Drake ~ The Motto Featuring Lil Wayne & Tyga (Official Video) from OctobersVeryOwn on Vimeo.

For ever-popular rap star Drake's latest, brand new video, released yesterday, for "The Motto" featuring Lil Wayne and Tyga, the top selling artist whose recently released second album Take Care (from where this song is culled as a bonus track) went straight to number one on the Billboard pop album charts (and #1 at Amoeba too the week it was released last month) travels to the Bay Area.

 The video is an homage to the Bay in general and in particular to Mac Dre (the late great Vallejo rapper born Andre Hicks whose mom Wanda Salvatto appears at the beginning of video) and some other Bay Area landmarks including Amoeba Music San Francisco at the 1:10 mark in the above video - making it the latest in a long line of music videos, movies, and TV commercials to feature Amoeba Music. 

Drake's new excellent video features lots of other Bay landmarks (a lot of footage shot on Treasure Island) and familiar rap figures including E-40 and Drake lovingly shouts out Mac Dre and even paraphrases some of his music ("Feelin Myself") in the song/video. You can buy Drake's Take Care on CD and also Take Care on vinyl from Amoeba Music.

With the smell of BBQs in the air this Memorial Day weekend and the kick off of the summer season that gladly brings with it the time to relax & kick back with family and friends, music steps up its role in playing a central theme in our lives. Hence this (subjective) summer song playlist culled from the literally thousands of great songs out there that celebrate summertime and  just hanging out in the sunshine in the park or backyard, or at the beach.

Here are a dozen personal faves (lots of classics) from the rap and pop categories culled from over the past several decades including Len's "Steal My Sunshine" (1999), Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince's "Summertime" (1991), Raewkon's "Ice Cream" (1995), The Foo Fighters' "Barbeque Song" that they did for an MTV special (2007), Mac Dre's "California Livin'" (1992), Dove Shack's (with Warren G) "Summertime in the LBC," and dating back to 1966 with The Lovin Spoonful's summertime classic "Summer In The City."

                           
           

Today marks the anniversary of a sad occasion for Bay Area rap fans. On this date, November 1st, back in 2004, Vallejo rapper Mac Dre was shot and killed in Kansas City, Missouri after a car pulled alongside the van he was in and fired several shots, killing the rapper born Andre Hicks on the spot.

Mac Dre had performed at a concert in Kansas City that weekend and was on his way out of town on Highway 71 when the car pulled up alongside the vehicle in which Mac Dre was a passenger and opened fire. The driver of the van crossed over into the southbound lanes of the highway before crashing into a ravine. By the time medical help arrived on the scene Mac Dre was dead from a single bullet wound.

If he were alive today, Mac Dre would be 40 years of age and, no doubt, the traditionally prolific artist would have recorded and released at least a dozen albums and Treal TV DVDs over the last six years. In honor of Mac Dre, below are a few videos by the artist including two from the 1990s, from his pre-Thizz stage and before he spearheaded the Bay Area's hyphy movement. You're missed, Mac Dre.

"What hit me most about hearing the news of Michael Jackson dying was only then I realized just how much he meant to me, how much his music was such a part of my life," confided my friend Eboness from New York by phone on Thursday evening, just hours after the shocking news of the pop star's passing had clogged all channels of communication. 

One of the many friends and acquaintances who seemed compelled to reach out and talk MJ on Thursday and in the days since, Eboness is 38 and lives in Harlem. Like so many people out there, she grew up on Jackson's music.

She said she and her mom had just come from 125th Street, where a growing crowd was gathering en masse outside the Apollo Theater to spontaneously mourn alongside total strangers in the shared sadness. As Jackson's music boomed from speakers up high, the teary eyed crowd below, with sunken shoulders, sang along to every lyric.

Thursday afternoon's shocking news of MJ passing caught everyone off guard it seemed. When I got that first text on my phone sometime after 3pm from my friend Timi D... which read "Michael Jackson just died???" I thought that maybe it was some of kind of prank or inside joke about the oft mocked star. Maybe it had something to do with his string of upcoming UK concert dates, I theorized as my Google search quickly confirmed the tragic news, with reports citing either the LA Times who broke the story or leading gossip news site TMZ that simultaneously reported on the same story. And when I next logged on to my email, my inbox was overflowing with messages with MJ's name in the subject box. I then clicked on the Amoeblog, where I saw that Whitmore had just posted the news. That was about 3:15 or 3:20 pm on Thursday; by then the news had already spread like wildfire via news and gossip sites and of course via Twitter, Facebook, and every other social network.