Memphis Bleek says Combat Jack once tried to jerk him (no Afrika Bambaataa)
Hip-hop podcast beef takes a turn for the personal, on Noreaga’s hilarious new Drink Champs
Internets,
The intense competition amongst the top hip-hop podcasts took a turn for the personal this week, when Memphis Bleek went on Noreaga’s Drink Champs podcast and revealed that Combat Jack once tried to jerk him the same way he jerked Noreaga . . . allegedly.
Also, as we used to say back in the ’00s, no homo.
Drink Champs has been around for all of about a month and has become something like a phenomenon. It’s currently the top music podcast on iTunes, ahead of NPR’s All Songs Considered and Song Exploder.
A few weeks ago, DMX went on there and told the story of the time he almost signed to Bad Boy, but Diddy felt he wasn’t marketable. The show has also been credited with somehow facilitating a DMX sample that appears on the new Drake album, VIEWS.
Speaking of which, last week’s guest, KRS-One, weighed in on both the fact that Drake doesn’t write his own rhymes and the allegations against Afrika Bambaataa, neither of which he seemed to give a shit about. He said it doesn’t matter that Drake uses a ghostwriter, because when you think about it, we all use a ghostwriter, i.e. the lord.
I can’t remember why he said it didn’t matter that Afrika Bambaataa faps in front of teenage boys, but it was probably something along the lines of the argument I put forth in a recent edition of Life in a Shanty Town. Namely, that Bambaataa was probably a fruit all along (hence the outfits), as was the alleged victim, and Bambaataa being a little bit older was neither here nor there.
Great minds think alike.
This week’s episode, with Memphis Bleek, gets into all kinds of shit, including a more detailed version of the story of how he became Jay Z’s hetero life partner than I’ve heard elsewhere, either because Bleek held back in other interviews or because why would I want to read an interview with Memphis Bleek? It’s possible that the only interviews with Memphis Bleek I’ve bothered with have been this one and his episode of the Combat Jack Show.
On the Combat Jack Show, someone (maybe Dallas Penn, if he was still on the show) asked Bleek how it felt to be, arguably, the greatest weed carrier of all time, ahead of Consequence. Bleek objected to being called a weed carrier, saying that, if anything, he was the weed supplier . . . which, as far as I’m concerned, wouldn’t preclude him from being considered a weed carrier. Some weed carriers also sell weed, to supplement the income they receive from holding someone else’s weed.
On Drink Champs, Noreaga called Bleek the best hype man of all time, or something to that effect, ahead of Spliff Star (who has the best, and most appropriate, weed carrier name of all time). You could tell he wanted to say weed carrier, but he didn’t want things to get weird.
A conversation about Dame Dash somehow turned to a story of a deal Bleek had on the table before he signed with Roc-A-Fella. The deal was some ol’ bullshit. Bleek showed the contract to Dame, and Dame suggested he get a lawyer. Bleek said they’d already gotten him a lawyer. That lawyer turned out to be none other than the Internets’ own Combat Jack.
It wasn’t clear who “they” was in this scenario, and Noreaga didn’t bother to follow up. He may have been too amused by the idea of Combat ripping off rappers back in the ‘90s.
Noreaga has his own penny loafers-era Combat Jack story, which he told on the Noreaga episode of the Combat Jack Show and then again, briefly, on this episode of Drink Champs. He says that when he signed his deal to record the first Capone-N-Noreaga album, Combat, Tragedy, Capone and himself each received $5,000, and that he received his cut in cash in a greasy envelope.
Truth be told, I’m not even sure how that was a bad deal. It definitely seems like a bad amount of money to record a rap album. $5,000 would be a bad amount of money to work the fry station at McDonald’s, if you had to work there any more than a few months. Even if he’d received the full $20,000, or half that, since he was splitting it with Capone, it wouldn’t have been that much money.
Is 25% more or less than the industry standard for a lawyer in one of these deals? I wouldn’t know. I was pre-med. Don’t lawyers take like half, in cases where someone slips and falls in a store and then sues the company for like $50 million? Perhaps, it can be argued, lawyers should receive less in a record deal, since it doesn’t involve as much work. Those contracts are probably 99.7% boilerplate.
Really, it seems like Nore’s problem was that he seriously considered accepting a $20,000 contract to record an album that the label could turn around and sell for upwards of $20 a copy back in the mid to late ’90s. Both Bleek and Nore probably should have considered finding their own lawyers, rather than having a third party — whether it was a manager or the label or whoever — find a lawyer for them.
Because this is 2016, there’s no way for Combat to respond other than the patented screencap of some text, on Twitter, and that’s reserved solely for when something sexual has been alleged. Maybe they can talk it out on a future episode of Drink Champs. On Twitter this afternoon, Combat joked that he wasn’t sure which would happen first, his appearance on Nore’s podcast, or him suing Nore for failure to put some respek on his name.
If he really did sue Nore, I mean if he has a leg to stand on legally, he’d probably make more than he’ll make from offer code-based ads for scammy subscription-based products as a result of appearing on the show, but it’s likely that the bit about the lawsuit was only intended as a signal to Nore’s bosses at CBS, in an attempt to undermine the show’s heretofore freewheeling nature.
With the level of competition in hip-hop podcasts these days, it’s important to think strategically.
Take it easy on yourself,
Bol
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
