Tony Yayo recently talked about why he believe G-Unit’s joint album TOS Flopped:
“Ain’t no love in the industry,” Yayo added, addressing the reception to the G-Unit group effort T.O.S. “You just have to be business-orientated. T.O.S. was a good album. The streets loved it. It wasn’t commercial. And basically, it’s something on the catalog; we go to the next project. I feel like a new artist right now. I feel like we’re starting all over.” Yayo said that the low sales for Terminate on Sight have only driven the Unit’s captain to make some of his best work to date. Still, Yayo said the meager SoundScan showing last time around had nothing to do with his camp’s musical quality. “T.O.S., I feel like sometimes the things that 50 and Jimmy Iovine go through trickle down on us,” Yayo said.
“50 is the kind of person, he has so much power and money, sometimes I think the label gets intimidated by that. None of his artists have to starve. Me and Banks and Buck, we all was good. If Interscope don’t wanna throw me an advance, I can always get the quarter mil, half a mil from Fif. I feel [T.O.S.] wasn’t marketed, period. Even with the iTunes, people tried to order the album, they couldn’t order the album. We had weak preorders. We didn’t go on a good promo run. … 50 has one more album left [on his Interscope contract]. If you’re Jimmy Iovine or somebody, when you know you have that leverage, why not let the G-Unit album fail so we can give you less money if you come back to negotiate with us? If the album does well, I have to give you more money.”

At a presidential rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, MTV personality Sway had the opportunity to speak with presidential candidate Barack Obama to discuss issues such as the economy, Hip Hop, and of course John McCain.

Since the interview took place after the presidential debate, Obama was able to speak on his overall opinion of the debate.

“I think what we did was to try to just make clear some big differences between John McCain and myself,” Obama explained to MTV’s Sway. “He thinks the war in Iraq was smart and he wants to stay there. We want to end it. He thinks it was important to support George Bush’s economic policies. I think they’ve been a disaster.”

According to Obama, during the presidential debate McCain made allegations against him that were just not true.

“We’ve become accustomed in our politics to folks just being able to make stuff up or say whatever they want to say. It’s one of the few areas of public life where the standards sometimes are lowered, in terms of you being accurate about what you say about other people.”

Although some critics have blasted him for hit, Obama is still backing his appreciation of Hip Hop.

“I enjoy it, but these days I don’t have the time to listen to it all the time,” Obama shared with Sway. “I’m a little older than Hip Hop culture. I was there at the beginning, but I was already getting older…What I’ve appreciated, watching this Hip Hop generation, is to see how entrepreneurial they’ve been. In the past, musicians oftentimes were commodities. They were just shuffled around. Obviously, they did well, but they didn’t have the vision to say, ‘I’m going to build a business. I’m going to build my own studio. I’m going to create my own production operations.’ I think they’re a lot more sophisticated than in the past, and that is a wonderful thing.”

Some of the Hip-Hop artists in rotation on Senator Obama’s iPod include Kanye West and Jay-Z and Indie artists St. Laz and Papoose.

In a follow up story, Sway referred to his interview with Obama as a milestone in his career and considers Obama an “everyday citizen.”

The next presidential debate will take place on October 7 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sean Kingston $500,000 chain has been stolen from the mail. Sources tell Hip Hop Spy that the teen rapper, best known for his Summer 2007 hit “Beautiful Girls, had his sister FedEx the gawdy chain from Los Angeles to New York but when the package arrived on Sean’s doorstep (a day late), it was empty.
Kingston’s sister reportedly only insured the FedEx package for $500. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is now working the case. We at Hip Hop Spy say Sean got robbed twice for the same chain, the first time was when he paid 500,000 for it. He definately got beat on that deal.