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Read More →Kanye West is a busy man who chooses his artistic endeavors carefully, so he’s not just signing on to co-produce any movie. But did he did co-produce “Top Five,” the new film starring, written and directed by Chris Rock, out next week. So how’d he end up on board?
“I send all my scripts to Kanye,” Rock told MTV News on the red carpet for the New York premiere of the movie on Wednesday night.
I wanted to believe him (and would have), but the comedic great then broke into laughter, and let us in on how both Yeezy and Jay Z ended up with co-producer roles.
“I mean, if you doing anything that has hip-hop involved in it, you better call up Kanye, you better call up Jay,” he said. “And they were great. When you see the movie, you’ll see.”
One of the reasons the legendary comedian can call ‘Ye so easily is that they already have an established relationship. He appeared on “Blame Game,” off of 2010′s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, where he performs a now-iconic two-minute skit at the end of the song. In a recent appearance on the “Juan Epstein” podcast, Rock said Yeezy had him in the booth for hours.
“Kanye knows what he wants,” he said, thinking back to the session. “And he makes sure he’s gonna get it. Anybody else would have probably had me in there for 20 minutes. He had me in there for a couple of ...
Read More →FKA twigs has one lethal voice — literally. In her new video for “Video Girl,” off of her debut record, LP1, twigs performs the jam to an audience of one: a man on death row slowly dying via lethal injection. Yikes.
The song was based on a pretty simple premise: FKA twigs (born Tahliah Barnett) previously found fame as a dancer in music videos, but after separating herself from that world she used to lie when people asked if she was “the girl from the video.”
The video — directed by Kahlil Joseph — however, has a much darker premise. A lot more complex. Who is the man twigs is haunting? Did he murder her? Is she a ghost? Is that why he’s on death row? And who is the other man — the one with blood pouring from his mouth?
Oh, to see the world through twigs’ Google Glass! Judging by this video, we imagine it to be a lot like that movie “Insidious.”
Check out “Video Girl” below:
Brenna Ehrlich is a reporter for MTV News as well as the senior writer/editor for the O Music Awards. In the past, she served as associate editor at Mashable, penned a netiquette column for CNN and co-authored the blog and book "Stuff Hipsters Hate." She likes trying not to die in moshpits and listening to songs on repeat. Follow her on Twitter for news on cats and punk bands.
@BrennaEhrlichWe’ve seen our fair share of celebrity couple splits in the last month, and on Tuesday (October 28), we got news of another: A$AP Rocky and Chanel Iman.
The “Pretend” rapper and the supermodel have broken up, according to E! News. “It was just not working out with both of their busy travel schedules,” a source told the site, adding that it happened a few weeks ago. “Time away from each other played a big part in the breakup.”
Related: The Do’s And Don’ts Of Celebrity Breakups
Rocky and Iman kept mostly private for the year-plus that they dated, but they did have a few standout moments that we got to see — like on the red carpet at the 2013 VMAs, when the two shared a sweet, spontaneous kiss.
Getty Images
That night, in true New York City fashion, they took the train home.
The source told E! News that neither is harboring negativity following the split.
“They don’t have any hard feelings. [They] only want the best for each other in the long run.”
Many may feel that T-Pain is the King of Auto-Tune, having worked with it throughout his career and helped to popularize its use. But there’s another Auto-Tune favorite who Pain himself doesn’t think qualifies for Auto-Tune royalty: Kanye West.
“Kanye uses it, but he doesn’t use it correctly,” the singer told “HuffPost Live.” “He makes great music with it, but the way that I use it and the way that I’ve shown Chris [Brown] and Jamie [Foxx] to use it, he doesn’t use it that way.”
And what’s the issue, exactly? The order of operations.
“[Kanye] sings without it first and then he puts [Auto-Tune] on after he’s done with the vocals,” the “Up Down” singer added. “You don’t know how it’s going to come out. You can’t catch your mistakes before they happen. So sometimes it gets a little bit wobbly and things like that…[808s & Heartbreak] was actually good, but I had a lot to do with that album.”
These two have been at odds over Auto-Tune in the past. Just check out the video below for proof.
Is this Taylor Swift’s New York?
Unfortunately, it seems so.
On Tuesday (October 28), Hollaback!, a “movement to end street harassment,” teamed with filmmaker Rob Bliss to release “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman.” The video splices together a day’s worth of footage into a less-than-two-minute clip, which features actress Shoshana B. Roberts walking around the city and experiencing “100+ instances of street harassment.”
Bliss walked in front of Roberts for the entire day, while she held two microphones, and the pair captured interactions with varying degrees of inappropriateness. Some men said things like, “How are you this morning,” and “Have a nice evening,” while others offered shouts of “Damn!” One man even walked silently beside her for five minutes.
If that’s not uncomfortable, I’m not sure what is.
Hollaback! said that upon posting the video, Roberts was on the receiving end of rape threats in the YouTube comments.
“The rape threats indicate that we are hitting a nerve,” Hollaback! director Emily May told Newsday. “We want to do more than just hit a nerve though, we want New Yorkers to realize — once and for all — that street harassment isn’t OK, and that as a city we refuse to tolerate it.”
Bliss said that he wanted to bring to light what women experience everyday.
“I think a lot of men don’t understand the collective weight that this harassment causes,” he said. “They see it as just an innocent ‘compliment’ but are missing the forest for the ...
Read More →I’ve never been Nicki Minaj for Halloween — but you wouldn’t know that given the comments I’ve received for dressing as Sexy Buzz Lightyear (pictured above), Sexy Marie Antoinette and Sexy Captain Hook. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be Nicki for Halloween. I just don’t have the body to pull off a pink string bikini and Jordans.
You see, when you’re brown and you put on a costume without a sign implicating what the hell you are, people automatically assume that you could only be one of a small number of people, like Nicki Minaj, the Obamas or a member of the First Family — i.e., the Knowles-Carters.
And I get it. It’s just easier to assume that people are dressing as a character of their own race, even when their costume is relatively neutral.
So this Halloween, if you’re not sure what someone is dressed as, ASK! No one is going to get upset if you ask them what they are rather than getting it wrong. You might just find that your friend “Oprah” is actually “Kris Jenner” or that “Crazy Eyes” is actually just “Miley Cyrus.”
All you have to do is ask.
Phones are pretty much a constant in horror movies — whether you’ve got the killer calling from inside the house or some creepy breathing on the other side of the receiver. However, in a video short titled “What Terrifies 20-Somethings On Halloween,” it’s the absence of phones that’s really scary.
A finalist in Guillermo del Toro/YouTube’s House Of Horrors contest, this little video — created, in part, by Paul Gale (who made that amazing video about why Starbucks gets your name wrong) — features comedians like Sunita Mani (Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What”) and was directed by T.J. Misny.
Check it out below. And maybe, just maybe, leave your phone at home this Halloween… Trust us, this vid will scare you straight when it comes to cell obsession.
Brenna Ehrlich is a reporter for MTV News as well as the senior writer/editor for the O Music Awards. In the past, she served as associate editor at Mashable, penned a netiquette column for CNN and co-authored the blog and book "Stuff Hipsters Hate." She likes trying not to die in moshpits and listening to songs on repeat. Follow her on Twitter for news on cats and punk bands.
@BrennaEhrlich