Watch the video. Isn’t it sad? Paul Mawhinney is the owner of the largest record collection in the world, and he’s been trying to sell it for a few years, at an asking price of 3 million, but has yet to receive a real serious offer. He’s 69 years old and is legally blind, which I’m sure makes his daily grind that much harder. I feel like I posted about Paul a few months ago, when this story was just in the papers, and hadn’t yet made it to a web video, but I can’t remember for certain.

I guess the common thinking would be, hey why doesn’t some big rap producer buy the collection from him? They’ve probably got 3 million laying around, right?

Uhhh… no. Actually after buying 10 million dollar houses with extra pools, and Bentleys for disasters like Lil Kim, there’s not much left over for ya’know, consuming music.

I think the biggest obstacle facing anyone who would want to buy the collection is finding a place to store it properly. You’d literally need to own a warehouse or something. And that’s where the 3 million dollar price tag starts ballooning into something else altogether.

What I would love to see happen is some arts foundation take it off his hands and maybe create a vinyl museum. A vinyl library. How are records any different from books? In the United States, for some people it’s more important to have a big library than a big dick (think: rich, old world, society types). Why isn’t vinyl treated the same way?

Paul seems very dejected, down about the fact that he dedicated his whole life to collecting and archiving vinyl, and nobody seems to care. In some respects, he’s a dinosaur. A relic. A byproduct of a forgotten era. This video sorta hit me in the heart.

Oh, DMX. The troubled rapper will sit in jail while courts in Florida and Arizona battle over who will try X first, MTV News is reporting. It seems like DMX is set to do major time. [MTV]

Queen Latifah has been named as the honorary chair of the 2008 Urbanworld Film Festival, it was announced. The 5-day fest will take place in New York City from September 10 to the 14 and feature a documentary titled “Wu: The Story of Wu-Tang Clan.” For more information, click here.

Daddy Yankee didn’t quite blow like he was suppose to after landing in the States. But the Puerto Rican star is still at it. Taking the next step in the rapper playbook, DY is starting in a straight-to-DVD flick. [Billboard]

Another year, another one of these damn Forbes magazine lists of the top moneymakers in hip-hop. Let’s take a look at this year’s list and see what significance, if any, we might be able to glean.

First of all, you’ll notice there’s been a shakeup in the top two. Jay-Z, who came in first last year, has now been bumped down to second. Fiddy Cent, who was second last year, is now in first, mainly due to the windfall he received from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coca Cola.

Which I’m sure was convenient for the good people at Forbes. They didn’t have to sweat doing another feature on Jay-Z. As if anyone needs to read another feature on Jay-Z again, evar. Instead, they’ve done a big feature on Fiddy, detailing his rise from a lowly crack dealer in the ghettos (as opposed to the nice parts) of Queens, to the point where he’s now apparently about to open up his own platinum mine in South Africa.

Word?

I wish the story in Forbes, which is, after all, a business magazine, would have gotten into what Fiddy Cent has got to offer the precious metals industry, other than the fact that he’s obviously got some money to invest. But if this guy Fiddy’s supposedly going into business with, Patrice Motsepe, is worth like twice as much as Oprah, what does he need with Fiddy’s paltry $100 million, or whatever?

You’d think he’d be able to afford his own equipment at this point..

And yet, this guy somehow feels the need to go into business with Fiddy Cent. Hmm… I wonder if this just a matter of him trying to spread some Marcus Garvey-style Pan Africanism with his gold tooth-clad brothers here in the states, or if there isn’t some deeper fuckery going on.

Of course, I’m assuming it’s the latter, though I couldn’t any really good evidence using Google, i.e. the extent of the effort I’m willing to exert with regard to investigative journalism. I did find some interesting leads though.

I started by doing what any reasonable person would do. That is, I typed this guy Motsepe’s name into Google along with the name of Lev Leviev, the Israeli diamond mining, settlement building billionaire scumfuck (you’ll recall that I did a post on him here a while back), to see if the two of them are in business together.

It turns out there’s hundreds of results with both of their names - but mostly just because they both happen to be billionaires, and they both work in more or less the same industry. I notice, though, that the very first result is a list, with both of their names on it, of participants in something called… wait for it, the World Economic Forum Russia CEO Roundtable. (Oh, really?)

So we know they’ve at least met.

I did some further investigating of just this guy Patrice Motsepe, and I found an interview of him on the red carpert of some event he was attending with Russell Simmons, here in the States, in which he mentioned that the two of them have been in business together. Aww dang…

Granted, he didn’t say for a fact that him and Rush were involved with some sort of plot by the TIs to strip Africa of its natural resources and have the vast majority of the wealth, less whatever token they give Rush and Fiddy (which I’m sure we’ll be reading about in another issue of Forbes), go to fund the apartheid state in Israel. But did he have to?

I mean, Russell Simmons is involved. What else could this be?

In retrospect, this all should have been obvious back when it was announced that Fiddy had received $400 million (or however much it was) from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coca-Cola, despite the fact that he hardly even did anything other than lend part of his nom de rap to one of their flavors. (Grape, natch.) The few commercials I even saw him do for them were after the shit had already sold to Coca Cola.

And yet, Fiddy Cent got $100 million or whatever out of that deal? In America, home of the motherfucking prison-industrial complex? Get the fuck out of here! There’s no way in the world the TIs would let some shit like that go down, without their being some sort of ulterior motive involved.

Most likely, Coca Cola was in on this shit as well. (Do the knowledge. Coca Coal has been involved in all kinds of fuckery over the years.) The TIs probably arranged for him to receive $100 million from Coca Cola, just so he’d have the money to invest in this mining venture. But don’t get it twisted - that’s been the TI’s money all along. Fiddy Cent is just the black front for TI interests. Just like the rest of these clowns.

When I saw this guy’s name the first thing I thought was, “Damn! I was hoping the “$” sign being used as an “S” died along with Ma$e’s career.” Guess that was asking for too much.

Then when I popped in the mixtape and heard birds chirping and some old-school feel, goody-good music I thought, “Is this gonna be a mixtape for those ‘out loud and proud’ peeps?” But that wasn’t the case (Thank goodness). Instead I ended up listening to some pretty damn good hip-hop music.

I have to admit, the kid can flow something hard like Michael Phelps (I had to use the M. Phelps metaphor before these rappers get to it. Remember where you heard it first!).

From jumping on a extraordinary bubblegum-pop beat on “Modern Day Hippie” and making it listen-able, to going extra gutter on Busta’s “New York” track on “Roll My Shit.”

Other than the flow, son got some entertaining rhymes, too. On “The Good Part,” he says sh*t like, “Joe, they say flow I got the girls feenin’ / your hoe keep my name in her mouth now more than my seamen– see, man / you a little jackass like Wee-man /…”

Even his man, Trademark Da Skydiver, popped off something retarded on “Soundtrack To Success.”
The only fault I can see in Curren$y is that he’s similar to Ma$e more ways than the use of the “$.” A lot of people are gonna feel that their styles are similar from the way he raps to the tone of his voice at times.

But like I said, the flow is platanos and I hope that the young homie can keep the good music consistent.

Hottest Joint: “Brett Favre” and “Still That Nigga”

Weakest Joint: “Modern Day Hippie”