U.S. Student Loan Rates Set To Double Today

Read the whole thing at Salon; excerpt below.

Student loan debt, which at over $1 trillion tops credit card debt in the U.S. today. The average burden is $28,000, but add in their credit cards and they’re graduating with an average of $35,000 in debt. It’s no wonder that people who’ve paid off their student loan debt are 36 percent more likely to own homes than those who haven’t,

RIAA Changes 30-Day Rule In Light of Jay-Z’s ‘MCHG’ Release

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At first, RIAA appeared to not honor the early million-unit sale of Magna Carta Holy Grail, as it was done 30 days prior to it’s release (supposedly giving it platinum status); however, RIAA has changed their outlook and has decided to grant Jay-Z with another platinum selling album.

“We think it’s time for the RIAA – and Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman – to align digital song and album certification requirements. That’s why today we are officially updating this rule in our G&P Program requirements”

“The reality is that how fans consume music is changing, the music business is changing as labels and artist partner with a breathtaking array of new technology services, and the industry’s premier award recognizing artists’ commercial achievement should similarly keep pace.”

To check out the full release of information about the new rules regarding the RIAA, click here.

WINNERS: 2013 BET Awards

If you missed it, you can check out the winners at last night’s BET Awards above. The list itself is below as well.

BEST MALE HIP-HOP ARTIST
WINNER: Kendrick Lamar
2 Chainz
A$AP Rocky
Drake
Future

BEST FEMALE HIP-HOP ARTIST
WINNER: Nicki Minaj
Azealia Banks
Eve
Rasheeda
Rye Rye

BEST NEW ARTIST
WINNER: Kendrick Lamar
Azealia Banks
Joey Bada$$
Trindad Jame$
The Weeknd

VIDEO OF THE YEAR
WINNER: Drake – Started From the Bottom
2 Chainz – No Lie f. Drake
A$AP Rocky – Fuckin’ Problems f. Drake, 2 Chainz & Kendrick Lamar
Drake – HYFR f. Lil Wayne
Kendrick Lamar – Poetic Justice f. Drake
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis – Thrift Shop
Miguel – Adorn
Rihanna – Diamonds
Justin Timberlake – Suit & Tie f. Jay-Z
Kanye West – Mercy

BEST FEMALE R&B / POP ARTIST
WINNER: Rihanna
Beyoncé
Tamar Braxton
Alicia Keys
Elle Varner

BEST MALE R&B / POP ARTIST
WINNER: Miguel
Chris Brown
Bruno Mars
Justin Timberlake
Usher

BEST GROUP
WINNER: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Mary Mary
Mindless Behavior
Slaughterhouse
The Throne (Kanye & Jay-Z)

BEST COLLABORATION
WINNER: A$AP Rocky – Fuckin’ Problems
2 Chainz – No Lie f. Drake
French Montana – Pop That
Kendrick Lamar – Poetic Justice f. Drake
Justin Timberlake – Suit & Tie f. Jay-Z
Kanye West – Mercy

19 Firefighters Killed In Arizona Fire

From CNN, where you can read more on the story (including what measures the firefighters took to try to survive the blaze):

They were part of an elite squad who confronted wildfires up close, setting up barriers to stop the spreading destruction.

But the inferno blazing across central Arizona proved too much, even for the shelters the 19 firefighters carried as a last-ditch survival tool.

The firefighters were killed Sunday while fighting the Yarnell Hill fire, northwest of Phoenix. Among them was Eric Marsh, superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, according this father, John Marsh.

It was the deadliest day for firefighters since the 9/11 attacks. And it is the deadliest wildland fire since 1933, according to a list from the U.S. National Wildfire Coordinating Group. Twenty-five firefighters died when a blaze burned in light chaparral near Griffith Park, California.

“Our entire crew was lost,” Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo told reporters Sunday night. “We just lost 19 of some of the finest people you’ll ever meet. Right now, we’re in crisis.”

The tragedy killed about 20% of the Prescott Fire Department. Fraijo said one member of the team was not with the other crew members and survived.

Cirque du Soleil Performer Dies During Show

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From NBC News:

A Cirque du Soleil performer died Saturday after an accident during a performance of the show “Ka” at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, authorities announced Sunday.

Sarah Guyard-Guillot, 31, was pronounced dead shortly before midnight Saturday, according to the Clark County Coroner’s Office. A cause of death has yet to be determined.

Audience members told the Las Vegas Sun that a performer suspended by a wire in the show’s final scene dropped a distance of nearly 50 feet into a pit below the stage.

“Initially, a lot of people in the audience thought it was part of the choreographed fight. But you could hear screaming, then groaning, and we could hear a female artist crying from the stage,” Dan Mosqueda, who was attending the show with his family, told the Sun.

The newspaper also reported that Guyard-Guillot was a mother of two young children and had spent 22 years as an acrobatic performer.

“I am heartbroken. I wish to extend my sincerest sympathies to the family. We are all completely devasted with this news. Sassoon was an artist with the original cast of KÀ since 2006 and has been an integral part of our Cirque du Soleil tight family. We are reminded, with great humility and respect, how extraordinary our artists are each and every night,” Cirque du Soleil said in a statement released Sunday.

Performances of “Ka” have been indefinitely suspended, the company announced.

Reverend Al Sharpton Scores A Book Deal…..With Cash Money Records

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Somehow, this seems fitting. From HipHopDX:

The Reverend Al Sharpton and Cash Money agree to a book deal for Sharpton’s “The Rejected Stone.”

Sharpton told The Associated Press on Thursday that the book, titled The Reject Stone, would include his thoughts on Lil Wayne and other rappers and that he was anxious to have a positive dialogue.

The Reject Stone is due out on October 8 and will track Sharpton’s progress from “personal evolution” to New York street activist to political candidate, civil rights spokesman and television host.

Jermaine Dupri’s Tax Troubles Get Worse

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JD’s money troubles reportedly just took another step in the wrong direction, thanks to the IRS. From TMZ:

Uncle Sam just slapped the hip-hop mogul with a giant tax bill … to the tune of $800,000.

According to two separate tax liens filed by the IRS (everyone’s fav government agency) … Dupri needs to cough up tax dough from the years 2008, 2010 and 2011. Here’s the breakdown:

2008: $646.47
2010: $140,889.76
2011: $657,156.12

Grand total allegedly owed — $798,692.35.

Calls to Jermaine’s reps have not been returned.

ARTWORK/TRACKLISTING: @JaySean – Neon

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Neon drops July 30th. You can check out the tracklisting for the project below.

Tracklist
1. Neon
2. Luckiest Man
3. Words
4. Where you are
5. Guns and Roses
6. Mars (Feat. Rick Ross)
7. Miss popular
8. Close to you
9. Deep End
10. Worth it All
11. Passenger Side
12. All on Your Body (Feat. Ace Hood)
13. Break of Dawn (Feat. Busta Rhymes)
14. Sucka for You

Lauryn Hill Gives Her Feelings On (Reverse) Racism

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Certainly an interesting read. Check it out below and let us know your thoughts….taken from Ms. Lauryn Hill’s Tumblr.

The concept of reverse racism is flawed, if not absolutely ridiculous. Most, if not all of the negative responses from people of color toward white people, are reactions to the hatred, violence, cruelty and brutality that they were shown by white people for centuries. Much of the foundation of the modern world was built on the forced free labor of black peoples. The African Slave Trade, the institution of slavery, colonialism, its derivative systems, and the multiple holocausts throughout history, where whites used race as the defining reason to justify their oppression, conquest, and brutal treatment of non-white peoples, are how race became such a factor to begin with.

The initial claim by the oppressors, followed a moral imperative (so they said) that people outside of Occidental and European birth were in savage and cursed conditions, and that God justified the captivity of these people, and the rape and pillage of their lands.

Ironically, these oppressors would try to discard this same God, who supposedly justified this brutality, in the name of Darwin, whose famous line ‘survival of the fittest’ was used to justify criminal behavior once the Bible could no longer be used as a hiding place for economic domination and evil intention.

Spirituality and morality were replaced by capitalism, and with it a conscious shift of focus toward the exploitation of the vulnerable.

In order to justify reverse racism one would have to first create an even playing field, undo the generations of torture, terror, and brutality, and then judge whether or not a non-white person is in fact a racist. This approach would require people to examine the need/addiction to feel superior to someone else for no justifiable reason, and the myriad policies: Spiritual, political and social, that it bore. True dominion is self evident and not the result of sabotaging another in order to achieve it. That would be an illegitimate as well as a fleeting position. The Universe, will eventually seek to right/balance itself.

Of course there are white people who live transcendent lives, not exploiting ill-gotten privilege or perpetuating the sins of their ancestors who used violence and deceit as a means to gain advantage over others. Humanity in proper order is obligated to acknowledge the Truth, whoever it comes from, be they Black, White or other. Righteous indignation is simply a response to long-standing evil.

Much of the world is still reeling from the abuses of Imperialist selfishness, misunderstanding, ignorance and greed. Black people remain in many ways a shattered community, disenfranchised, forcefully removed from context and still caged in, denied from making truly independent choices and experiencing existential freedom. Their natural homes, just like their natural selves, raped and pillaged of the resources and gifts God has given to them. Interpreted through someone else’s slanted lens and filter, they remain in many ways, misrepresented. Taxation without proper representation, might I remind you, was the very platform of protest that began the Revolutionary War, which gained this country its independence from England. Anger is not only the natural response to the abuse of power, but is also appropriate when there is no real acknowledgment of these abuses, or deep, meaningful and profound change.

If we took all of what we deem horrible regarding the criminal abuses that black people have committed over this country’s history, and add it all up, it still does not compare to the hundreds of years of terrorism, violent domination, theft, rape, abuse, captivity, and beyond that black people have suffered under the ideologies and systems of white supremacy, racism, and slave based paradigms. I say this only to say that abuse unresolved begets or creates abuse. How then does the chief offender become the judge? Might does not necessarily mean right. Right is right. People forcibly reduced to sub-human existences, so that they behave in sub-human ways, helps a system to justify itself or feel less guilty about its blood saturated foundation and gross crimes against humanity. People, like plants, grow where the light is. When you enclose a plant and limit its light source, it will bend itself toward the light, for the light is necessary for its survival. This same thing happens to people locked in communities where little light and little opportunity is allowed them, survival then forces them to twist and/or bend toward the only way of escape.

There is good. And I both acknowledge and encourage the good. Instead of throwing out the Baby with the bath water, we do well to expose the intentionally poisoned water the Baby has been forced to soak in since its origin in these lands. America’s particular brand of hypocrisy is gross (double entendre).

I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalizing the traumatized, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, ‘trying’ to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on. Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalize them, subject them to rules that don’t apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain focused to cease from rage.

The prosecutor, who was a woman, made a statement during sentencing about me not doing any charity work for a number of years during my ‘exile.’ A) Charity work is not a requirement, but something done because someone wants to. I was clearly doing charitable works way before other people were even thinking about it. And B) Even the judge had to comment that she, meaning I, was both having and raising children during this period. As if that was not challenging enough to do. She sounded like the echo of the grotesque slave master, who expected women to give birth while in the field, scoop the Baby up, and then continue to work. Disgusting.

When you are beaten and penalized for being independent, or truly self reliant, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with self-reliance, and a fear of true independence. When you are beaten or threatened with death for trying to read a book, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with education. When families are broken up by force and threat of violence, then the family structure becomes dysfunctional. When men who would naturally defend their women and families are threatened with castration and death, then this natural response also becomes dysfunctional. When looking at the oppressor is punishable by violence, then examination of him and his system becomes a difficult and taboo thing to do, despite every bone in your body demanding it. When questioning or opposing oppression is punishable by death, imprisonment, or economic assassination, then opposing systemic wrong in any or all of its meta manifestations is a terrifying concept. Anyone forced to live so incredibly diametrically opposed to that which is natural to themselves, will end up in crisis if they don’t successfully find a way to improve or transcend these circumstances! All of which require healing. It is only by the Grace of God and the resilience of the people that things haven’t been worse.

Much of my music, if not all of it, is about Love, a therapeutic resolve created in response to the lack of messages encouraging people like me toward free moral agency. Helping to ameliorate this condition has never been addressed through the political arena alone. It is a sacrificial work that doesn’t simply happen between the hours of 9 to 5 or Monday through Friday, but when inspiration leads us to avail ourselves for the Truth that needs to be said. Unlike the system too often contrarily demonstrates, we believe that people can be and should be helped, and that trauma should not be criminalized but acknowledged, healed and dealt with. This takes awareness, sensitivity and a level of freedom in my opinion the system lacks. And if we don’t know or understand how to do it, then we humbly refer to a higher authority.

We have no desire to create humanoids, turn people into machines, or dumb them down so that they remain dependent longer than necessary to an antiquated system in denial of its many inadequacies and need to evolve. Instead we seek to educate and shed light on the snares, traps, and enticements that people set up in the name of business that are intended only to catch the sleeping and/or uninformed.

Why would a system, ‘well intentioned’, wait until breakdown or incarceration to consider rehabilitation, after generations of institutionally inflicted trauma and abuse on a people? To me it is obvious that the accumulation of generational trauma and abuse have created the very behaviors the system tries to punish, by providing no sufficient outlets for the victims of institutional terror. Clearly, the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused, who ‘acting out’ from years of abuse and mistreatment, reflect the very aggression that they were exposed to.

VH1 Cancels The Gossip Game

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Reports Shot 97:

Truthfully the appearances from The Hater along with the storylines of Cousin Viv, Ms. Drama, Kim Osario and Jaz Fly were the only things keeping the show afloat!

It was a good premise and would probably have worked better if they didn’t push the show’s time slot to 11pm and if the cast had been tweeked a bit more.

Here is the tea straight from Cousin Viv:

I am sad to inform my readers that there will NOT be a second season of Vh1′s “The Gossip Game“.

I’m not sure what the reasoning was behind the cancellation, but I will say this.

There was a lot going on behind the scenes that affected our show.

For starters, our original start time was 9pm and was pushed back to 9:30 because T.I.’s “A Family Hustle” was a family show and coming on at 10′oclock while most families are getting ready for bed was #NOBueno.

Then we were pushed back to 11pm (which I never understood why that happened) because “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” was coming back to our TV screens and they HAD to repeat that show twice along with T.I.’s show before they even aired our show.

Hence, our show never even had a chance.

So it was no surprise to me that our show got canned. But not one to worry, I’ve got some other things in the works so I know I’ll be straight.

Meek Mill Gets In Trouble Over Remarks On Twitter

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Reports SOHH:

Details of the rapper’s court appearance bubbled online Friday evening.

In a contentious hearing, a Philadelphia judge on Friday ordered up-and-coming rapper Meek Mill to attend etiquette classes and provide his probation officer with details of all travel plans. Common Pleas Judge Genece E. Brinkley told Meek Mill, also known as Robert Williams, that he must complete the classes before Aug. 4 and notify his probation officer, Treas Underwood, any time he wants to travel outside of Pennsylvania. Those orders came at a probation violation hearing for Williams, who is on probation for a 2008 gun and drug conviction. He was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in prison. Williams served eight months in jail and began five years’ probation in the fall of 2009. (Philly)

Additional reports claim Meek’s probation officer has received threats in light of his actions on social media outlets like Twitter.

Assistant District Attorney Nicole A. DeSantis told the judge that Williams was prolific on Twitter and other social media. As a result of some of his pronouncements, she said, Williams’ probation officer had received threats from Williams’ followers via social media. At times, the exchanges between Williams’ lawyer, Gary Silver, and DeSantis grew heated. At one point, the court stenographer asked them to speak one at a time. The judge said Williams needed etiquette classes to refine his use of social media and to help him explain the nature of his business to the court. She recommended that Philadelphia radio host Dyana Williams conduct the classes because of her knowledge of the music business. The judge said the etiquette classes were “more important than any concerts he might have.” (Philly)

Rick Ross Sued Over Rolexes

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From TMZ:

Rick Ross has just been sued for being so sophisticated … he forgot to pay a nearly $90,000 bill for three Rolexes he bought last year — this according to a new lawsuit.

Johnny’s Custom Jewelry in Texas filed the suit against Ross and his company Maybach Music, claiming the rapper agreed to purchase 3 diamond Rolexes last August for a total of $89,847.50.

According to Johnny’s, the Rolexes include one 18K gold watch with 30CT of diamonds ($55,000), one 18K gold watch with 7CT of diamonds ($14,000), and one two-tone watch with 5CT of diamonds ($14,000).

Johnny’s says it held up its end of the bargain — delivering the watches as ordered — but Rick still hasn’t paid for the bling. Johnny’s wants the rapper to cough up the owed money stat, plus interest.

UPDATE: Jay-Z Plans Times Square Concert For July

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UPDATE: Success! The planned performance that was reported on below has reportedly been approved.

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From the New York Post:

Jay-Z is planning a surprise concert atop the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater next month that will turn rush-hour Times Square into a gigantic street party, sources told The Post yesterday.

The rapper is close to obtaining the necessary approvals for a July 8 “Late Show With David Letterman” performance, the sources said.

The city killed the same plan in the summer of 2010 over concerns about crowd control and security.

“If he gets permission from the mayor’s office, it’s going to be off the hook,” a law-enforcement source said. “They’ll have to shut down Broadway around the Letterman building. They’ll have to have a strong police presence. It’s going to be chaos with so many fans.”

The sources said the concert will likely go off as planned, despite the Bloomberg administration’s decision to pull the plug three years ago.

“It is close. There are a lot of logistical concerns,” one said, including shutting down a large swath of Times Square near the theater, which is between West 53rd and West 54th streets.

But, the source added, “This would be a great event for New York City.”

In 2010, Jay-Z and Eminem moved their concert to the theater’s rooftop, where permits weren’t required, after the city put the kibosh on their initial plan.