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“Ah, man. I don’t like to give it up,” he said when asked to explain one song on the album. “I got this song with Shawty Redd called ‘Let Me Handle My Business.’ The beat is … matter of fact, I’m not going to sell it like that. Shawty Redd, Young Jeezy, you know what it is. I’m just going in, basically handling my business. I gotta say what’s on my mind. But I’m not here to sell you on no album. Like I said, June, you will be surprised, homie. That’s real talk. I been working on this. I been back in the lab. … I got you.”

Via: MTV

Via: MTV

“The Funeral Service, the title of the mixtape is There Is No Competition, so I played off that like the competition is all dead to me. I don’t see anybody who could even be competition for me. I bump into a lot of people — I’m not gonna drop nobody’s name — but they say, ‘Just stay where you’re at. You’re in a perfect lane. Nobody can do what you do right now as far as being a lyrical dude and one of the guys that all the R&B artists run to to get on joints. It works for you.’ My lane is my lane. As an artist, I think I’ve evolved in my lane too.”

Via: MTV

“All my dreams are coming true all across the board for some reason,” Jay Electronica said via phone from London. Jay — who’s on the other side of the pond headlining shows — just celebrated his daughter Mars’ first birthday (mom is Erykah Badu) and his hometown team the New Orleans Saints just won the Super Bowl. Plus his career is on the upswing; life is good.

Jay’s Just Blaze-produced “Exhibit C” is one of those special hip-hop records that you hear and instantly love. An independent release, it’s garnering heavy rotation on major radio stations like New York’s Hot 97, and in the streets and on the Internet the record has the buzz of a #1 single. Several MCs from Capone-N-Noreaga to Cassidy have freestyled over the track on mixtapes and Diddy, Mos Def, Nas, Q-Tip and Talib Kweli have been publicly co-signing Electronica. The record is definitely his breakthrough.

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“It was mutual,” Bleek said about not signing with Hov’s Roc Nation and choosing to go independent. “It was a conversation … I was asking him his next move. What is he gonna do? Where is Blueprint 3 coming out, since he had just left Def Jam. He was telling me he was doing this Roc Nation thing. He was trying to start a whole new venture, new label, new brand — a whole new everything. I was like, ‘Damn. What’s next for me?’ He was like, ‘Whatever you wanna do.’ After a little bit of thinking, I came to a decision: ‘It’s time for [my company] Get Lo to breathe. I can’t be under that umbrella forever.’ The conversation was more or less mutual.

Hey, man, it’s ‘No beef 2010.’ That’s the trending topic on this interview, man,” Game laughed. “Dre called me and he was like, ‘You got any current-day problems with Ashanti?’ I was like, ‘Nah. I ain’t got no problems with Ashanti.’ She can sing like mutha—-a and you put her on a hook, it’s automatically radio. So he was like, ‘I’mma have her come down.’ ”

Within an hour, Game, Dre and Ashanti where in the studio working on music.

“Dre was going through beats and I picked one. I was like, ‘Let’s try her on this hook.’ Me and Ashanti wrote the hook, I went in on the verses and that was it,” he explained. “The song me and Ashanti did, it don’t even have a name for it yet. It’s crazy. We just did that a week ago and I ain’t even name it.”

Via: MTV

Go behind the scenes with Beyoncé as she shoots two commercials for Style Savvy, a new fashion video game for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi.