Shooting after Nas at Red Rocks

There was a grim end to last night's Nas, Schoolboy Q and Flying Lotus at Red Rocks: There was a triple shooting which - depending on which tweets you believe - saw the open air venue somewhere between lockdown, or everyone being searched as they left.

The Denver Post reports there's no indication of what happened to either shooters or shootees.

Letters - one

Bob Lefsetz has a leaked letter from an annoyed Nas. He's got an album ready to roll, but Island Def Jam don't want to release it.

Annoyed? He's livid:

I won’t even tap dance around in an email, I will get right into it. People connect to the Artist @ the end of the day, they don’t connect with the executives. Honestly, nobody even cares what label puts out a great record, they care about who recorded it. Yet time and time again its the executives who always stand in the way of a creative artist’s dream and aspirations. You don’t help draw the truth from my deepest and most inner soul, you don’t even do a great job @ selling it. The #1 problem with DEF JAM is pretty simple and obvious, the executives think they are the stars. You aren’t…. not even close. As a matter of fact, you wish you were, but it didn’t work out so you took a desk job. To the consumer, I COME FIRST. Stop trying to deprive them! I have a fan base that dies for my music and a RAP label that doesn’t understand RAP. Pretty fucked up situation

He ends his letter with a plea to Def Jam that we should "make money". But the labels don't really know how any more.

Kanye West wants his fans to be all eclectic

Given that Kanye West has been going off the boil a little of late, it's probably quite brave of him to suggest to his fans that they widen their musical horizons. He might try to be a little more coherent, though:

"Nas is the only MC of my generation — maybe Rakim, but he was the generation before me — Nas was the most respected MC in every genre of rap. Nigga, he could do a song with Puffy or Wu-Tang."

Goodness, as wide as Diddy or the Wu-Tangs, eh? That's pretty adaptable.

But Kanye has more:

"How is Soulja Boy killing hip-hop? He had one of the biggest songs of the summer. If anything, he's helping keep it alive. You don't have to be Lil Wayne in order for people to say your shit is fresh.

"Open y'all's fuckin' minds. Be accepting of different people. Let people be who they are."

It's not clear if West ever goes round commenting on blogs suggesting that people's tastes are wrong and it's clear they must be bitter or haters. But it's nice to see West moving on from his usual favourite subject of himself. At least for a short while:

"You know how many people came at me, calling me 'gay' cause I wear my jeans the fresh way?" he said to the audience. "Or 'cause I said, 'Hey, dude, how y'all gonna say 'fuck' right in front of a gay dude's face and act like that's OK?' That shit is disrespectful.

"It took me time to break out of the mental prisons I was in. The stereotypes of the fear of the backlash that I would get for believing in what I believe in, for accepting people for who they are."

I don't know about you, but I lost that somewhere around the idea of wearing jeans in a fresh way. And I can't begin to understand what a stereotype of a fear of a backlash is, but I think he's saying it's harder to be tolerant than it is to be victimised. And that there should be some sort of parade for people who wear their trousers freshly.

Has Maxim actually heard any album it reviews?

After yesterday's discovery that Maxim had given 2.5 to an album by the Black Crowes, Nas is now saying that his album has also been given the same score despite not being finished yet, either.

Spinner says Nas "chewed out" the magazine, but really he just shrugged:

"I'm finishing the album now, and it will be out April 22," Nas told the New York Post's Page Six. "I'd prefer [a review from] Playboy," Nas said. "That kind of stuff doesn't reach my radar or effect anybody around me. I don't know what a music rating from Maxim is ... I don't know what it even means really."

Should we have a little sympathy for Maxim? It's being caught in the crunch as labels bring the turnaround to get albums into stores faster than ever, to avoid leaks, and the monthly magazines' lead times. The monthly titles are going to have to rethink how they review albums in the future - when albums hit the iTunes store almost as soon as the microphones are switched off, it's getting harder and harder for them to listen to the records to have reviews published for the release dates.

The answer might be to concentrate on longer, more considered pieces which might come two or three weeks after the album has been in the shops, rather than scrabbling to get some made-up number into the pages as soon as possible. It certainly would be lead to less awkward moments.

Nas pours some petrol

With all the subtlety of a six-year old throwing a tantrum because he wants a Fudge Bar, Nas has weighed the ongoing debate of the use of a certain word in rap, and elected to call his new album Nigga.

Yes, Nas. It'll make everyone look at you. It'll also make everyone say "he doesn't really understand the forces he's trying to use for some cheap publicity, does he?"

Nas remembers VTech by shouting at Billo

The decision to invite Nas to perform at last night's Virginia Tech showbiz memorial wasn't a universally popular one, what with Nas's track record for making gratuitiously violent songs. However, the adoption of the 'ban Nas' campaign by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly handed Nas an easy way out. Instead of defending his music, he was able to get on the safer ground of attacking O'Reilly instead:

"He's a racist," Nas said. "Everybody has a marketing plan; his marketing plan is racism.

"He doesn't understand the younger generation. He deals with the past," Nas continued. "The people he represents are Republican, older, a generation that has nothing to do with the reality of what's happening now with my generation. ... He's not really on my radar. People like him are supposed to be taught and people like me are supposed to let niggas like him know. I don't take him serious. His shit is all about getting ratings or whatever. I wouldn't honor anything Bill O'Reilly has to say. It just shows you what bloodsuckers do: They abuse something like the Virginia Tech [tragedy] for show ratings. You can't talk to a person like that."

Now, you'll not find anyone keener than us to point out the shortcomings of Billo, but this is somewhat simplistic - after all, while Fox News' interest in Virgina Tech might be a ratings boost, isn't Nas' appearance at the Dave Matthews organised event also about commerce? And is turning the event into a platform to cry "racism" at Fox really any less of an abuse of the memories of those who died?

Nas did eventually try to explain why a man who makes money selling violent records was present at a memorial service for those who were killed. Tried being the operative word. His reasoning? Erm, life's hard:

Here's somebody that speaks about America in his music, and the community that I come from has the same kind of violence as Virginia Tech," the legendary rapper said about himself. "It's unnecessary, stupid violence. Hip-hop is a part of the generation of [Virginia Tech] as well as alternative and pop and rock. Hip-hop is a part of that. That's why I'm [performing at the concert]. With Bill O'Reilly, it doesn't raise an eyebrow to me because it's garbage, its bullshit. He has nothing to do with the real people who go to school or the parents who had to endure that tragedy."

Hmm. Is Nas really comparing the tiresome internal gang-on-gang shooty-shooty-look-at-my-gun violence which has blighted hip-hop is comparable with being shot in a random mass-killing? He does seem to.

Nas then suggests that it's not odd that he would be there, because not all his songs are violent and, um, he doesn't sing about Russians:

"Let him ask why I made the songs I made," Nas said. "It didn't come from nowhere. It came from this country. I'm not talking about Russia in my music. I've never been to Russia. I'm not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China. I'm talking about me being American and growing up in a crazy world and helping to reflect all different sides of life. I got songs also about totally different things — 'Black Girl Lost,' you feel what I'm saying?"

Some of these points may or may not be fair - the more coherent of them, anyway - and there is room, certainly, for a debate about how far artists are making violent works because they're influenced by surroundings, and how far violent art makes all our public spaces less safe. And Bill O'Reilly's one-manned version of less-informed Daily Mail, with piles, is fair for a take-down.

Indeed, so wrong-headed is Bill's worldview, his suggestion that something must be banned is usually enough to get us out running up a petition to have the State supply whatever it is on the general rates.

But this does miss the point somewhat. The best Nas has done is suggest why Bill O'reilly might not be the best person to frame the question, but he still hasn't managed to answer it: when families and survivors of the Virginia Tech killings had asked you, because of your violent work, to not come to an event being held in their name, why did you still go?

Murder victims families object to Murder singer

We're not entirely sure that having a gig at Virgina Tech is a robust idea in the first place - is the idea that, somehow, forty minutes of Dave Matthews is going to heal the pain? Or is it merely a slightly grisly way of bumping up John Mayer's sales?

What's made it worse, though, is that the organisers - who are, funnily enough, the Dave Matthews Band - has invited Nas to be on the bill.

Yes, Nas. Because how better to remember the brutal murders by a gunman than listening to the bloke who did the "shoot 'em up, just shoot 'em up, what?/ Kill, kill, kill, murder, murder, murder" song.

Some of the families, represented by Vincent J. Bove, aren't happy:

The lyrics "are indicative of the moral decay in our society that contributes to acts of violence," said Bove, a New Jersey security expert who has volunteered to speak for the families. "For a university official to condone it or to be clueless of what this person's track record is, it's unconscionable beyond belief."

University officials, however, said they have received an overwhelmingly positive response since they announced the concert Wednesday and have no plans to revise the lineup.

Because, of course, the Virgina Tech officials are pretty good at not taking responsibility.

50 Cent: Nas isn't thick enough

There is despair, and then there is the pit of despair, as 50 Cent pinpoints the reason for Nas' decline - he's too worried about all this booklearning:

“Nas is a really smart guy. He reads books constantly. We were around him on the Nastradamus tour. He was almost weirder than me 'cause we would go to breakfast and he'd be there reading a book."

A book? Can you even imagine such a weird thing to be doing?

"Conceptually, I think that's what made him drift away from what his initial audience enjoys from him and why he's not hot right now."

If having some interest in your world moves you "conceptually" away from your audience, that would seem to be an audience you're better without. Happily for 50 Cent, we can comfortably conclude he's not about to try and raise himself above whatever level of ignorance he has so far managed to achieve.

"Always down and keeping it real"

Presumably Victoria Beckham's happy at the sort of leak of the truly horrifying Full Stop, a weak, milky rap where Glamour Magazine's entrepreneur of the year tries to suggest that we should forget the "good girl" because she's - yes - "always down and keeping it real". Nas is on board for as long as it take his people to put the Switch card through the machine and transfer the fee.

Are we hearing things, or does she really claim that she wants to live "like hot knives"? How does one do that - hang around in dingy student flats and wait for the loan cheque to clear?

We're choosing to see this as a threat - "sure, object away to a Spice Girls reunion - if you don't want my clumsy musical stylings safely drowned out by a bellowing Mel B..."

Could Nas be hiding from all of Croatia?

Ten days ago, Nerys Hucker emailed us in response to the story about Nas insisting on a police escort through the mean streets of Birmingham. And, erm, we put the email into a pile of things to respond to and forgot.

However, belatedly, we can bring you Nerys' theory: Seeing as Nas pulled out of going to Croatia, because it was too dangerous, could he be afraid of bumping into Balkans?

On the other hand, a man who thinks Croatia is too dangerous might be nervous about going to Birmingham for its own sake. After all, it's the only city in England to have shut itself down for the night because of fear of... erm, something or other.

Nas confuses himself with some sort of dignitry

Can it really be true that Nas - the man who claims in "NY State of Mind" to win "gun battles with mega cops" - has tried to insist that he gets a police escort to his gig in Birmingham tonight?

Nas has insisted in his rider:

"Under no circumstances is the artist to be delayed arriving or departing the venue due to traffic."

And how, exactly, is the venue meant to make the traffic in a city bend to his will?

If ever there was a time and place just begging for a Reclaim The Streets demo, this, surely, is it. How priceless would the look on Nas' silly I-love-murder chops be if his cars sailed round a corner into a street blocked by people enjoying a bicycle party?

Nice, Nas

For once, we have a bit of sympathy for a major label. Sony, called by sohh.com to see if they could clairfy why Nas says he "looks up to Hitler" said they "weren't clear at the direction" the rapper was coming from. We're not sure if even any extra clarity at the direction would help much.

Still, doubtless the BNP will be knocking together a page thanking him for his support.

Talking of which, they've still got the page about Dannii Minogue up on their site - Dannii, what's happened to your legal action? Would you like us to pay for a courrier to get the papers round there?