Hip-Hop Saved My Life -Lupe Fiasco (feat. Nikki Jean)

Pennsylvania based singer/song writer Nikki Jean is turning heads all over the music industry, and gaining many fans because of her recent success. Don’t believe me? Watch her latest YouTube video as she explains her long lost “family.” I have to say that I’m happy for her, with women being only seen as “sights,” Jean shows us that we can actually be in music videos without having to shake our booty and wear barely there clothing. Watch her as she makes her cameo in Lupe Fiasco’s “Hip-Hop Saved My Life”

21 Official Movie Trailer

Here is the theatrical trailer for Columbia Pictures latest action/adventure movie “21″ which opens in theaters today. Directed by Robert Luketic, (director of such movies as Legally, Blonde, Win a date with Ted Hamilton, Monster-in-Law) It’s about six M.I.T students who make millions from a card counting scheme in Vegas . The film is based on actual events and was adapted from the best-selling novel written by Ben Mezrich. The cast includes Across the Universe’s star Jim Sturgess along with Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, and Laurence Fishburne.

Excerpts from “The Confession,”

“The closet starves a man, and when he gets a chance he gorges till it sickens him,”

New York magazine published excerpts from “The Confession,” an autobiography by former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, who resigned from office in 2004 after saying he had had a gay affair with Golan Cipel, an Israeli national whom he appointed as the state’s homeland security adviser.

“nauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Ironically, the dividing experience of my sexuality helped me thrive in that environment. As I climbed the electoral ladder — from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey — political compromises came easy to me because I’d learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them. I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts — protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

There were moments when the ripping misery of this life became too great, moments when I thought about “becoming gay” and all that that entails. One of these moments came after I lost my first race for governor to Christine Todd Whitman in 1997. I thought to myself: You’re at a fork in the road. You could give this up and be yourself. This is your last chance. But I felt compelled to keep running for governor.

I craved love. For years sex had been all that was available to me. From the time in high school when I made up my mind to behave in public as though I were straight, I nonetheless carried on sexually with men. I visited bookstores in New York and New Jersey and had sex in the small booths there until I became too famous to risk discovery. I lurked around parkway rest stops, exchanging false names and intimacies with strangers. But there never was an emotional meaning to these trysts, even the few that were repeat engagements.

The only place where I had ever found any real pleasure in these encounters was in Washington, during my law-school years. At the juncture of Sixth and I Streets, just around the corner from Judiciary Square, there was an abandoned synagogue and a narrow alley leading to the long-forgotten gardens in back. Every night, rain or shine, this hidden pocket of Washington filled with men just like me — almost all of them wearing business suits and, on most of their left hands, proof that they’d made the same compromises I had. We were the power brokers and backroom operatives and future leaders of America. We just happened to be gay.

I felt as though I’d come upon a sanctuary — it was a churchlike, almost spiritual place.

Moonlight squinted through the stained-glass windows into our garden, catching an inviting eye or a face stretched in ecstasy. I looked forward to my visits there, sometimes two or three a week. I quickly learned whom to approach and whose advance to wait for, when to move quickly, which posture said “no thanks” and which said “please.” One evening, as I stood on one of the metal platforms back there, a word came to me: liberated. Standing there in full sight of this group of men, I’d finally found a way to show who I was. I am finally free, I told myself. When of course I was just in a bigger cage.

How do you live with such shame? How do you accommodate your own revulsion with whom you have become? You do it by splitting in two. You rescue part of yourself, the half that stands for tradition and values and America, the part that looks like the family you came from, the part that is acceptably true. And you walk away from the other half the way you would abandon something spoiled. You take less and less responsibility for the abandoned half, until it seems to take on a life of its own — to become something you merely observe. And when you’re on the other side, in the shrubbery or behind the synagogue, you no longer recognize your decent self. Years later I realized I’d become both Gene and Phineas from “A Separate Peace”: the soul and the body, the person who tumbled from the tree and the person who made him fall.

An intense and inevitable thing happens after you win a big election. The jostling for power is wild. Republicans had controlled the governor’s mansion for sixteen of the past twenty years, and now we were overwhelmed by pressure to bring Democrats and their supporters in from the cold.

All my financial contributors were vying for payback as well. My goal had been to raise $40 million for the campaign, which, unless you’re a Clinton or a Bush, is an obscene amount to pull out of pockets. You can’t take large sums of money from people without making them specific and personal promises in return. People weren’t shy about saying what they expected for their “investments” — board appointments to the Sports Authority or the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, for example, which were coveted not just for their prestige but because they offered control over tremendously potent economic engines, with discretionary budgets in the tens of millions. The plum was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; directors there controlled a multibillion-dollar budget. I tried to stay as naïve about this horse trading as possible. But I allowed my staff to intimate things to donors. This is the daredevil’s dance every politician faces.

Some appointments drew quick criticism.

Republicans were all over my decision to appoint Charlie Kushner, who with his family and business had donated more than $1 million to my campaigns, to the board of the Port Authority.

They complained it was political payback, but that was wrong. Kushner refused my appointment three times before finally accepting.

I think Golan expected me to end up in the White House. Maybe that’s what he loved about me — my potential to bring him to Washington. If he was using me as the engine driving his own ambition, I didn’t mind. I liked seeing myself reflected in his eyes.

One afternoon in May, after a meeting at Drumthwacket, Golan stayed behind in the rather uncomfortable library on the first floor as the other state officials left. Dina was upstairs with Jacqueline. I looped through the kitchen and dismissed the cook and building manager, returning to the library with two cups of tea.

Behind the library was a more intimate study, a small room lined with historic books and oil paintings.

Golan was frustrated. He felt that I was freezing him out of my inner circle. It had been weeks since we’d seen each other.

“Of course, I want to be with you — selfishly,” I told him. “But my time is fully regulated now. The scheduling process is brutal.”

I closed the blinds. We kissed. There was a feeling of doom, as if we both knew this was the end. The thought made me crazy.

“I love you, Golan,” I said. “You make me so happy. I’ve never, you know … ” He looked so sad just then; I knew he understood.

“I could leave all this behind. I could leave the governor’s office and the career in politics. I would. I would leave it all for you if you told me we’d be together forever.”

He seemed shocked. “Do you mean that?” he asked.

I did mean it. But looking into his eyes I could see that life ever after was not a possibility.

He was not willing to walk into the sunlight with me if it meant walking out of politics. He was like me that way — desperately wanting two things that could never fit together.

“Yes,” I answered.

He didn’t reply.

Although we never said a word about it, we both knew this was the end of our affair.

“You said you’d give it all up for me,” he threw back at me.

“Golan, I said I’d give it all up if you were with me. If we’re together as two individuals in love, that makes sense. But I’m not surrendering government for the sake of your job.”

In August, he finally agreed to resign. But almost immediately he began demanding his job back. He found me on my cell phone at all hours, interrupting everything from daybreak trips to the gym to late-night dinners with Drumthwacket staffers. He felt tricked into quitting, he said. I sometimes thought his desperate sadness was about losing me, about losing our love. But that was just self-flattery. I think he hated losing access to power.

If my relief at finally coming out made me momentarily ebullient, I soon sank into an agonizing depression. A week before the press conference I had enjoyed a relevance and influence. Now I was trivial and inconsequential.”

RATED NEXT: Esmee Denters… Get To Know Her

Dutch singer Esmee Denters has quickly become an industry juggernaut in the past couple of months, It all started when the now 19-year-old one day decided to use her sisters old webcam, thought that it would be fun to record TLC “Waterfalls” and upload it onto YouTube. The singer was later noticed by Ari Goldstein on the popular video sharing website in August of 2006, and the rest as they say is history. I can’t begin to explain how I felt when I stumbled upon a video of hers back in January. This soulful young lady is touring industry heads all over. Justin Timberlake has signed her to his own record label, and just last year she appeared on the Oprah show. If you’ve never heard about Esmee Denters before, you better get familiar.

Essence Magazine Honors Black Hollywood

There are stars and there are talents. Not surprisingly; sometimes these two intertwine. Evan Ross, Jurnee Smollett, Tristan Wilds, and Raven Simone are all a perfect rendition of this. You can find these young black power house (all under 25) actors all featured in this months issue of Essence Magazine as they honor black Hollywood. These young black actors all posses talent that cannot be ignored.Halle Berry is also no stranger in this category. Who can forget when she made history in 2002 by winning an Academy Award for her lead performance in the movie Monsters Ball? After-all it had been 74 years since a Black woman had coveted the Best actress award.”This moment is so much bigger than me, It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” She said”On that historic night both Berry and Denzel Washington made history with there wins. It was In 1954 when Dorty Dandridge made history as the first black woman to be nominated for Best Actress for her role in Carmen Jones. Even-though a vast majority of us thought that things would surely change after that night for black actors. The truth of the matter is that we have seen very little change still. I can’t begin to explain how I feel whenever I see black actors in Hollywood being casted in films as the “token black.” Those actors take the role not because they want to, but because of the lack of roles that are given to them. I can safely say that the future is looking very promising for actors of color, but with the film industry being no stranger to racism there is not telling what direction it will take us next.

Join Essence along with some of todays biggest movers and shakers (Ruby Dee, Pauls Patton, Kerry Washington, Kasi Lemmons, Don Cheadle, James Lassiter to name a few) as they celebrate our excellence in there March double exposure Hollywood issue.