Honey Boo Boo and Nugget. (Facebook)

– Jon Hamm's girlfriend is not a fan of Jon Hamm's penis getting all the attention. Also, apparently Jon Hamm doesn't wear underwear? Very cool.

– The beef between Jonah Hill and CNN anchor Don Lemon is hysterical. Mr. Lemon was so miffed that the famous TV star didn't know who he was that he tweeted about it, then Jonah tweeted back, and then Lemon went and complained about it being treated "like the help" on Starting Point with Soledad O'Brien. How professional.

– I bet you've always wanted to know what Dana's love interest on Homeland did before he was the VP's kid. Well, apparently a lot of rapping.

http://youtu.be/GszV6rvD4sI

– Lindsay Lohan is not going to do a planned interview with Barbara Walters because she doesn't want to talk about her car crash. Fine. It's not like there aren't a billion of other subjects to grill Lindsay Lohan on. It's called compromise, people!

– PETA is scared that Honey Boo Boo will eat her pet chicken, named Nugget. Maybe she can make it up to them by posing topless or something.

Swizz Beatz and DMC. (Shaun Mader/Patrick McMullan)

We were exhausted—it was our third night in a row at The Plaza, and, quite frankly, we were becoming a little too familiar with the hotel’s ornate ballrooms at fund-raiser after frilly fund-raiser. The Observer loves schmoozing, but of late our calendar has left us rather harried—perhaps even unappreciative. As we arrived at the bedazzled edifice for the seventh annual Children’s Rights Benefit this past Wednesday, we quickly took notice of rapper Nick Cannon, slipping coolly out of a large black SUV with an entourage and bodyguards. At last, something seemed fresh, and unpredictable. While hip-hop stars and R&B producers are certainly no strangers to this old-school bastion of New York excess, it’s always exciting to see a touch of, er, young blood among traditional notions of prestige and privilege. With producer Kasseem David Dean a k a “Swizz Beatz” up for top honors that night, we anticipated that the hotel would be getting a much-needed dose of swagger. 

Cocktail time was a hurried blur. An eclectic mix of hip-hop notables such as Bow Wow and Shorty Da Prince, lawyers and their arm candy, and charitable old-money types buzzed about, slurping top-shelf cocktails at an alarming pace—you’d think that despite all the lavish pretense on display, not a soul there had previously experienced an open bar. But the pre-emptive binge was soon brought to a halt as dinner bells beckoned guests to their tables.

“It’s fun being one of the greatest rappers of all time, but I’m here because I am an adopted foster child,” Rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels began the ceremonies, ever so modest, as he beamed to the crowd from the ballroom’s podium, dressed in his signature all-black baggy denim jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket. Why wear a stuffy three-piece suit, when your profession gives you the license to dress like you’re taking a motorcycle up to the Cloisters?

The pioneer spoke to the crowd about the importance of Children’s Rights, a national watchdog organization that advocates for abused, abandoned and neglected children.

We scanned our table brimming with mature, genteel professionals and nonprofit champions.

“I can’t understand a word he is saying,” cooed the lady to our left.

“Who is that?” whispered a grande dame to our right.

“No clue! Ask The Observer, he seems hip,” another suggested, turning toward us.

We informed them that DMC hailed from one of hip-hop’s original acts, Run–D.M.C.

“He reeks of rap,” one patron snapped.

We suggested that she better learn to quickly enjoy the scent, because next up was rapper Nick Cannon, who empathized with the trappings of the nation’s foster care system.

“My grandmother raised me because my parents were teenagers. She went on to raise over 100 foster kids and help with emergency care. I know why we’re here tonight firsthand.”

Rather than wait for our table to ask the proverbial question, we jumped right in.

“Nick Cannon is a big rapper and married to Mariah Carey,” we yelled across the table.

“And this Beatz guy? Who is he?”

The honoree of the evening?

“His wife is Alicia Keys,” we elaborated in unison with Anne Strickland Squadron, board of directors secretary.

Everyone nodded with better familiarity.

The now-recognized Mr. Cannon and Alan C. Myers, the chairman of Children’s Rights’ board of directors, then welcomed the man of the hour, Swizz Beatz, to the stage to receive the Children’s Rights’ Champion Award.

“There is no better place to be than right here,” said the star, after detailing his jet-lagged adventure to make it to The Plaza.

“When you’re a family man, you understand how important it is for every child to have an equal chance.”

“He’s deejaying the after party!” announced Ms. Squadron to her enduringly clueless but enthusiastic coterie after Swizz Beatz had taken his seat.

“Ohhh!” they chimed.

But before they could ask what an after party was, the night took a somber turn with an “If I Could Get My Childhood My Back” video montage, in which former victims of abusive and downtrodden upbringings shared their harrowing stories.

Then a one-time foster youth, Emalee Wooton, delivered a tear-jerker with her firsthand account of a tragic childhood, which she has triumphantly risen above to construct a new life for her children.

At a nearby table, stylish do-gooder and doll-about-town Arden Wohl and her business partner, cupcake king Massimo LoBuglio, sat uncharacteristically enthralled. Ms. Wohl said that she has taken some time off from the Manhattan party scene, choosing to focus on philanthropic projects such as the Girls Education and Mentoring Service with A-list gal pal Demi Moore.

“The only events I go to these days are for foster care and children’s rights—and this is an amazing organization,” she told us, in between dodging questions about the fledgling bakery business she is starting up with Mr. LoBuglio. The partnership of a philanthropist and a pastry mogul can surely only mean one thing: free cake.

Indeed, as the wine flowed, so did the contents of people’s wallets at the charity’s bash, with the event raising triple the funds forked over the previous year. Hugh Hildesley, executive vice president and senior auctioneer at Sotheby’s, used his tipsy charm to great success during the annual reverse auction, which cashed out at $200,000. Two elusive high rollers also offered up $50,000 apiece for the foundation, with others contributing sums up to $25,000. In total, the soirée bleed the philanthropic crowd of about half a million. Meals at The Plaza can be so pricey these days!

“Tonight is better than the Grammys,” Swizz Beatz proclaimed—a tad hyperbolic. By the time the after party rolled around, the mostly mature crowd had all but scampered off, as a new wave of 30-somethings trickled into a downstairs ballroom for the Young Leadership Committee members’ late-night merriment and silent auction.

Enticing as a spin on the dance floor to David Guetta and Avicii may have seemed, we found our supposed young, hip selves rather exhausted and decided to pass on the gyrating, youthful bacchanalia scuttling out the back door before midnight, our dignity intact.

editorial@observer.com

Kanye West’s newest album, Cruel Summer—a compilation of his G.O.O.D. Music label's artists—is to be released next Tuesday, September 18. A few of the tracks have already been released, but today saw the release of the album's opening track, To The World, which features R. Kelly singing the hook. And at two minutes and 25 seconds in, the following verse comes from Mr. West:

I need a new crib to hold my plaques
Rick Ross had told me that.
Said I'd be all up in Goldman Sachs.
Like, "These ni**as tryna hold me back
These ni**as tryna hold me back."
I'm just trying to protect my stacks
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax.

For those in need of contextual help herein: Rick Ross is a fellow rapper, and "stacks" refers to money. In other words:

• He's just trying to protect his money and find a decent place to invest it.
• He's been advised by fellow rapper Rick Ross to invest it with Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management, because people will no doubt try to prevent his liquid wealth from growing, by hook or by crook.
• Take Mitt Romney, for example!
• Mitt Romney found a way to ostensibly evade the full reach of the Internal Revenue Service—or at the very least, a tax rate for people as wealthy as he is—and if Mitt Romney doesn't have to pay taxes, why should Kanye West?

 
Previously, Kanye West famously told the world that former president George W. Bush "does not care about black people" and later imagined his eventual foray into fatherhood:

And I’ll never let my son have an ego.
He’ll be nice to everyone
wherever we go.
I mean
I might even make him be Republican
So everybody know he love white people.

And now Mitt Romney can say his taxes have been rapped about. Which his opponent can not.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Nicki Minaj/ President Barack Obama.

Last week, Nicki Minaj caused whiplash, turning our heads with her verse on on Lil Wayne’s latest mixtape, Dedication 4. "I’m a Republican voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches is fucking up the economy,” she rapped, causing us to wonder whether this would hurt her chances for judging American Idol ... even if she was joking.

Now the hip-hop star is claiming that yes, she was just joking, especially when the POTUS gave her the benefit of the doubt on a recent radio shout-out.

When asked what he thought about Ms. Minaj's music, President Barack Obama told Orlando's Power 953, "I think she had a song on there, a little rap that said that, but she likes to play different characters. So I don’t know what’s going on there."

Ms. Minaj took this full-fledged support of her tunes, tweeting: "Ha! Thank you for understanding my creative humor & sarcasm Mr. President, the smart ones always do… *sends love & support*"

She followed this with several updates:
"Awesome! Now I can tell my grandchildren that the 1st black President of the United States took the time to address a Nicki Minaj question."
"My president is BLACK and my Fav is WINNING..... FUCKKKK YOUUUU!"
"Thanks haters! Lmaoooooooooooooooooooooooo. #BarbzWinAgain"
"ahahhahaahhahahahahhahahahhahahahahhahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

WHAT STARTED THIS

The profile, titled "The House That Hova Built"—released online September 6, and in print September 9—really started seeing pickup today for this particular line:

He gets a little agitated when the subject of Zuccotti Park comes up: "What's the thing on the wall, what are you fighting for?" He says he told Russell Simmons, the rap mogul, the same: "I'm not going to a park and picnic, I have no idea what to do, I don't know what the fight is about. What do we want, do you know?"

Jay-Z likes clarity: "I think all those things need to really declare themselves a bit more clearly. Because when you just say that 'the 1 percent is that,' that’s not true. Yeah, the 1 percent that's robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that's criminal, that's bad. Not being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on."

Jay-Z's certainly not the first person to criticize the Occupy movement for a perceived lack of direction, but he may be its most famous.

THE RESPONSE

One Occupier has since responded in kind by planning a protest (or "teach-in") outside of his upcoming concerts at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn:

On SEPTEMBER 28th we will arrive at his sold-out Barclays concert to lovingly show Jay-Z what we want and how he can help: by encouraging his fans to take action for social justice in their communities, schools, workplaces, and homes.

Join us September 28 at Barclays at 6pm for an Occupy Wall Street teach-in and musical performance. Let’s be a sincere answer to Jay’s question. In turn we will ask one of him, one Florence Reece wrote in the 1930s and still matters now, “Which Side Are You On?”

THE MIDDLEMAN

Meanwhile, Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons—who was responsible for bringing Kanye West down to Zuccotti Park last year—published a blog post regarding Jay-Z's comments, in which he both defends the rapper and takes him to task for not knowing better:

Jay-Z's words matter. He was honest enough to say that he didn’t understand it. A lot of Americans don’t. He was also honest enough to recognize that there are some in the 1 percent who "deceiving" and "robbing," so I know in his heart he gets it. I know he is a compassionate person who cares about the poor, so I'm certain if I had two more minutes with him, I could change his mind.

PRECEDENT

Previously, Michael Skolnik—who is the editor-in-chief of Simmons's site, GlobalGrind—published a post about Jay-Z and Occupy Wall Street last November, when the rapper caused a ruckus by debuting a shirt after a Madison Square Garden concert that read "OCCUPY ALL STREETS."

The shirt, sold by Jay-Z's Roc-a-Wear apparel line, was controversial on its debut, as the company explained that it wouldn't be donating profits to the movement that ostensibly inspired the design. Back then, Skolnik and GlobalGrind decried any controversy over the shirt, noting the "factious [sic] media" who had, in his mind, drummed up controversy over nothing, and urged readers not to look too far into the shirt:

The corporate-controlled media is so thirsty for the blood of the celebrities that they try to find silly and frivolous things to separate great messengers from the people. The media, and I am not just talking about the right wing media, needs to give up on this divisive style of journalism and start to support the 99%. You can own your old-school corner of the media, but you cannot own our future. We are sick and tired of the media treating the Occupy Wall Street movement like it is some rag-tag group of hippies who are camped out in a park. This movement has grown so quickly and so widely that it has inspired heroes of ours, like Jay-Z, to spread the message for us.

It would appear, in retrospect, that Jay-Z was never too "up" on the message.

[Ed.: All of this goes without mentioning the fact, of course, that he's an investor in a basketball team playing at a stadium named for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, Barclays Bank.]

What happens now? Well ...

CONCLUSION

1. Occupy will have its musical protest outside the Jay-Z concert. They will likely not come up with anything as good as previous Jay-Z protesters, but here's hoping.

2. It will receive some degree of press coverage, but likely not too much (though more if the protesters are manhandled by security or cops).

3. Jay-Z will make a canny reference about the entire thing in a song.

4. Somewhere down the road, someone will have another opportunity to ask Jay-Z about this entire incident in a future magazine profile.

5. Repeat.

Further Reading:

Shocker: Jay-Z Officially Doesn't Care About OWS [ANIMAL New York]
Jay-Z Says He Didn't Understand Occupy, but That Didn't Stop Him From Profiting Off It With T-Shirts [Gawker]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Dr. Dre—the man behind seminal rap albums The Chronic and 2001, for who many matters are in fact "Nothin' But a G Thang," and the hitmaster behind the rise of such prominent rappers as Eminem and Snoop Dogg (né Doggy Dogg)—is finally enshrined in immortality by entry into the New York Times crossword puzzle answer pantheon, as the answer to today's (SPOILER ALERT) 26-Down clue, "Rap's Dr. ___."

Previous honorees of this designation include:

• Ghostface Killah [May 7, 2012]
• Ice-T [May 25, 2012]
• Eminem [May 27, 2012]
• Ja Rule [June 9, 2012]
• Fat Joe [June 22, 2012]
• N.W.A.* [July 4, 2012]
• Tone Loc [July 18, 2012]

The Observer's Crossword Puzzle Research Department has only taken the most cursory of looks, but it would initially appear that this summer, more rappers have appeared within the pages (or rather, letter boxes) of the Times crossword puzzles than any year prior to it. As such: We've emailed Times crossword master Will Shortz to validate or invalidate our theory, and will update if we hear back. In the mean time, if you can think of any other examples of rappers appearing in the Times crossword pages—either this year, or at any point before it—by all means, let us know (either via email or the comments).

[PREVIOUSLY: New York Times’ Crosswords Going Premium-Premium, Even for Subscribers]

*Of which, Dr. Dre was a founding member, but was not individually recognized in the clue.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Fear not, though. The modest opening of the Barclays Center (the new home of the NBA's Nets, of which, Jay-Z is an investor) will now shove this seemingly arbitrary but actually earth-shatteringly important query into irrelevance, as Jay-Z will not be playing one, or two, but three shows to open the new stadium, this September.

Ticket prices aren't out yet, but DNAinfo notes that over 7,000 tickets for the shows—September 28th, 29th, and 30th—will go for under $30 (the other prices have not been announced). What they didn't say is how much those $30 tickets will go for after a bunch of awful scalping robots vacuum them up and resell them on StubHub or Craigslist for over 7,000 times their original face value.

If anything, however, this presents a wonderful out, so you don't have to choose between wearing your Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn shirt, your Occupy All Streets shirt, and your I'm Still Calling It Pacific-Atlantic shirt to Jay-Z's Barclays Center opening.

Now, you can wear all three.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Like so many other young suburbanites, the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill was the first CD I owned. I first discovered it during a contraband, back-of-bus listening session towards the end of a school year on a friend's portable CD player, acquired thereafter through a Columbia House "17 Discs for $0.01" offer ripped out of Rolling Stone and immediately mailed in. The fact that these three guys who cursed not unlike some of the older kids I knew also happened to be Jewish was not a small deal: When I was eleven, Jewishness was still an alien thing to so many of my friends growing up, even in a city as urbanized as Las Vegas.

The Beastie Boys represented a world of possibility far from the all-too-familiar stereotype of the young Jewish kid: feeble, nebbish, unathletic, and timid, whose idea of humor and wit resembled less the incisive, cutting, and shocking ways of the Beastie Boys and more the schlocky, Catskills Borscht-Belt style of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Not that the Beastie Boys weren't influenced by that, too—they clearly were—but discovering Licensed to Ill was a relevatory moment in that more suddenly became possible.

There was one line from Licensed To Ill that always struck me as off, though, even as it existed in the same album as "Girls": The one in "Paul Revere" about having done "it" with a sheriff's daughter using a "whiffle ball bat." I always heard it as out of place, not in the good-natured vein of the rest of the album. It wasn't enough to turn me off to the group, though; I was, after all, eleven. But MCA soon stood out to me not a few weeks later, the first time I saw "Sure Shot" on MTV, sandwiched in the Buzz Bin that summer between Warren G and Nate Dogg's "Regulate," Aerosmith's "Crazy," and later on, the group's classic "Sabatoge" clip.

He was the guy who rhymed on "Sure Shot":

I want to say a little something that's long overdue
The disrespect to women has got to be through
To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends
I want to offer my love and respect to the end

His study of eastern religions later became the impetus for the Beastie Boys' participation in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, something that brought awareness of a religion and issues a world away to the front of MTV's programming schedule, a practicing Bhuddist who was no doubt a large part of the reason the "whiffle ball bat" lyrics of "Paul Revere"—not even his—were never performed as such again (it was changed to a few things, among which was something about "a Siamese Cat," hilariously).

Again, surely I would've eventually come across Buddhism, but without MCA, not in sixth grade. It was MCA who was responsible for my favorite Beastie verse (the last lines of "Root Down" in which he shouts out his parents) and one of my favorite MTV moments (when he stormed the VMA stage as Nathanial Hornblower, only matched by ODB's "Wu Tang is for the children" speech).

In the summer of 1998, towards the end of my fourth listen to Hello Nasty, when I finally made it past the first half of the album, I heard something happened on the fifteenth track: The same guys who'd not a few tracks ago delivered the megaphone-rap of "The Move" (explaining how they were "intercontinental when we eat French Toast") and the tin-can digitization of "Intergalactic" had slowed everything to a crawl, and turned it down to an acoustic, intimate whisper. It was the odd occurance of being taken from a race track and being slammed head first into quiet placidity, as MCA quietly cooed about being "as deluded as the next guy."

In 2009, Jess Harvell wrote for Pitchfork that "I Don't Know" was a moment of failure for the Beastie Boys, a piece of "eye-rolling heart-on-sleeve earnestness," characterized as a cliche, overly sincere trap guys with the clout enabling them to make a non-linear, multifaceted album creative enough to want to explore other sonic territories can fall into.

In 1997, it was a shock to everything I'd known or assumed about the Beastie Boys, especially at 14: That their insecurities, like everyone else's, were very real, but more importantly, that they could exist on the same album as "Remote Control" and "Body Movin."

It may—like all of this, here—be an eye-rollingly sincere moment, but it was also the one in which I recognized MCA as my favorite of the Beastie Boys. The fact that it was seen by a critic as "eye-rolling" sincerity is as telling as those who are quoting the "whiffle ball bat" line on Twitter in tribute to Yauch: He was a crucial element of the nuance, subtlety, and exploration of new sonic ground that kept the Beastie Boys relevant over the last two decades, beyond what was expected of them, risks taken without which these three, white, Jewish guys may have long been relegated to novelty act status by now, and nothing more than a quoted "Whiffle Ball bat" line on Twitter that they couldn't even bring themselves to recite not a few years after it made them as successful and influential as they are today.

Yauch was 47, and is survived by his wife, Dechen Wangdu, their daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch, and his parents, Frances and Noel Yauch.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The final clue to today's puzzle, by Tom Pepper, solvable with a three-letter answer:

"63. Hip-hop's ___ Def."

As blogger and columnist Phillip Bump notes, the same clue appeared back in November. The puzzle, by Jeremy Newton and Tony Orbach, ran on Sunday, November 13, 2011 with the clue to a three-letter answer being:

"113. Hip-hop’s ___ Def."

[Before we proceed any further, it may be wise to enlist herein a SPOILER ALERT for the answer out of sympathy for those who may need one, unfortunate folk that they are.]

The answer is clearly Mos Def*. There are at least two other three-letter "Def"-related clue/answer combinations within the realm of hip-hop puzzle makers could potentially consider:

• Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin's seminal New York rap label Def Jam.
• 'Underground' rap label Def Jux.

 
....Which goes without mentioning all the other "Def" references in hip-hop (like 90s Atlanta-based rap label So So Def, or the "supergroup" of rappers whose 1998 cover of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" became a hit single, Def Squad) or any of the other possible music-related answers that could go with the word "Def" ("Hi-Def," "Def Leppard," etc).

Granted, Will Shortz probably can't remember every single clue that comes under his purview. Surely, some will repeat themselves. But the answer is technically inaccurate, if not simply outdated: The rapper formerly known Mos Def stopped going by that name last year, which he famously noted in a November 2011 interview with Stephen Colbert.

Furthermore, the crossword section has a recent history with a debatable answers to hip-hop oriented clues.

At the beginning of January, a reader email debating the answer to the clue "Wack, as in hip hop" became the subject of joyously heated debate among the oddly inevitable cross-section of hip-hop fans and seasoned crossword solvers. The answer was "ILLIN."

Most hip-hop fans would tell you that someone who is "ILL" (the neutral-action descriptor of "ILLIN") is certainly by no means "wack," though there's room for debate about the transitive verb's mostly-positive connotations. The fence-sitters at Gawker weighed in on the final definition of the word as "malleable," an unfortunate entry in their series of outdated but relatively astute hip-hop punditry.

Also, crossword freaks would argue that an outdated clue from a Sunday puzzle (the week's most challenging) appearing in a Monday puzzle (the week's least challenging) undermines the challenge of the original clue. And the truth is, there is no more an accessible def-related answer than the word "Mos," one of the first Google results for "hip-hop" and "Def."

Needless to say, the Times should expand its rap-related hip-hop purview. Should Will Shortz decide to take us up on the matter, we've made a Spotify playlist in his honor. May the Times' crosswords forever be more 'def,' less 'Mos' from this day forward.

[*Who, full disclosure, is not a fan of The Observer.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Makes Kanye's bling look like copper.

We're hoping General Assembly votes MC Moneypenney's hot new single to be the official anthem of Occupy Wall Street. (Sorry, all other OWS songs.)


We love the Michael Douglas monologue in the beginning, but also the amazing way he manages to namecheck Paul Krugman, James Tobin, Lloyd Blankfein, and Peter DeFazio in under six minutes of rhymes. MC Moneypenney is like the Jay-Z of white novelty rappers.