JAY-Z | The Story of O.J. | Official Music Video

Watch the The Story of O.J. From JAY-Z’s new album, '4:44' Streaming now on TIDAL.


Follow JAY-Z:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JayZ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/s_c_

Music video by JAY-Z performing The Story of O.J.. (C) 2017 S. Carter Enterprises, LLC. Marketed by Roc Nation & Distributed by Roc Nation/UMG Recordings, Inc.

http://vevo.ly/cX2dKZ

Happy Birthday Jay Z | The Black Album

VinRican Celebrates Jay-Z's Birthday By Showcasing Classic Samples Used On "The Black Album"



Power 106 YouTube Channel:
Subscribe Now - http://bit.ly/17Rrvxu

For more exclusive interviews visit:
Power 106 Website - http://bit.ly/THwnRX

Find Power 106:
Facebook - http://bit.ly/TjOLyl
Twitter - http://bit.ly/12eZ0t2

Stream Power 106 - Where Hip Hop Lives:
Listen Live - http://bit.ly/T0chlq

Discover The Classic Samples Used On Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt" #WaxOnly

VinRican Showcases Classic Samples That Were Used On Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt" Album.



Power 106 YouTube Channel:
Subscribe Now - http://bit.ly/17Rrvxu

For more exclusive interviews visit:
Power 106 Website - http://bit.ly/THwnRX

Find Power 106:
Facebook - http://bit.ly/TjOLyl
Twitter - http://bit.ly/12eZ0t2
Stream Power 106 - Where Hip Hop Lives:
Listen Live - http://bit.ly/T0chlq

Discover The Samples Behind Jay Z's "The Blueprint"

On 9/11/2001 Jay-Z Released "The Blueprint." To Celebrate Its Release We Showcase Some of The Original Samples Used On This Classic.



Power 106 YouTube Channel:
Subscribe Now - http://bit.ly/17Rrvxu

For more exclusive interviews visit:
Power 106 Website - http://bit.ly/THwnRX

Find Power 106:
Facebook - http://bit.ly/TjOLyl
Twitter - http://bit.ly/12eZ0t2

Stream Power 106 - Where Hip Hop Lives:
Listen Live - http://bit.ly/T0chlq

The Blueprint: Dussé

Watch JAY Z's Life+Times content one week early on Vessel: http://www.vessel.com/jayzlifeandtimes

Rick Ross ft. Jay Z | Movin' Bass (Audio) (Explicit)

Rick Ross ft. Jay Z | Movin' Bass (Audio) (Explicit)



Pre-Order "HOOD BILLIONAIRE" Now!
Get "Nickel Rock" ft. Boosie Badazz instantly with your Albun Pre-Order on iTunes
http://smarturl.it/HoodBillionaire?IQ...



Album Pre-Order Also Available On:
Google Play http://smarturl.it/gHoodBillionaire?I...
Amazon http://geni.us/aHoodBillionaire

Get "Nickel Rock" Single on Google Playhttp://smarturl.it/gNickelRock?IQid=vevo

"Hood Billionaire" Available Everywhere 11.24.14
Includes the smashes "ELVIS PRESLEY BLVD" ft. Project Pat, "KEEP DOIN' THAT (Rich Chick)" ft. R. Kelly, & "IF THEY KNEW" ft. K. Michelle
Guest features include Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, Yo Gotti & More!

Santigold's Second Collaboration With Stance Features Socks Inspired by Big Daddy Kane and Aliens

Santigold is bringing her off-beat sense of style to another special collaboration with Stance Socks. The last collection included pieces inspired by Jay Z and Mount Kilimanjaro, while this one pays tribute to a few of the most fashionably inspiring moments in history according to the singer.

The kaleidoscopic collection features three unique unisex designs: Big Daddy Kane, Egypt and Aliens, and The Chase. Santigold explains the inspiration behind her sophomore collection: “Each sock has a fashionable theme from the past: Big Daddy Kane with his iconic Hip Hop flare; the top-hat and ascot sporting attire of the hunters on The Chase sock as they perch atop their beautiful horses; and the aliens who possibly helped create the mysterious mind-blowing legacy of beauty, decadence and technology of Ancient Egypt."



The collab with Stance isn't Santigold's first foray beyond the world of music. She also previously partnered with Vans to produce the all-gold-everything Tosha Hi sneakers, as well as with cosmetics company Smashbox on her own line of makeup.

The Stance x Santigold collection launches today, Nov. 7, at Stance.com and select stockists. Check out the promotional video above and the full collection below.

Classic Battle: Cassidy vs. Freeway (Put A Beat On)

The Cassidy vs. Freeway match is one of the most classic rap battles in Hip Hop, and has helped to play a role in the extreme popularity that the sport has gained over the years. While both men put forth a great effort, Freeway's request to put on a beat by the end of the battle was translated as a sign of forfeiting the match. Cassidy's relentless punchline style helped to influence the bar structures of many Battle Rappers who are popular today.

Interestingly enough, this battle was instigated by none-other-than Jay Z. Cassidy shared the backstory to his and Freeway's lyrical clash during a recent interview with VladTV, where Cassidy recalled Jay Z "talking crazy" and downplaying his lyrical skill. This lead Cass to challenge anyone from Jay's camp, which resulted in him exchanging bars with Freeway.

Angie Martinez | THE TRUTH w/ Elliott Wilson

On the latest episode of The Truth, Elliott Wilson catches up with Angie Martinez, who discusses her reasons behind leaving Hot 97 after two decades and joining competitor Power 105.1.

Little Dragon Breaks Down "Nabuma Rubberband" | DECODED

On the latest episode of DECODED, Little Dragon breaks down the lyrics of "Nabuma Rubberband" and talks about the extinction of birds.

Jeezy | THE TRUTH w/ Elliott Wilson

On the latest episode of The Truth, Elliott Wilson catches up with Jeezy on his new album "Seen It All," as well as money, fame, and staying real.

On The Run Tour: Rehearsals

This is real life.



Executive Producers: Roc Nation & Parkwood Entertainment
Director: Scheme Engine
Producers: Devin Chanda and Matt Mitchener
Associate Producers: James Rothman and Charles Todd
Cinematographers: Ben Vogel, Dustin Nakao Haider, and David Raboy
Sound Recorder/Mixer: Andrew Yip
Editor: Matt Mitchener
Color: Thomas Stigler

The Rap Test

STORY BY: MATTHEW TRAMMELL/FADER

The Rap Test Is the Best Thing on the Internet (For Real This Time)



I have dreamed of a product like this existing for years and it’s finally here. 21-year-old Danny Friday created The Rap Test to crowdsource the world’s biggest rap fans: the site plays snippets of tracks from one artist and users race to identify the title before the clock runs out.

The quicker you answer, the more points you get, and the higher you go the more obscure the tracks get. FADER’s resident rap nerds got to Level 9 of the Kanye Test and started freezing up when it dipped into B-sides from the Freshman Adjustment mixtapes.

It’s fun, fast, and highly addictive if you’re a rap nerd: test your knowledge of catalogues from Kanye, Jay-Z, Drake, Meek Mill, Eminem & Kendrick Lamar and say goodbye to productivity for the rest of the afternoon.

Off The Wall | The Clark Family Treasures At Christie's

One of the first American titans of industry, William A. Clark (1839-1925) founded Las Vegas through his railroad ventures and also served as Senator of Montana in the early 1900s. In his lifetime, he amassed an incredible fortune and a trove of treasures that reflect American history during the late 1800s.



Here, Life + Times takes a look at Clark's collection on auction at Christie's--acquired from his famous reclusive daughter, Huguette Clark--including artwork from John Singer Sargent, literature from Walt Whitman, and one of the greatest viiolins ever made.

The Reintroduction of Mumu Fresh

The Reintroduction of Mumu Fresh follows the traditional mixtape format by recycling pre-released popular beats originally released by notable artists with a similar flow often times, but new lyrics. What sets Mumu and this mixtape apart in this vast and influential mixtape generation is Mumu’s ability to maintain her commitment to providing a balanced perspective on current social, racial, political, gender and class issues that plague the human race while keeping it fresh, exciting, and rockable through her superior vocal performance, wit, humor and good old fashioned rhyming skills.

Ab-Soul Breaks Down | Stigmata | DECODED ft. Action Bronson & Asaad

Ab-Soul, using only JAY Z lyrics, decodes "Stigmata," the Action Bronson-assisted lead single from his upcoming album, These Days... The album is out June 24th, courtesy of Top Dawg Entertainment.

Townhall w/ The Roots

In part 2 of Sway's sit down with The Roots on Hip Hop Nation's Townhall at Shade 45, Black Thought and Quest Love chopped it up with our Sway in the Morning leader.

10 years ago The Roots performed with Jay Z at an Unplugged performance, that was deemed controversial. It wasn't usual that a mainstream act would perform with an "underground" group.

"I was losing sleep over it," Quest told Sway. "Should we do it, should we not do it?"

Black Thought then spoke on being "really street," and one of the best rappers in the game.

How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, Part II | Questlove

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America, Part II
By Questlove



This is the second in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.

What do people think of when they think about hip-hop? I don’t mean the technique of the music so much as its meaning. Technique is a limited part of any art form, really: how well Rapper X raps is important but not central. How devious or wonderful Producer X’s beats are can get you on your feet more quickly, but hip-hop isn’t an abstract sonic art form. It’s a narrative one. And what that means is that matter matters more than art. Or rather: what matters to art is its matter, what it’s about, the ideas it communicates to its audience. The other aspects serve it, but perfect performance and production of empty ideas can’t fake the fill. I hope this isn’t a controversial view. It shouldn’t be.

I’d argue that when people think of hip-hop, pretty quickly they think of bling, of watches or cars or jewels or private jets. They think of success and its fruits, and the triumphant figures who are picking that fruit. This linkage isn’t limited to hip-hop — all of American celebrity, to some degree, is based on showing what you can buy — but it’s stronger there. The reasons are complex, of course, but the aspirational strain in African-American culture runs all the way back to slavery days. Slaves couldn’t own property because they were property. When freed, they were able to exist politically, and also economically. Owning things was a way of proving that you existed — and so, by extension, owning many things was a way of proving that you existed emphatically. Hip-hop is about having things to prove you’re not a have-not; it works against the notion that you might have so little economic control that you would simply disappear.

But what are the haves that you might have? And are they the same haves that people had 10 years ago, or 20? You only have to wind the clock back a few decades to see how drastically this dynamic has changed.

Back in 1986, the group standing on top of the rap heap was Run-DMC, and after rising to international prominence, they released a song about one of their prized possessions. That song, of course, was “My Adidas.” Let’s take a look at how rap stars back in the '80s celebrated what they owned:

My Adidas
walked through concert doors
and roamed all over coliseum floors
I stepped on stage, at Live Aid
All the people gave and the poor got paid

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that this is an especially benign form of consumerism. For starters, it’s not about the shoes themselves, in the main. It’s about the group’s experiences on the way to stardom: the audiences that came to see them, the shows they headlined. And fairly quickly, it’s not about them at all — it’s about Live Aid, a benefit concert focused on making sure that “the poor got paid.” In last week’s column, Albert Einstein and I talked about spooky action at a distance, which I reimagined as a version of the social contract: what happens elsewhere also happens to you, and it’s hard to divorce yourself from other people’s circumstances, no matter how much you try. This is that same principle, an illustration of connection. It’s sole music: the shoes convey you to the spot where you can see the haves working on behalf of the have-nots.

But there’s something else, too. Think about the product that’s carrying the song along. It’s a little strange: It’s a German athletic shoe from Herzogenaurach, not Hollis, Queens. But it is also (or was also) part of the Run-DMC uniform: the terry-cloth Kangol hat, the warm-up suits. At the time, Run-DMC was counterprogramming the flamboyance of other hip-hop artists, who were dressing like they were still in the funk and disco eras, with furs and studded jackets. Run-DMC stripped it down, and in doing so, sold a new kind of cool. More to the point, they sold a cool that was accessible to their fans. You could buy Adidas and be in their club, which was a club that you wanted to be in.

What has changed? Well, back in Run-DMC’s day, hip-hop had winners and others, on a sliding scale, all the way down to artists who were making more modest local impact. Now, because of the radical contraction of the market and the reluctance of companies to invest in anything that’s not a sure bet, hip-hop has become almost exclusively about winners, big sellers who have already proven their muscle. And even those numbers are dwindling, to the point where the million-seller club these days contains almost no one — Jay Z, Eminem, Drake, Macklemore, and Kendrick Lamar. You could argue that there are artists a tick down who have more cultural cachet: the big example there is Kanye West, who has sold not quite 700,000 copies of Yeezus. But that’s a half-dozen artists, total, with any appreciable influence.

And what do those artists do? They celebrate themselves, just like the artists of a generation earlier. They talk about products that prop them up, just like the artists of a generation earlier. But what have the products become? Let’s look at one of the descendants of “My Adidas” — a song on Jay Z’s recent Magna Carta Holy Grail called “Picasso Baby.”

I just want a Picasso, in my casa
No, my castle

This is on the opposite side of the planet, ethically and socially, from “My Adidas.” It associates personal satisfaction with a product, but on an entirely different scale. I went to the mall the other day. They didn’t sell any Picassos. You can accuse me of a certain amount of humorlessness, and I’ll plead temporary insanity. But let’s look back into the lyrics. Jay Z isn’t just collecting art. He’s using the brand names of other famous painters to declare himself, by association, as an artist.

It ain't hard to tell
I'm the new Jean Michel
Surrounded by Warhols
My whole team ball
Twin Bugattis outside the Art Basel

Whereas “My Adidas” highlighted consumer items, “Picasso Baby” is all about unattainable luxury, fantasy acquisitions. Within the first ten words of the song, Jay Z ensures that no one in his audience can identify with the experience that he’s rapping about. He would never want to be in a club that would have you as a member. But this doesn’t offend his audiences. They love it. They want to be just like him so they can exclude people just like them. There’s an even more egregious (comic?) example, from Ace Hood, with his song “Bugatti.” I’ll quote the chorus.

I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti
I woke up in a new Bugatti

Now I’ll quote a verse:

Niggas be hatin’
I’m rich as a bitch
A hundred K? I spent that on my wrist
Two hundred thousand, I spent that on your bitch
You and your model put that on the list

I don’t know exactly how much a Bugatti costs. Oh, wait: I’ve been told by my business manager that it costs Amused Laughter. Very few people I know, including several best-selling artists in various musical genres, can afford this item, which depreciates as violently as whiplash the minute it’s off the lot. Something about the song, though, creates an environment where I feel a twinge of shame admitting that. And I won’t even get into whether I can spend a hundred K on my wrist.

But what does it mean that hearing the song somehow makes me measure myself against its outsize boasting? For starters, it means that hip-hop has become complicit in the process by which winners are increasingly isolated from the populations they are supposed to inspire and engage — which are also, in theory, the populations that are supposed to furnish the next crop of winners. This isn’t a black thing or even a hip-hop thing exclusively. American politics functions the same way. But it’s a significant turnaround and comedown for a music that was, only a little while back, devoted to reflecting the experience of real people and, through that reflection, challenging the power structure that produces inequality and disenfranchisement.

Who’s to blame? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Puff Daddy’s work with the Notorious B.I.G. in the early '90s did plenty to cement the idea of hip-hop as a genre of conspicuous consumption. Before those videos, wealth was evident, but it was also contextualized, given specific character that harmonized with the backgrounds of the artists. Run-DMC had East Coast cool and cachet; Dr. Dre had West Coast cool and cachet. But Puffy had — and wanted to tell everyone he had — a different idea of power, an abstract capitalist cachet. His videos, and the image they projected, played as well in California as in New York, as well in Chicago as in Florida. It was a cartoon idea of wealth, to the point that specific reality no longer mattered. In literary terms, it was pure signifier. It would take him a little while to formulate that into a manifesto, but when he did, he hit it on the nose. “Bad Boy for Life,” in 2001, contained a line that says all that anyone needs to know about this strain of hip-hop: "Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.” Picasso, baby.

A few years back, there was a video on YouTube that featured the rapper Lil Boosie. It showed him counting out his money onto the pavement of a parking lot. You can see it here. I haven’t studied too much contemporary performance art, but whoever’s doing it — Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic — can’t be doing anything stranger than this. (You too, James Franco.) The money is a pure abstraction. Nothing is purchased with it — no goods, no services. It’s a series of symbols being thrown to the ground, one after the other. And as each one lands, the message gets stronger and stronger. You don’t have this money. You may never see this many hundreds. You don’t belong here.

The last stop on this train, at least for today, is the “Otis” video that Jay Z and Kanye West made to promote the hit single from Watch the Throne. In the video, which was directed by Spike Jonze, the two of them go to an industrial space and proceed to demolish a Maybach (another car, like a Bugatti, that no one can afford), after which they drive around the lot, four models in the backseat. What are they destroying with their hammers and their saws? The car? The idea of the car? The idea of the car in other videos? And what are they building as they destroy? The idea that they exist at a level where they can afford to discard something as valuable as the car? The idea that their cool transcends money and the things that it can acquire? The belief that art should always violate and remake consumer products? A hierarchy of image that somehow, strangely, privileges the human element? The car was eventually auctioned, and proceeds were donated toward the East African Drought Disaster. Spooky action at a distance.

Pharrell & Jay-Z | Coachella 2014 Weekend 2

Pharrell brought out Jay-Z to perform a few of their biggest collaborations during Pharrell's Coachella 2014 Weekend 2 performance.

Robinson Canó | Where I'm From

n this short, Spanish-language documentary, JAY Z's Life+Times tracks the personal journey of Robinson Cano to the Seattle Mariners from San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic, delving into the prevailing youth baseball culture there through the eyes of a native son. Featuring never-before-seen footage and interviews of Canó and his family, JZL+T and Roc Nation Sports presents a candid vignette of a people and a small town to whom baseball is not just a sport, but a way of life.