Love him or hate him, Lil Wayne (aka Weezy) is the man of the moment with his anticipated new album, Tha Carter III (Cash Money/Universal) released earlier this week which broke sales records - selling close to half a million units on the day of its release. And with an approximated million copies sold within the first week - it is guaranteed to be the number one Billboard pop chart  topper. Undoubtedly the album will also go on to become one of the top selling releases of 2008. 

"It's doing really well here. It got a whole bunch of hype of course. But what is interesting to me is the diversity of Lil Wayne fans," reports Marques Newson from the hip-hop department at the Amoeba Music Hollywood store. "I was on the register Tuesday, the release date of the new CD, and there was literally every type of person buying it, every race and age you can think of.  Not just young guys like you might think...but like 40 or 50 year old white women or 60 year old black women."  

Speaking of age, what is most significant about Lil Wayne, a long established rap star  who just recently scored his first pop hit with "Lollipop," is that he is only 25 years old but has been putting it down in the rap game since he hooked up with the Cash Money Records crew when just a teenager.  Besides Lil Wayne's regular full length releases (it's three years since his last official album Tha Carter II) and the countless cameos he makes on other projects, there are a ton of mix CDs featuring his music, including DJ EFX (not to be confused with Raul "DJ EFX" Recinos -- veteran Bay Area hip-hop/house/ tribal/electronic DJ/producer), who recently dropped the popular Before The Carter Vol. 2.  The mixtape only helped fuel interest in the artist's official June 10th release that is clearly geared for crossover pop success with such high-profile collaborators as Jay-Z.

On top of all this, Lil Wayne recently wrapped up filming a part as a student-athlete in the forthcoming movie The Patriots with Forest Whitaker. So Dwayne Michael Carter (his real name) looks set to be a huge, huge star. Of course, the far-from-humble Dwayne has been calling himself "the best rapper alive" for quite a while already which, note, is one of the reasons he causes so much ire in others. Another reason he gets hated on in hip-hop circles is that the often clearly buzzed Weezy (cough syrup is one of his favorite poisons, as well as weed and E) will utter, or rather slur, some of the dumbest, most unprofessional things at the most inappropriate times (i.e, in recorded interviews), like when he recently told Foundation magazine that mix-tape DJs suck ("Fuck you if you are a mix tape DJ" and "I created the mix tape game" were two of his quotes).

Of course such a statement would not go unchecked for long, especially in this digital age when word travels fast, real fast, and YouTube rebuttals surface almost instantly.  One of the first to take Weezy's bait and defend the honor of the mix tape DJ was none other than respected longtime mix-tape DJ Doo Wop (at right), who's been making mix tapes since they were tapes or cassettes, and who also happens to be a skilled emcee with a history of picking up the the mic to use as a battle weapon. Doo Wop responded with some scathing anti-Weezy commentary via song and videos including "Smarten Up Dwayne," (below) in which (among other put-downs) he calls the drug-addled Weezy, "Mr. Winehouse." The clip has already created  quite a buzz since it was posted early last week.



An unlikely person to benefit from the buzz surrounding the Doo Wop vs. Dwayne controversy is Bay Area producer/turntablist DJ Spair of Oakland Faders fame. "Very recently I've been getting all of these hits on MySpace and YouTube directed from Doo Wop's postings," said DJ Spair by phone from Las Vegas yesterday. The reason for the response is DJ Spair and Bronx, NY's Doo Wop had recently collaborated on a great track called "Things Just Ain't The Same." An advance promo-only single from the still-in-production DJ Spair debut album, the single -- recorded before Doo Wop's run-in with Weezy jumped off -- features Doo Wop on the mic over a killer track by Spair. That song also finds Doo Wop defending the honor of longtime hip-hop DJs but also quick to cut down the recent wave of fake wannabe mix tape "DJs"  getting a dumb ID and stretching it out into a redundant 80 minute mix CD.

The DJ Spair album, which will be his solo debut album as producer/artist (not to be confused with the series of mix CDs he has released over the years), will drop later this year and will feature many other exciting cameos including Zion I, and Mistah F.A.B. (reworking an old Hugh E MC cut).

Spair's group the Oakland Faders, which he formed back at the beginning of this decade with DJ Platurn (pictured left with Spair), is still an entity but their appearances as a full unit will be fewer now that Spair will be spending most of his time in Las Vegas where he is already doing residencies, including one inside the Mandalay. "There are a lot of DJs out here but most of them suck...only a handful can really rock a party," said Spair, who is a killer turntablist and who has been DJing for a good decade. He mentioned such other great hip-hop DJs as the Beat Junkies' Melo-D who also does a residency in Vegas, and Presto 1 and DJ Megaman, coincidentally two DJs with whom Spair says he is forming the new turntable trio The Other Guys.
 
HIP-HOP QUOTABLE OF THE WEEK:

"Hip-hop is dead. That's what they said on the news.
Nah. It's still alive. It's just getting confused"
   - quote by Yungun (aka Essa) on the song "Just Won't Stop" off the new Herbaliser album Same As It Never Was in which the UK emcee drops some insightful observations on the oversaturated hip-hop music scene of this current digital age where everyone's an artist. "There's a million acts but no fans," he also notes in the same song.




Above is the video for the great new single from RZA, aka Bobby Digital, "U Can't Stop Me Now," featuring fellow Wu member Inspectah Deck and taken from the artist's new full-length Digi Snacks -- in Amoeba on June 24th. Speaking of RZA,  who is currently on a tour that stops at 1015 Folsom in San Francisco on Saturday (June 21), you may recall recently reading an Amoeblog about the hip-hop/chess connection, in which the prominent Wu-Tang Clan member won the Hip-Hop Chess Federation belt at last year's tournament held in the Bay Area. Well, the latest is that RZA has unveiled a chess website called wuchess.com where hip-hop generation chess fanatics can get news on Wu-Tang and chess championships, play chess online, and social network with other chess/hip-hop heads. But be forewarned, the site is not free: it charges an annual membership fee of $48. 

The recent news story about someone stealing the ashes of Kurt Cobain reminded me of how in 2005 some fool actually stole Andre Hicks, aka Mac Dre's, tombstone (50 pounds in weight) from Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery where the murdered legendary Vallejo rap star was buried in November 2005. After the brazen theft, a reward of $10,000 for the recovery of the headstone was offered plus promises to beat the culprit -- if ever caught.  The tombstone was never recovered but it has since been replaced.