THIS WILL BE YOU!
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
(Late) Drake Feature in FADER
On September 7, 2008, Lil Wayne stepped onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards and then stepped decisively away from the words on the lyric sheet circulating in the audience with the following lines…
I’m on my Disney thang, goofy flow/ I’m Captain Hook on the beat and my new car is Rufio/ Damn where my roof just go/ I’m somebody that you should know/ Get to shakin’ somethin’ cause that’s what [deleted] produced it fo’/ I make mistakes that I don’t ever make excuses fo’/ Leavin’ girls that love me and constantly seducing hoes/ I’m losing my mind like, Damn where my roof just go/ Top slipped off like Janet at the Super Bowl
Then, as Leona Lewis launched into the hook of Nina Simone’s “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” he croaked, “Drizzy Drake: I love you, bwoy!” That namecheck was the only clue to most attendees that Wayne had just blatantly violated the unwritten rules of his own freestyle game by spitting another artist’s words. Though almost lost in host Russell Brand’s commentary on promise rings and presidential politics, it was a coronation moment rarely seen in the arena of rap, and with one verse, Wayne introduced the name of his protégé to the mainstream in dramatic fashion. Amongst those already familiar with the various Wayne-affiliated rookies collectively known as Young Money, the lines sparked a fierce debate over whether Drake was in fact ghostwriting for the master (he and Wayne both still claim he never has), but by the time the rap blog drama blew over, one thing seemed clear: Drake was the next big thing, heir apparent to Wayne’s multi-platinum throne and Young Money’s most likely flagship artist.
The buzz was confirmed by the radio phenomenon of “Best I Ever Had,” a soft rock-sampling mixtape track that hit #1 on numerous charts without major label support or even a record deal in place. But a second look made this passing of the torch seem like an unlikely proposition. Drake shares with Wayne a certain manchild vocal tone, but their styles are almost antonyms. Where Wayne rides his stream-of-consciousness through drug and gunplay into Freudian—almost hallucinatory—nursery rhymes, Drake hews rigorously close to the guidelines of rap formalism, pumping an incredible volume of two- and three-syllable schemes out of the same subjects: girls, multi-colored whips and his skill in the booth. He seems to depart from this formula only to talk about his emotional state, an introspection that usually happens when he shifts from rap mode into catchy and sometimes haunting R&B. On his own records, he abandons Southern double-time to push genre boundaries more like Kanye, rapping over chopped-and-filtered snatches of Coldplay, Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn & John.
The differences only get starker if you compare Drake’s bio to his project-raised, tattooed and codeine-addicted mentor. Though born in Memphis, Aubrey Drake Graham was raised in Forest Hills, an affluent enclave of Toronto that is about as far in mood and geography from New Orleans as you could get without a land bridge. Before he ever considered being a rapper, Drake was a child actor, portraying athlete Jimmy Brooks on the Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation. His father, Dennis Graham, was a drummer for Jerry Lee Lewis, and he is nephew to both legendary bassist Larry Graham and Teenie Hodges—a guitarist best known for co-writing some of Al Green’s ’70s classics who’s played with everyone from Talking Heads to Cat Power.
The more you know about him, in fact, the harder it seems to know exactly who Drake is. There is something almost chameleon-like about his talent. If his appeal can’t be contained to a one-liner like “Wayne protégé,” it’s only because he invites a whole series of comparisons: to Wayne’s inventiveness, Kanye’s art-school eclecticism, Jay-Z’s braggadocio and Lloyd’s post-Kelly singsong. Though he reps Toronto, in interviews Drake has even said that a childhood split between his father’s base in Memphis and his mother’s house in Canada has allowed him to escape the territorial matrix of rap. He’s parlayed this “from everywhere” quality into a burgeoning career as a guest verse specialist, always adjusting his approach to the demands of the host organism, a strategy that makes you wonder which Drake will step out on his own debut LP—slated to drop before the end of the year—a project that’s not recorded yet but already titled Thank Me Later.
In some sense, Drake has already provided one answer in the form of So Far Gone, the mixtape that spawned “Best I Ever Had.” Those who know him primarily as a Young Money soldier may be unaware that it had almost nothing to do with Wayne except for his vocal features, having been produced exclusively by Drake’s Toronto-based crew, and appropriately, it’s on his home court that I finally catch up with the moving target of so many expectations. We’ve both just flown in from New York on different flights and link for an after-midnight dinner on the roof deck of an Italian restaurant in which Drake is a silent partner. He’s wearing a leather jacket and leaning on a cane with a gangsterish list, walking off the same basketball injury that had him propped up on a stool for his closing performance at the 2009 BET Awards. Posing for our camera with glass raised, he has the air of a newly made man trying on the don’s overcoat for size, but in between snaps, he is quick to flash a grin to let you know he doesn’t take himself too serious. In person, he has a face like mercury, sometimes opening wide with disarming vulnerability, then just as impulsively clowning, eyes seeking out everyone’s reaction to see if they get the joke. If you don’t, they move away instantly, flat and bored. Child-star handsome, at 22 he is still growing into his looks, with deep-set eyes that make his face somehow boyish and craggy at the same time, features almost too large for his slim shoulders in a way that heightens the youthful quality. It is Fourth of July weekend. In the past week or so, Michael Jackson died, and Drake finally inked a major label deal. But the conversation mostly centers on the Kanye West-directed video for “Best I Ever Had,” which has just debuted. West’s cinematography is being panned by a local video dude who doesn’t like the lighting, though judging from his neon lumberjack and the hat awkwardly covering his baldy, his aesthetics are not necessarily to be banked on. Drake hardly blinks at the hometown hater, but the video—which features him playing coach to a female basketball squad in a league of their own, cleavage-wise—has invited negative feedback from other fans, ones whose opinion may carry more weight. Whether you like it or not, the video’s tone definitely puts an ironic distance on the genuine emotion of the hook, thereby ruining the girlish daydreams of many a 16-year-old disciple. Of these there are more than a few, many of them fans he brought with him from his days as a cable TV heartthrob. Drake claims not to have put too much thought into it. “I started getting the straight cookie cutter treatments,” he says. “The pretty boy, lovey-dovey shit that everybody wanted me to do.” The Toronto accent is an extreme north version of flat Midwestern twang, sprinkled with Jamaican patois. In Drake’s case, it’s mediated by a soft Southern cadence picked up from his Memphis cousins. It balances out in the middle somewhere, and if you didn’t know different, he could easily be from Detroit or Chicago. “I was just like, Man, let’s do Kanye’s video,” he says. “Some crazy shit that could potentially offend people. Let’s just fall out of this pattern of doing everything that everyone wants.” Despite the nonchalance, it’s the first inkling I get that his identity crisis is not so much a question about what makes him tick as a potential answer. The bait-and-switch of the video seems like a slo-mo version of a tactic he employs often in conversation and even in song, as when he raps, “I’m the next to blow…pause.” He’s always going out on a limb and then skewering himself before anyone else can, just to let you know that he could son himself more skillfully than you ever could—that he has the lyrical teeth to skewer you if you mistake introspection for weakness.
Toronto has been repeatedly recognized by the United Nations as the world’s most multicultural city, and the security council of close homies assembled around Drake seems to echo this. There’s Niko, with whom I don’t talk much but who looks like the fifth member of Black Chiney Soundsystem. Oliver el-Khatib, a Lebanese-Scandinavian who grew up between Toronto and London, is Drake’s brand manager. Tyrone “T-Rexx” Edwards promotes some of the trendiest parties in the city when he’s not running a government-sponsored project that gives inner city youth access to a professional studio. Boi 1da produced the beat for “Best I Ever Had,” while Noah “40” Shebib is Drake’s engineer and main partner in the studio. Then there’s Foots, whose main job seems to be taking Drake’s car on epic missions to acquire Belmonts for el-Khatib to smoke and being dipped head to toe in Polo. Totally unsolicited, he lifts his pantcuffs and shirt-tail to display the logos on his socks and boxers, just in case you doubted the thoroughness of his game. “I mean,” he says, “It do have a horse pon it too right? Respeck.” Even the brown-skinned girls who float around the table boast family trees that include Carib, Arawak, Syrian and African branches. Also, everybody is nice. In fact, to judge from this crew, everybody in Toronto is a creative individual with a pleasant-ass demeanor, racially integrated, well-adjusted, has free health care and is not broke.
All of which begs the question: What the hell do they have to rap about? Driving through, the city itself feels modern, clean and spacious, with no visible ghettos or overcrowding. If rap music often feels like a reverse SATs, an intellectual exercise inherently—if not intentionally—biased in a way that favors the skill sets of kids from oppressed minorities and dilapidated zip codes, it seems almost natural for a newcomer to edit out the squeaky clean parts of their resume. But Drake does not seem particularly pressed to play down the middle class and Jewish half of his biracial upbringing and frequently mentions his mother’s central role in his life.
The next day he even lets us tag along to visit his bubbe, his mother’s mother, in the nursing home she recently moved into. She obviously adores her Aubrey, and is not even mad when we interrupt her card game with her boyfriend. “Don’t call him that, we just say he’s a friend,” she says, as she is apparently not the type of bubbe to have her biz in the streets. “I have a girlfriend like that too,” Drake replies. “We say she’s just a friend, cause she doesn’t want anybody to know.” He could be talking about Rihanna, whom he’s been hanging out with a lot lately, or maybe his ex, Canadian diva Keshia Chante. Or really, any one of a number of world-class dimes he seems to have on the hook these days. We go to sit with Bubbe in her suite, where she has a Drake splash page from the Toronto paper taped to the wall. “Well, what’s new with you?” she asks, and Drake starts off like any other college age grandson. “Just traveling, mostly.” But then, “I signed a record deal. For a million dollars…” Bubbe makes him repeat this a few times before she is sure she heard right. “Actually, more than a million,” he confirms. That deal is the end result of what has been described as one of the biggest bidding wars the music industry has seen in ages. No one party is willing to share all the details, but Atlantic Records and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine were certainly both in the mix, and at one point, Universal Motown president Sylvia Rhone apparently threatened Drake with legal action to prevent him from going elsewhere. In the end, he signed directly to Aspire, a company co-run by his manager (and Young Money CEO) Cortez Bryant, with major label distribution through Universal Republic. Although his Wikipedia entry and various news items list his label as Cash Money/Universal Motown, Drake is quick to say, “I went through Universal Republic because I don’t fuck with Motown. At all.” The details are more than academic, since the Universal affiliation is what allows Lil Wayne and Young Money to own a piece of the project. But even though Wayne has been touted as an executive producer in previous interviews, Drake indicates that putting a YM logo on the disc is more of a nod to his mentor than a structural reality. “I respect the fact that Wayne put me in this position,” he says. “But as an artist, I have to do my own thing at this point. I’m not sure if that’s gonna be a struggle in the next couple months, to set myself apart. I don’t want it to feel like a disrespectful thing, but I know it’s a bridge that I’m going to have to cross as far as becoming my own person.”
Our next stop is the house Drake grew up in, which turns out to be one floor of a modest duplex on a block of Forest Hills that feels suburban but hardly wealthy. We’re here to continue the dubious project of pretending not to be photographing Drake at whatever activities he would be up to anyway. By that measure, he would be lamping under the birdbath in his smallish backyard, wrapped in a newly purchased Hermés blanket against the chill of a Canadian summer evening, staring at the purple flowers that overhang the steps and celebrating a million-plus advance with a bottle of Opus One and a droopy spliff. Although it’s meant to be a contemplative moment, there are lot of “pause” jokes between pics, and a lot of “respecks”—a conversation ender meant to convey exactly the opposite of what it says. “Which one” is another recurring theme, a particular way of phrasing friendly disrespect as an open-ended question, as in: “Foots, is that Polo Mansion or Polo Warehouse? Which one?” Drake’s mother arrives, to make sure we followed her detailed instructions and found the keys where they were hidden in a blue plastic prescription drug canister under the planter on top of the barbecue grill. She looks at her son wrapped in the Hermés blanket and says, “Are you cold, or are you just trying to look cool?” prompting much discussion of her natural “which one” skills. Drake has just about taken an entire Swisher Sweetfull to the face when Kanye West calls to say he’s done a re-edit of the “Best” video he wants him to see. T-Rexx is holding Drake’s phone and there’s an awkward interlude when he answers, “Ye? Kan-Ye?” because the association is still so new it doesn’t seem real.
This highlights yet another x-factor in play around this album project, which is the fact that Kanye—according to the people around Drake, anyway—is so open on his talent that he is more amped to work on Drake’s project than his own, dangling the possibility that he might step in as executive producer. That night at Cherry Beach studio, the crew runs through two or three newly recorded songs which are in contention for Thank Me Later. There’s “Shut it Down,” a pure R&B burner that’s so close to the sound he’s going for that Drake “probably almost can’t see it not making it”—though it still needs a rap verse and maybe a guest. There are tracks with Rihanna and Pharrell. “Forever” may be for the album or possibly a forthcoming soundtrack, a Kanye collabo in which he and Drake bring out the best in each other, elevating their respective rap games in a way that’s only happened with Drake and Wayne on tracks like “Ransom.” It’s the kind of verse that lends real credibility to his fans’ claims that Drake is the best lyricist on the set in 2009. Despite the obvious implication, he does not seem inclined to substitute one mentor for another, preferring to develop the sound for the album himself, drawing beats from his engineer, “40” Shebib, and other members of his crew, loosely known as October’s Very Own. It’s not that he doesn’t want Kanye’s input, but he feels that, “We’ve got to build a vision that’s strong enough for Kanye to come and say, ‘Okay, I see it.’ That Pharrell can say, ‘Okay, I see it.’”
It’s the following day now, and Drake is laid out on the king-size of a luxury hotel suite, resting the injured leg. With a tape recorder and chair pulled alongside, I can’t help but feel a little like a psychiatrist, and I am in fact asking him about his childhood. “Well I have always sorta been alone in my world,” he starts off. “I have great relationships with my parents and stuff, but I’ve never really been connected to anything, and it caused me to think a lot.” We talk about the relationship that first provoked him to try singing and his Memphis cousin’s obsession with Usher; about his misfit status amongst the rich kids of the Forest Hills high school where he lasted exactly one year, the biracial kid with the single mom and the dad “who was more like a little brother.” We talk about what aspects he drew from each: his father’s “overcool, Shaft-like personality,” his mom’s ambition, her generosity.
He is remarkably able to see and articulate all this in himself. But by this point, I don’t need anybody to tell me he’s got a whole hell of a lot to rap about after all; that probably since he even had an identity, he’s been using his exceptional verbal ability to navigate uncomfortable situations, sometimes finding common ground, sometimes striking out to defend himself, but always having to decide where to fit in when there is no automatic place for him. I give one last shot at getting Drake to define the place he wants to carve for himself with the album, his official stepping out moment. His eyes go wide with that throw-you-off vulnerability and he says, “I don’t think I ever want to find my place.”
Are we suprised by this?????
Jay-Z has done it again. The living rap legend has scored his eleventh no. 1 album with his latest disc The Blueprint 3 and surpassed his sales projections by over 125,000 copies.
As previously reported, industry insider hitsdailydouble.com placed Hov at around 300-350,000 for his first week sales, but according to Nielsen SoundScan, the rap megastar sold closer to 475,700. This is no small feat as Jay’s last album American Gangster sold 425,800 units in a much sunnier sales climate. The Brooklyn-bred MC was everywhere promoting BP3, with a star-studded 9-11 benefit at Madison Square Garden airing live on Fuse, a performance with Alicia Keys at the MTV VMAs and interviews on everyone from Oprah to Bill Maher to Stephen A. Smith.
Fellow New York vet Raekwon also made an impressive debut this week. The Wu-Tang rapper’s sequel to the 1995 classic, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, landed at the no. 4 spot, selling 67,600 copies in its first week.
Climbing four spots up the charts to make it back into the top 10 is the Black Eyed Peas. The group’s latest disc The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies) sold 10,000 more albums this week than last week, earning them a seat at no. 7. The group moved 43,500 units in their 14th week, making their grand total stand at 1,071,100.
Falling 16 spots to no. 24 is Pitbull. The Miami rep’s latest disc, Rebelution sold 17,800 CDs this week, making his two-week stats stand at 59,100.
At no. 30 is the collector’s edition of Jay’s first Blueprint album. The new version of the 2001 classic LP that turned Kanye West and Just Blaze into superproducers, pushed 14,000 units out of the stores this week.
Two spots down is fellow “Renegade” Eminem with his Relapse LP. In his 17th week on The Billboard 200 charts, Shady sold 13,700 units, making his overall tally stand at 1,424,600. Directly under Em is Brooklyn MC Fabolous. Loso’s Way cranked out 13,600 from the shelves this week, putting his grand total at 220,900.
Next week look for new releases from Kid Cudi, Drake, Lil Boosie, Q-Tip, Trick Daddy, New Boyz, M.O.P., N.O.R.E., Capone, KRS-One and Buckshot to make The Billboard 200. –Elan Mancini
Here WE go...
In Light of all the drama from the VMA's this past weekend. I wanted to stay away from the Kanye West/Taylor Swift fiasco. While I was out having lunch with some friends on Tuesday afternoon, I saw a copy of the USA TODAY, and I see Kanye West and Taylor Swift on the cover. I read the article, and decided to post it. (forgive me KW!!!!)
When South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama's address to Congress by shouting "You lie!" last week, at least one man was elated.
"I thought, 'Great, now the notion of civility may be back on the national agenda,' " says P.M. Forni, who heads The Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, an effort that promotes etiquette.
FAITH & REASON: No jackasses, Jesus said
After last weekend, Forni might want to hire extra staff. It looks like incivility is storming the gates.
First came tennis star Serena Williams, who lost her U.S. Open semifinal to Kim Clijsters on Saturday not with an errant shot on the last point, but because of a blistering salvo at a line judge who had called a foot fault on Williams.
Williams' expletive-laced tirade threatened the woman with bodily harm. The tennis player, who was fined $10,500 and went on to win the tournament's doubles championship Monday with her sister Venus, initially issued a lukewarm apology. Then, in a statement Monday, she apologized more directly and said her behavior was "inappropriate."
On Sunday night came rapper Kanye West, who bum-rushed the stage at Radio City Music Hall during the MTV Video Music Awards to interrupt Taylor Swift as she accepted the statuette for best female video. West snatched her microphone and ranted that Beyoncé should have won.
West subsequently apologized to Swift via his blog, saying, "That was Taylor's moment and I had no right … to take it away." But, he said, "I'm just real." On the premiere of The Jay Leno Show Monday night, the rapper added, "It was rude, period," and told Leno he wants to take time off to analyze "how I'm going to make it through the rest of this life."
Unfortunately for Wilson, these latest examples of boorish behavior haven't let him slip into pop culture's comforting shadows. Today, the House is scheduled to vote on a "resolution of disapproval" of his actions. Wilson says his apology, which the president accepted, is all that should be asked of him.
Individually, any of the events might have faded quickly into the global noise of Tweets, blogs and other digital gossip. But their back-to-back-to-back nature, as well as their high-profile forums, raise the question: Are we a nation of boors — or just keeping things real?
"I don't think society is coming off the rails," says Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post and a principal at the Emily Post Institute, which monitors the nation's P's and Q's.
"These three events were bad, but the reactions to them were significant in that people were not impressed," says Post, who points to everything from campaign donations to Wilson's opponents to a flurry of posts from celebrities who were appalled by West's behavior. (On her blog, pop star Kelly Clarkson blasted West for interrupting Swift and asked him, "What happened to you as a child?? Did you not get hugged enough??")
But perhaps the most poignant sign that civility lives was Beyoncé's response to West's stunt. After taking the stage at the VMAs for her video-of-the-year win for Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), Beyoncé brought Swift, 19, back on stage so Swift could have a do-over on her thank-you speech.
"Kanye stole Taylor's moment, but Beyoncé stole it right back," Post says. "That's an inspiration for anyone who would let all this bad behavior get them down."
Her gesture indeed turned heads.
"It's another reason to respect Beyoncé," says Miley Cyrus, another teen pop star who had her own run-in with incivility recently when actor/singer Jamie Foxx told her (in crude terms) to grow up. His comments came on satellite radio, after Cyrus complained that she hadn't gotten to hang out with the rock group Radiohead at the Grammy Awards.
Cyrus says she hasn't seen the video of West's interruption, and doesn't plan to.
"I don't want to give it another YouTube view to support (such) drama," she says.
A desire for attention
For Swift, West's act has had the effect of a homecoming queen getting tripped by the school bully. Her reward for staying cool could even be the Country Music Association's next Entertainer of the Year award, says Charlie Cook, senior manager of country programming for KKGO radio in Los Angeles.
"The country music community could rise up and say, 'Kanye, watch this!' " he says. "She's a smart woman, and I think it took her two seconds to realize that if she kept her mouth shut, it was going to be better than anything she possibly could have said."
A bit ironic, considering that it's typically the outburst that gets the publicity. And wanting more of the spotlight is precisely what motivates many of those who make a scene as West, Williams and Wilson did, says Letitia Baldrige of the executive consulting firm Baldrige & Lewris.
"Two things are happening: One is a mad desire to be the center of news, and the other is a sense among these people that because they are successful, they can get away with anything," says the veteran etiquette maven, who was first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's social secretary. "I've been around a while, so I've reached this level of cynicism proudly. But I do think that at some point as a society we'll hit a wall and turn back. Something will happen to make us stop and examine our behavior."
How we got to this place isn't a mystery, says Forni, author of The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude.
"American society is among the most informal in the world, and often that informality crosses over into incivility," he says. "Now, you add the informality of the Internet to this culture, and all bets are off. It's an age of total disclosure and total expression, with very little concern for the feelings of others."
The ability to comment about others from a distance and with anonymity is the Web's hallmark and its poison, says Jerry Bowles, co-founder of SocialMediaToday.com, which keeps tabs on the impact of social media on society. Bowles' recent blog post lamented the recent erosion of civility.
"The Web seems to turn most people into adversaries, and in doing so, we tend to lose the ability to really talk to each other," he says. "This is particularly true for politics on the Web, where the comments tend to run to the extremes and sometimes can be downright seditious. I find it scary."
Is there any antidote to such venom?
"It starts with an apology," Forni says. "That is what restores the bones of civil society."
Post agrees, noting that West's blog apology to Swift hardly counts, and if anything seems to keep the focus on its author and not the mea culpa.
"A Tweet just brings it all back to you again," she says. "It should be in person or on the phone."
A purpose behind the outbursts?
West's transgression did rock the celebrity crowd, which tends to defend its own and even glorify edgy behavior, says Chris Willman, a blogger for Yahoo! Music who says West told him to "die" after Willman wrote a negative review of West's work.
"In the back of Kanye's mind, he figures anything he does can be written off as, 'That's just Kanye being Kanye,' " Willman says. "But because he is such a popular and respected figure, it took real rage for these fellow celebrities to come out against him."
Willman adds that whether it's West or Wilson or "anyone, really, it seems like people are turning into modern-day Howard Beales," a reference to the crazed news anchor in the 1976 film Networkwho urges viewers to repeat after him, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."
"If you have an outburst in public, there's a certain element of your fan base that expect it and will probably love you for it," says Willman, citing Wilson's quasi-celebrity among some conservatives — a sentiment that echoes raucous "town hall" meetings in which boisterous critics have blasted Democrats' plans to overhaul the health-care system.
"For West, this could be the beginning of a true chastening," Willman says. "But for Wilson, it could be the beginnings of him as a true cult figure."
That may be difficult for some to swallow. After all, Wilson insulted the president to his face in a forum — the House floor — with a strict code of conduct. Lawmakers are required to address each other in the third person. (Which is why, as C-SPAN junkies know, politicians often address each other with stilted phrases such as "My distinguished colleague" from such-and-such state.) What's more, they are admonished to "refrain from discussing the president's personal character."
All of which made Wilson's outburst all the more shocking — and not just to Democrats. "I cringed," said Rep. David Dreier of California, the top-ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee.
"Wilson's comments would seem so much more severe than West's or Williams'," says Alan Light, a music journalist and former editor of Vibe and Spin. "After all, in the pop culture world you almost have to create controversy or no one will pay attention."
West comes out of a hip-hop tradition that speaks "truth to power, but hip-hop is mainstream now," Light says. "Swift is hardly the person you interrupt to make the point that your friend's video is better. His is not an underdog voice."
As for Williams, Light notes that she's merely following in the footsteps of tennis bad-boys John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. "Was it the severity of the language that made it so bad?" he asks. "Because she's hardly the first to yell" at a line judge.
For CBS tennis commentator Mary Carillo, who believes Williams should receive a stiffer fine and be suspended, tennis has the obligation to censure any player who violates a code of conduct. "I have always admired what a fighter Serena is, and how fair she and her sister are," Carillo says. "And there's no question she felt under pressure as she was losing to someone who had just become a mom and gotten back into the game. So it was an aberration.
"Having said that, that lineperson felt threatened. She felt fear," Carillo says. "I've got a couple of kids, and I see thuggery on many of the TV shows they watch. So, no, it's not OK to say, 'That's just the way society is today,' and leave it at that."
Contributing: Brian Mansfield, Elysa Gardner and Kathy Kiely
Interesting.... I guess?
I was reading some stuff from New York, and I stumbled on this. I am not a HUGE Perez Hilton fan, but I like Lady Gaga's Music, and I think she is doing what a lot of these "pop" acts are in fear of doing: Being Different. Any how, here's the article.
One of the most-hyped Fashion Week parties was Out magazine's at the Box last night, thrown in honor of September issue cover girl and vocal gay-rights proponent Lady Gaga. The rumors (and there were many) were evenly split between thinking she'd perform and thinking she'd simply show up and say hello to her fans. The night before, Gaga seemed to have no trouble attending the Marc Jacobs show and performing practically naked at the after-party the designer threw in conjunction with V magazine. But Out magazine couldn't confirm Gaga's attendance at the party they threw for her until she finally showed up at the Box at around midnight, about an hour after Out's party technically ended. By then most of the crowd — die-hard Gaga fans, who showed up mostly just to see her — had cleared. Gaga took a seat in a booth in the back of the balcony, ordered French fries, and refused to speak to reporters. She didn't even let Out magazine take her picture so they could, you know, say she actually attended the party they threw for her.
Earlier in the night Gaga attended Perez Hilton's party to celebrate the launch of his new, um, fashion blog, CocoPerez.com. She had no trouble getting her photo taken at that soirée. Perez accompanied her to the Out party, and gamely posed for photos by the bar downstairs before assuming his spot at Gaga's booth. Earlier in the day she did a mini photo shoot for V wearing a T-shirt with her V cover on it. Out editor Aaron Hicklin tried to persuade her and her people to do a photo op, but by the time we left she hadn't budged. Seeing as no images of her have emerged on the wire, she must not have. So why the diva behavior at Out's party? She can flaunt her nipples for Marc but can't even let Out take her photo? Diva fail.
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