The Boombox Music Blog

John Legend Talks New LP, Rick Ross Rape Lyric Controversy -- EXCLUSIVE Interview

Jozen Cummings — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:24:00 EST

Isaac Brekken, Getty Images It's been four years since John Legend has released a new studio solo album, but it's not like Kanye West's most consistent artist has been sitting around idle. Legend spent that time opening for Sade on her world tour, recording a collaboration album with The Roots (2010's Wake Up), getting engaged to his supermodel girlfriend Chrissy Teigen (the wedding's later this year) and doing his philanthropic work on behalf of education. Busy as he was, Legend says none of these endeavors get in the way of recording as much as the creative process itself, and his new LP Love In The Future is due in stores June 25. "We wrote a lot of songs and spent a lot of time on it because we wanted to get it exactly right," Legend told The Boombox in an EXCLUSIVE interview. "Sometimes your creative process takes a little longer than you think." Read on to hear him talk about Kanye West's involvement in the new album, whether or not he's going to sing at his own wedding, and his thoughts on Rick Ross's controversial lyrics glorifying rape. ...

Dave J Hogan, Getty Images

When artists come out with a new album, they either say they're trying to go back to their roots or they're trying to go in a new direction with the music. Which way are you leaning towards on Love In The Future?

In some ways we have a lot of the essence from Get Lifted and Once Again. My favorite album of mine is Once Again. It's more beautiful musically and more rich, so I definitely wanted some of that on this album. Get Lifted has a certain rawness and pure soul I love, so wanted some of those elements too. But we did want to make it new as well and not just retread, so we definitely put some new things into it, with some new producers. There's some newer sounds on there.

How involved was Kanye on this album versus your previous projects?

He was more involved in this album than he's ever been on a creative level. He's listened to everything, helped me write certain songs, helped me reproduce and remix certain things. He really got his hands dirty.

Was that something you asked him to do, to get more involved? Or did he just step up?

It was me wanting him to be involved, but also him being really excited about it. For some reason, this time, where he was in his life creatively, and what he was feeling at the time, he wanted to be more personally involved this time and I welcomed it.

Johnny Nunez, WireImage

From one controversial collaborator to another, let's talk about Rick Ross. He's on your album's first single, "Who Do We Think We Are." You two have made some great songs together in the past, so we can assume you are friends. What are your thoughts on the lyrics on Rocko's "U.O.E.N.O.," where he's talking about slipping a molly in a girls drink?

People have a right to get upset if you make light of what is essentially rape. Because he talks about slipping a molly into someone's champagne, people think it's a little more innocent than the vision of rape most of us have, which is you know, a violent stranger takes a woman and forces himself on her. But anytime you have sex with someone without their consent, and that includes drugging someone without their consent, without their knowledge, then it's a form of rape.

So you think he deserves the ridicule he's received?

He's not the first rapper to say some things that are terrible, and he won't be the last, and we have to be a little bit careful about over-policing artists with lyrics. Part of what makes them interesting is they're playing characters and depicting a life that may or may not be realistic. We shouldn't take every rap literally and examine it for whether or not it's a good role model or good prescription for how you live your life. I listen to rappers talk about killing all the time, and I am never going to go out and kill somebody because of it. I hear rappers talking about robbing people some of the time, and I enjoy some of it [laughs], I really do, but I'm not going to go out and rob anybody.

Right.

We shouldn't take every rapper literally, but that being said, there's no reason for a rapper to encourage rape in a song, and my advice would be to just don't do it. Rape is a serious thing that hurts a lot of people, and it's been in the news a lot with Steubenville and Republican politicians talking about it. Rightfully, people are sensitive about it now.

Michael Loccisano, Getty Images

You're involved in a lot of social and political issues, is this one of them?

It's interesting because the work I do, one of the charities I work for is called A Long Walk Home and they work with kids on sexual violence issues and rape survivors. I'm actually in touch with people who have been raped, so this issue is really important to me. I don't think anyone should make light of it in any song.

So if Rick Ross recorded those lyrics on a song with you, you would tell him to change it?

I don't really police other people on their creativity, pretty much ever. I don't say no, you can't say that, to anybody, unless it's on my song. If it's on my song, and Rick is putting out a song with me and he has the lyrics, I'd be like, "Dude, we have to change that, I can't represent that." If he's doing something on his own record, then that's on him. He's gotta bear the repercussions of it.

Okay, well onto a less controversial topic: Weddings. You're engaged, and I assume the wedding is soon, are you planning on singing at the wedding?

We have a date set and we know where it's going to be. We're not announcing it publicly, but it'll be later this year. I haven't decided what we're going to do for the music. Who knows though? Maybe I will sing.

Watch John Legend "Who Do We Think We Are" Feat. Rick Ross Video

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Hip-Hop and Valentine's Day: Why Rap Makes it Hard to Fall in Love

Jozen Cummings — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:45:00 EST

Youtube This is a guest post by Jozen Cummings (@jozenc), relationship/dating columnist at the New York Post and creator of the popular blog Until I Get Married. It's 1993, and I'm walking down the aisle of a local grocery store with my mother. In my head there's an Ice Cube lyric from "It Was A Good Day," which at the time was in heavy rotation. This particular lyric is my favorite because there is room in it for me to replace Ice Cube's name with my name and for whatever reason, I think now -- with my mother close enough to smack me and a grocery store full of people -- is a perfect time for me to yell the lyric at the top of my lungs. "Even saw the lights of the Good Year blimp and it said Jozen's a pimp!" ...

My mother does what any mother should: she smacks me across my mouth. Disgusted, offended and angry as I've ever seen her, she asks me, "Do you even know what that word means?" "No," I mutter as I touch my lips to make sure they are still attached to my face. My mother walks me out of the store, leaving a shopping cart full of grocery stores behind.

We're on our way back home, and when we arrive, she makes me open the dictionary to look up the word "pimp." I don't remember exactly what the dictionary definition was, and I don't think learning it was as effective as my mother hoped. Yes, I understood pimps were social deviants, but in 1993, hip-hop made them look like the coolest thing to be.

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Ice Cube was a pimp, so he said. Snoop Dogg said, "we don't love them hoes," on "Gin and Juice." E-40 cautioned against coming to the aid of women in "Captain Save-A-Hoe." Too $hort made me feel like the only life to live was that of a man with not one woman but many in "I'm a Player."

I was 12-years-old when these records came out. I knew very little about women, and even less about love. What I did know was I was a virgin, and in hindsight it's crazy for me to think how uncool that felt, mostly because of hip-hop. These records, which I had to listen to out of earshot from my parents, failed to completely brainwash me into thinking I was something that I wasn't.

But still, they couldn't stop me from wishing I was like those guys I saw on MTV Jams, rapping in their big houses and fancy cars with all those women who seemed to like them flanking their left and right sides. None of the materialism I saw was as alluring as the affection they got from those pretty black and brown women. To me, it looked like those women loved them and I wanted to be loved the same way.

People talk a lot about the lack of respect hip-hop has for women, and history can prove that to be true, but for years all the negative talk about women was just as much about an absence of love. Sure LL Cool J said he needed it, but that moment was fleeting, and everyone who heard "I Think I Need Love" back in 1987 knew he was pandering to his female audience.

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My parents were my primary teachers when it came to love, but when you're a teenager, when is listening to your parents ever the move? I listened to rappers, and when it came to love, rappers seemed to have the best motto about it, which was to forget about it.

Rappers weren't teaching me to hate women so much as they were teaching me to avoid getting played by them. Women, in their eyes, were always up to no good, and falling in love them was only going to be a sucker move. No one wanted to be the guy Too Short was talking to at the end of "The World Is Filled..." from Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death album.

We all know the language rappers used to describe women and talk about women was venomous and damaging to a lot of women, but it had an indelible effect on the male psyche as well. Contrary to what some people may say, rappers didn't teach men to hate women, they taught us to hate love and be cynical about women. Women weren't the fairer sex. They were just sex and if we loved anything, let it be that.

But love their mind, their soul, with all our heart? That's not what players did, and they seemed to be smarter for it. All the singers, from Jodeci to Boyz II Men, sounded so sad, "Feenin'" for their woman or down "On Bended Knee" in an attempt to get them back. Who wanted to be those guys?

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Rappers seemed like the guys who were having all the fun, and from afar, it looked like the best way to avoid tears over a woman was to care about her as little as possible. And female MCs weren't making things any easier.

MC Lyte was screaming about how she needed a "Ruff Neck," to which my step-dad said to me, "Don't go out there trying to be like one of those guys she's rapping about." And Lil Kim's request for cunnilingus on "Not Tonight" (among other songs of her) was not only unreasonable, it went against the words of DJ Quik who said no man should ever do such a thing on the misleadingly titled "Can I Eat It?"

If anything, the female rappers wanted men who were either able to afford them nice things or put in long hours on the corner. I had no means to do the former, and I had no desire to live the life of the latter. So I just went about my business, trying my best not to love these girls.

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But by the late 1990s, hip-hop started to become more a business endeavor and less an artistic one, and the tune of popular rap songs slowly started to change. Rappers were becoming more emotionally available, as they crafted sixteen bars of heartbreak.

Yes, they were still angry, but they turned down the volume and started focusing more on the one who got away instead of lumping all women into one group of bad people. There were songs like Jay-Z's "Song Cry," OutKast's "Ms. Jackson" and ironically, the song that put The Roots on the mainstream map was a rap love song, "You Got Me."

All of this started happening around the turn-of-the century -- 2001, 2000, and 1991 --respectively. Coincidentally this was around the same time I too started growing up. I had been in love once in high school, and now I was hearing songs I could relate to about it on the radio.

These days, a rap love song is nowhere near the commodity it once was. Every rapper has one, and sure they may shrug it off by calling it the designated "chick track," but it gets them absolutely nowhere to treat it as such.

How we got here, whether it be natural maturation or financial gain, doesn't matter. I'm grateful to hear guys open up a little bit more about what they've really been through. The prevalence of rap love songs hasn't made hip-hop less soft. If anything, it's actually strengthened artistically by rappers who've learned to emote without necessarily singing.

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Artists like Drake, who can pull off melodic rhyme structures will always use such a skill to their advantage. But maybe we should see such choices as simply utilizing their gifts to their fullest extent instead of pandering to sensitive thugs.

For my money, there's not one record Kanye West sang on 808s & Heartbreak that was more heartfelt than what he rapped on "Blame Game" from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Last year Nas delivered Life Is Good, arguably his second best album after his 1994 debut Illmatic, and unquestionably his most emotional one with songs like "Bye Baby" tackling his difficult time going through a divorce.

And Jay-Z, the man who once rapped, "I make the best bitch see the exit," is very happily and very publicly married. Sure he's referred to his wife Beyonce by another b-word, but before he even put a ring on it, he proudly, let the world know in "PSA," that not only was she the baddest chick in the game, she was also wearing his chain.

Some may see the way Jay-Z refers to his wife as just another case of trophysizing a woman. But there will never be a time when a man doesn't want to reflect his good taste by putting a woman who adores him on display. As a matter of fact, there was a time when rappers were doing it excessively: That year was 1993!

Rap still has a misogyny problem, and many rappers are still speaking ill about women, but at least now we can say it's the rappers themselves who need to grow up, and not the entire rap genre.

A lot of the best rappers these days either are in love or have been in love, and they're not afraid to rap about it.

Top 20 Hip-Hop Songs, Albums and Artists You Wouldn't Believe Were Nominated for Grammys

Jozen Cummings — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:45:00 EST

Ke.Mazur, WireImage Which came first, the Grammys not caring about rap or rap not caring about the Grammys? There's a case to be made for both answers, but everyone can agree the relationship between music's most polarizing genre and music's most prestigious award show has been unhealthy since 1989, the year the Grammys decided rap was important enough to give its artists its own category (Best Rap Performance). But the better question to ask about rap and the Grammys is do the people who decide the nominations actually listen to the genre? Judging by the show's history of nominees, the answer is yes, but perhaps only on the radio. ...

Regardless of what type of music it is, the Grammys seem to care about star power, hit records, and well, perhaps last of all... artistry. And it's rare we get all three of these qualities to show up in one nomination, so what's left is a history of head-scratching nominations and winners.

To this day, you can still get a Flava Flav-like "WOW" from someone who doesn't know the black guy who starred in "Men In Black" is the same guy who won the first rap Grammy... ever.

Below are 20 more rap Grammy nominees (and winners) that will, in the words of Eve -- the 2002 winner for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration -- "blow ya mind."

Wait till you get to number one. Then you'll really see what we mean.

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