was part of hip hop. It was always something I saw as one cultural movement.” Fab 5 Freddy: «Nobody then was seeing it as all being connected. I thought if this was all put in a movie, we can connect it all together.» He was, not coincidentally, among the creators of the independent movie Wild Style, directed by East Village filmmaker Charlie Ahearn in 1983. The film starred some of the most important artists of each of the three cultures in an awkward drama about cultural life in the ghetto. Fab 5 Freddy recollects how he explained the idea of the movie to Ahearn. Basically I was telling him about rap music, DJs, graffiti, and break dancing. That they were like all one thing in a way coming from the same place, the same vibe but nobody then was seeing it as all being connected. […] I thought if this was all put in a movie, we can connect it all together with a story to basically show people that it is one thing. Less credible but much more widely distributed, Beat Street (1984) was a cheap Hollywood product designed to exploit the commercial appeal of the new phenomena. Wild Style and Beat Street were, on the one hand, the main factors responsible for the conception of hip hop, and, on the other, the primary vehicles for hip hop’s international dissemination. Additionally, Chalfant’s 1983 documentary Style Wars, which was focused on graffiti and served as graffiti’s main exporting channel, included several minutes of breakdance and a score featuring several rap tracks. Notwithstanding this and in spite of the artificiality of a link that was driven by money and unrelated to the participant cultures, graffiti and the other components of hip-hop were close in space and time, were products of the same cultural context, and shared some important concepts. In his 1980 article that first linked graffiti and rap, Richard Goldstein supported this idea holding that both phenomena had originated in the same cultural conditions.11 Graffiti, rap and breakdance were indeed products of the same reality: that of the pre-teens, teenagers, and young people of the deprived areas of New York, a city undergoing the most difficult years of its recent history. Critic Glenn O’Brien puts it this way: “It’s like, what’s the connection between jazz and Abstract Expressionism? They weren’t the same people doing hip hop and graffiti, but there was a cultural, mental, and spiritual connection.”12 It’s not true, however, that no one participated in more than one of the cultures: even influential writers such as Phase II or Futura 2000 recorded rap albums, and played a role in the evolution of that music genre.13 But there were more significant aspects shared by the three cultures. The most prominent of them would beyond question be internal competition – the core mechanism and engine of all of them. This competition through artistic skills, athletic feats, and displays of tenacity functioned as a symbolic confrontation that sublimated the real violence of street gangs, pervasive in the city up to the mid-seventies. Through this process of sublimation, the emergence of the cultures that would be grouped under the hip hop label was one of the main factors in the decline of street gangs. The tendency to self-glorify and to assume fantastic identities by adopting spectacular aliases is common to them all as well. Fab 5 Freddy offers the following description of this idea: “Like ‘let’s reinvent our selves in these fantasie’s super hero pop culture images. Let’s make our selves these characters we dream about.’ Like ‘hey I’m Flash, I’m the fastest’ you know? ‘I’m Super so and so, I’m cool this; I’m hot that.’”14 Moreover, the three cultures appropriated public space for artistic expression: breakdance originated in the streets and parks, the same setting in which the block parties took place, parties that would eventually give way to DJ and rap culture. Finally, it must be noted that the international circulation of the aforementioned media products firmly established the link between graffiti and hip hop in the consciousness of teenagers worldwide. Many of the first generation writers of Europe, Australia or the United States consider this link to be a pivotal element in their experience of graffiti. This is because it was through said products that these writers had their initial contact with graffiti, therefore they conceived it from the start as an inextricable part of hip hop. Furthermore, the link has been persistently repeated by the media for almost 30 years and as such, has deeply permeated the image that society has of graffiti. In spite of the historical truth and despite that a significantly substantial number of the practitioners of graffiti in the New York tradition, both in New York and beyond, have never identified with hip hop, the perceived link persists. Full article at Urbanario.com

Stream Pop Smoke AP (Music From The Film Boogie)

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Duke Duece drops a new project titled 'Duke Nukem' consisting of 14 tracks featuring A$AP Ferg, Offset, Young Dolph, Foogiano, Lil Keed & Mulatto. Stream The Project Duke Duece Duke Nukem Below...

Watch the official music video of "Glock In My Lap" by 21 Savage & Metro Boomin.

By: KultureHub Hip-hop and rap artists defend their honors like warriors, but sometimes it just gets a bit catty. These creatives build their reputations off of the control and power they have over their image, making their harsh hip-hop beef warranted and particularly volatile. Nowadays, it’s hard to separate which music disses are solely orchestrated as publicity stunts and which are not. Regardless of the intentions, disses have been keeping the rap & hip hop scene exciting and engaging since the medium’s start. Here are some of our favorite moments of hip hop beef of all time: 1. Control — Big Sean ft. Kendrick Lamar & Jay Electronica Big Sean starts out claiming he doesn’t need to call out other rappers and Kendrick later follows by explicitly listing out the artists he hopes to destroy, including none other than Big Sean. To be featured on a track and diss the artist featuring you is exactly the type of raw authenticity that makes Kendrick a living legend. Nowadays, rappers use diss tracks to get attention and streams for themselves and the other artist. I’m not judging that as much as I’m just pointing out facts. Kendrick dissing artists on another rapper’s song ends the back and forth as it starts it. This hip-hop beef if surely one for the books. 2. Roxanne’s Revenge — Roxanne Shanté In 1984, legendary producer Marley Marl was heated after music group UTFO canceled their appearance on his radio show. The group gained a lot of traction for their song Roxanne Roxanne, which told the story of a girl who refused interest in them regardless of their cars or money. To get back at them, Marl elicited the help of 14-year old Queens rapper, now known as, Roxanne Shanté. She was well known throughout her neighborhood for winning freestyle battles against rappers who were decades older than her. Marl offered her a pair of jeans if she freestyles Roxanne’s Revenge, a song dissing UTFO from a woman’s perspective. Shanté’s song exploded and peaked the charts at No. 22 while UTFO’s got no higher than No. 79. Roxanne’s Revenge is said to have invented hip-hop beef and has cemented Shanté in history as one of hip hop’s first female legends. 3. I Smell Pussy — 50 Cent’s rap beef with Ja Rule Some of the most genuine hip-hop beef of all time have come from the ongoing feud between 50 Cent & Ja Rule. Their beef started in 1999 when Ja Rule was robbed at gunpoint by one of 50 Cent’s affiliates. Since then, the two and their crews have had verbal and physical altercations. In 2002, 50 Cent silently issued a police order of protection against Ja Rule before dropping yet another diss track, “I Smell Pussy.” In 2013 Ja Rule publicly announced that 50 Cent won the beef, but that hasn’t stopped 50 from continuing to diss Ja. Aside from their lyrics, no blow comes close to 2018 when 50 Cent bought out the first 200 rows of Ja Rule’s concert so he’d perform to an empty venue: Full article at Kulturehub.com