The way big rap albums have been made for a while now involves a lot of e-mail and FTP sites, which keeps Lil Wayne from having to constantly be flying from one studio to another to keep up his packed schedule of guest appearances. Jay-Z and Kanye bucked that trend when making Watch the Throne, choosing instead to record the album in a series of luxury hotel suites with both rappers in the room together at the same time for every track. With the crazy outsized influence the pair has on the hip-hop world there's been a flurry of talk about rappers and producers returning to in-person collaborations and regaining the creative crackle you really only get from artists vibing off of each other in close physical proximity.
There's another reason for hip-hop artists to consider working face to face: that's the main reason why Watch the Throne didn't leak before it hit iTunes last Monday. Well I mean that and the encrypted hard drives in military-grade secure briefcases and a bunch of other Ocean's Eleven-style security measures. Basically these days if you don't want your record on RapidShare a couple of months before its street date you're going to have to work like a terrorist cell. Billboard has the whole fascinating and slightly crazy story.
If you haven't seen the Spike Jonze-directed video for WTT's first single, "Otis"—which somehow manages to make being an insanely wealthy and famous rap star look pretty fun—it's after the jump.
The Chicago-area native dished tabloid-style gossip here for almost a decade. Now she's a leader in a fringe right-wing online community spreading a bizarre political conspiracy theory.
A retrospective of comedy sketches from The Kids in the Hall in honor of the performance tonight at the Chicago Theatre, one of five stops on the troupe's first tour together since 2008.
The Chicago-area native dished tabloid-style gossip here for almost a decade. Now she's a leader in a fringe right-wing online community spreading a bizarre political conspiracy theory.