Raekwon & Capone-N-Noreaga hold a toast to being number 7 on Time Magazine's Album of the Year & number 1 hip hop/rap album with iTunes.

New Song "Happy New Year" - Raekwon

The return of Raekwon is a comeback that has been highly praised and acknowledged by Hip Hop heads.
Even in today's changing climate in the music industry, the Chef was able to show that he can still cook up some potent product for the streets to feed off of.
The storm following Only Build 4 Cuban Linx Pt. 2 was so great that it even caught the attention of TIME Magazine as they gave Rae the Number 7 slot for the album of the year. Not Hip Hop/Rap album, but the album of the year.
It must be noted that his latest offering was the only Hip Hop album that was actually featured on the top 10 list.
Time Magazine took some time out to throw out some feedback in regards to Rae's return and the impact of the sequel to the 1995 classic debut.
“The sequel to Raekwon's much loved 1995 solo debut picks up as if no time has passed. He's still rhyming about cocaine deals, hustlers and urban menace — which makes for an elevated degree of difficulty, since a song about the production of crack (“Pyrex Vision”) should be not only impotent in 2009, but deservedly so. The reason it works, like all of Cuban Linx, Pt 2, is that Raekwon is a poet of grime, a storyteller who understands that rap is less about an easy hook than the collision of carefully chosen words. He's also a melancholic who prefers replaying the circumstances of growing up in hell (“All my life around drug niggas, villains who want millions/ Niggas with them hoodies on with Teks in the building”) to celebrating the trappings of success. With production from nearly every top name in hip-hop, it's a spooky and sad monograph — not lovable, but quite powerful.”
With all these new talents popping up left from right, it must leave a good taste to know that most can't do it like the pioneers of rap. Congratulations Raekwon

While many look at the state of New York and automatically think to themselves music and the shift of rap, others look at the grand picture and take a glimpse at the actual communities that inhabit the Big Apple.
As some speak on the preservation of the craft of Hip Hop and bringing it back to its breeding grounds, some look at the city as it continues to go through rapid transformations.
Talib Kweli, a Brooklyn native, has continued to provide commentary on his city. Along with Mos Def, the duo most known as Black Star collaborated on Def's album The Ecstatic for the track “History” with each giving their own chronicles of life in the big city.
Replacing Mos Def for the Splash Festival overseas, Kweli spoke with splash!mag on the premise of the song.
“The song is about history in general, but being that I'm from New York, you hear my personal story, you hear Mos Def's personal story. New York is what it is, the people make up New York, not the politics. The politics is what you see as far as gentrification and everything.”
Unable to look into the future, Kweli is unaware of what is in store for NY, but as the title of song, history has a way of repeating itself as everything in life goes through a revolving door.
“I can't predict the future of this city, but I know that things have cycles so whatever we see now for the next 20, 30 years, 20 to 30 years from now it will change. So if you have rich white people living in a neighborhood, 30 years from now, in New York City, it will be a different type of neighborhood and then it will switch back. It's just the nature of the beast of New York City.”
“Every city goes through cycles and New York is in a cycle right now where the tourism and bring the people and the dollars in is important to the government so that's what you see. You see the cleaning up.”
Hearing the two together once again would obviously create countless in regards to Black Star and making a return.
“When you do something positive and give it to the world, I would be arrogant to be annoyed if people kept asking me the question. So people ask that question a lot, but it's just a good feeling, it's not anything that annoys me.”
Musically, the rapper stated that he was in the process of creating his next album. Being labeled as a conscious rapper, he uses it as influence for the title Prisoner of Consciousness.
A release date has yet to be scheduled for the album.

Almost exactly eleven years after its posthumous release, legendary rapper Tupac Shakur's 1998 hit "Changes" has been selected by the Vatican as one of the institution's "12 Favorite Songs" as part of a playlist for MySpace's new streaming service MySpace Music.
The distinction is the first time the Catholic Church has officially recognized the work of any popular American artist. With it, the song joins the ranks of works such as "Don Giovanni" by Mozart, the Vatican's own "Advocata Nostra," featuring the voice of Pope Benedict XVI, and "After The Rain," by Dame Shirley Bassey.
"The genres are very different from each other, but all these artists share the aim to reach the heart of good minded people," the Vatican explained on its official MySpace Music page.
The playlist, compiled by Father Giulio Neroni, was released Thursday, December 3 - and "Changes" has received nearly five million plays since then.
"This came as such an amazing surprise - it's not something I would have ever thought possible," says the late rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur. "I give thanks every day, knowing Tupac's words and music continue to have such an incredible effect on people worldwide. My son was always striving to reach out to as many people as he could, and he changed the world in doing so."
Released two years after the rapper's death in 1998, "Changes" has been acknowledged as one of Tupac's all-time classics ever since, with a message that resonates just as strongly today. The song is a streetwise meditation on racism, the Middle East, drugs and gang violence coupled with a call for hope and peace. In essence, it highlights the need for change on both a personal and global level.
"Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live, let's change the way we treat each other," states Tupac on the track. "You see, the old way wasn't working, so it's on us to do what we gotta do to survive."
The acclaimed single climbed to the top of the charts upon its release and became the only posthumously released Hip-Hop song to receive the Grammy nomination for "Best Rap Solo Performance." It recently confirmed its lasting power when it hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Ringtones Chart (November 7, 2009), a spot it held for a whopping 34 weeks.
"It's a testament to Tupac's genius that his music can have this kind of impact more than ten years after the fact," says Interscope Geffen A&M Chairman Jimmy Iovine. "This is an unprecedented honor to his legacy, as well as for those who had the privilege of working with him during his lifetime."
In additional Tupac news, it was announced in September that the artist's private writings would be added to Atlanta University Center's Robert Woodruff Library - an institution that also houses Martin Luther King's papers - to be made available for scholarly research.
The collection features Shakur's handwritten lyrics and track listings, personal notes, video and film concepts, fan correspondence, promotion materials and other items providing a unique insight into his creative genius.