It’s that time of year again and MTV has announced its top spitters in contention for its Hottest MC’s In The Game List.

MTV will announce the bottom 5 next week and will show the debate for the Top 5 on February 19 @ 10:30 P.M. on MTV2.

Can’t wait to see how this list turns as several people up here seem to have made the list because of longevity but didn’t drop anything remotely hot this year but that’s for them to decide.

Peep the list after the break and let us know who you think shouldn’t be on the list and who was overlooked.  As usual this will be one monster debate to watch.

2 Chainz,
50 Cent
Big Sean
Common
Drake
Eminem
Fabolous
French Montana
Jadakiss
Jay-Z
Jim Jones
Kanye West
Lil Wayne
Lloyd Banks
Maino
Meek Mill
Nas
Nicki Minaj
Red Cafe
Rick Ross
T.I.
Wale
Wiz Khalifa
Yelawolf
Young Jeezy

‘He was just being a mean, negative person, and that’s one of the main reasons why I’m not with him,’ model tells ‘RapFix Live.’

Kanye West admits his flaws — well, in song at least: On his 2011 single “Runaway,” the Louis Vuitton Don was apologetic about how he treated ex flame Amber Rose, owning up to his wrongs.

He took things a step further during his Watch the ThroneTour with Jay-Z, giving the audience love advice while performing the song. During the November 2 stop, ‘Ye sent a special shout to ex-girlfriend Amber Rose in the model’s hometown. “To the city of Philly, I want to thank y’all for making the incredible person that this song was made for,” he said while performing “Runaway” in Philadelphia.

“At first, I was like, ‘Wow, maybe he is sorry for just not being a good guy and not treating me the way I want to be treated and talking down to me,’ amongst other things,” Rose said on last week’s “RapFix Live.” “I instantly was like, ‘I forgive him.’ ”

To her, it all seemed very sincere. “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Yo, I forgive him.’ I let that go. I went through the crying and the heartbreak and all that stuff, and I moved on, and I’m so happy now that I actually have a gentleman, a great guy that I love so much,” Rose said of current boyfriendWiz Khalifa. “Then after he called me an incredible person in my hometown, he said, ‘Never find love in a strip club.’ And that’s when I was like, ‘You know what? Take your apology and shove it up your ass, because I don’t want to hear it.’ ”

The “Never find love in a strip club” line wasn’t from the Philly concert, though it is a Yeezy lyric from the Throne’s “New Day,” in which West passes life lessons to his unborn son. “New Day” was actually released in August, months before the concert, and in the song, Kanye makes no mention of Amber’s name, but it still rubbed the beauty the wrong way. According to Amber, who feels the lyric was a shot at her, the ex-couple didn’t meet in a gentlemen’s club.

“He didn’t meet me in a strip club; he knows he didn’t meet me in a strip club,” she said. “He was just being a mean, negative person, and that’s one of the main reasons why I’m not with him. He’s that; I don’t want that negativity in my life. Don’t apologize and then say something like that. It’s just rude, and it’s mean, and it’s not true.”

Later in her “RapFix Live” interview, Rose broke down crying because of the way some of ‘Ye’s overzealous fans have treated her in public. “I have people throwing things at me in the street because they’re fans of Kanye,” Amber said before she started to cry on set. “I’m just crying because I don’t deserve to be bullied like that. I’m a nice girl. I don’t bother anybody. I keep my mouth shut because I don’t want any trouble.”

Previously unseen footage of Kanye West has been circulating the web recently after a video was released of Yeezy performing live with Phenom in 1996 at Chicago`s Double Door. After DDotOmen put out the video of the early performance, a fan sent in a recording that predates West`s musical career.

The newly released clip show`s West reading a poem in 7<sup>th</sup> or 8<sup>th</sup> grade at Vanderpoel Elementary School which the 12 or 13 year-old Yeezy dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the clip from 1990, West reads his poem titled `His Name Means Love` during a school function which was probably organized for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 22 years ago. DDotOmenacquired the video after one reader saw the footage of the Double Door concert and sent the clip over to the website.

The teenage version of the G.O.O.D. Music artist exhibits some of his later talent and confidence as he delivers the short poem. “A man who fought for freedom, a man who fought for equality/Those who were against him were too blind to see. This is what this man fighting for/So blacks, Jews, Spanish and Asians can put their foot in the door/Yes, we know that this man was great/That’s why his name we celebrate/And everyone lifts their voices and sing/For a man who let freedom ring/Martin Luther King is who I’m speaking/A man who’s name means love,” reads the teenage West.

In the other vintage video of Kanye that made waves this week, the rapper is 18 or 19 years-old and was already developing into today`s Kanye. The young West wears a polo ensemble that was typical of his early days, but perhaps the most telling element of the clip is a line the rapper yells out near the video`s end. “Kanye represent the sexy niggas, fly niggas,“ Kanye shouts out.

Not surprisingly, this anxiety pervaded early reviews, and the album got knocked for its rampant luxury talk of watches, cars, and clothing (which, like other rap albums, it did have a lot of), as well as the money pumped into its production and promotion (which, like other albums by major pop figures, it did have a lot of). The implicit subtext of all this criticism was that Jay and Kanye were being greedy, expending huge sums to prevent the album from leaking. During the recording sessions, the album’s engineers employed a “nuclear football” system by which all files were kept on a single hard drive, locked in a briefcase, and carried wherever Jay and Kanye went—an almost unprecedented step in an era where music is thought to live nowhere but in the cloud.

The crazy thing is that it worked. Unlike other major albums in recent memory, Watch the Throne didn’t leak ahead of its release. Someone buying the album at midnight on August 8 was hearing songs like “Gotta Have It” and “No Church in the Wild” at exactly the same time as someone downloading the first available illegal copy of the album—which itself appeared to be just retagged versions of MP3s bought legally from the iTunes store. If that was the goal, the expense had been worth it.

Surely (went the thinking), the purpose of the leak-prevention must have been to ensure the greatest number of physical sales. According to a spokesperson, though, the idea was less to secure the rap giants’ fortunes and more to provide listeners with a particular kind of experience. “It was really important to [Jay] that people experienced this album in its entirety when they first listened to it,” an anonymous label exec said to Billboard‘s Steven J. Horowitz. “That was really the driving force of it, to create that nostalgic moment of unwrapping the CD and listening to it for the first time.”

That’s a weird way of putting it. Any listener truly interested in hearing an album fresh can just avoid downloading the leak before purchasing the CD. The experience Jay was really interested in providing—the thing it has been almost impossible to do in the digital era no matter how determined each individual listener was—was the experience of hearing the album at the same time as everyone else.

After all, the fun of release day is not so much novelty as the sense of being part of a shared, giant conversation, of having a collective experience while alone with headphones. The Web erases that possibility. An album that emerges via leak is consumed immediately by a small group of hardcore fans, then a few days later by the more generally knowledgeable, gradually up to release date by those who catch wind of it, and finally by the general public upon release. The release-day experience of years past gets diffused into a series of smaller, seemingly less-consequential conversations. The release of a pop album becomes not an event, but a series of individual experiences scattered over weeks or months. So while the money spent on Watch the Throne can be viewed as a let-them-eat-cake gesture of disconnection, it can also be seen as Jay and Kanye solving the coordination problem for monadic listeners, using their admittedly (and self-admittedly) elitist power to create an experience that the public is incapable of arranging on its own.

The need for such an effort is unexpected. Pre-Internet broadcast married speed with simultaneity; instead of news being disseminated by mail, reaching New Yorkers at a different time than it reached Iowans, news could be disseminated by wire or broadcast and reach even those people geographically far apart at the same time. The Internet, though, showed that the relationship was more of a bell curve: Now that mass amounts of people can know about events not as they are reported but as they actually happen, as with Osama bin Laden’s death, the experience of learning about news is fractured.

None of this is to say that the old feeling of having a collective experience was accurate: The much-lamented monoculture always excluded vast swaths of the population. But theillusion of the monoculture had a real effect on culture’s relationship with popular art. Pop culture is a realm void of originality, but though each product of it is a copy (of a copy [of a copy]), the experience of consuming your copy simultaneously with (seemingly) everyone else made the experience itself feel unique and entirely unlike anything anyone else had experienced before. Simultaneity conjured something that, in retrospect, felt much like the “aura” Walter Benjamin ascribed to a singular, un-reproduced work of art.

The Web has made that aura increasingly difficult to summon, as the ever-increasing penetration of the Internet has systematically revealed both how few truly unique experiences exist and how different those events that are supposedly shared are. (“Who is Arcade Fire?”) But there seems to be a feeling that finding a way to evoke these feelings of connection—despite their evident unreality—is absolutely necessary, whether to sustain the value of art as a sacred realm or to nurture a shared sense of collective societal purpose. (“We are the 99 percent.”) What Watch the Throne’s ultimate success suggests is that, even in the current environment of bottom-up creation, the experience of culture—the thing that creates its meaning—is something that can be most successful when coordinated from the throne on down.

Kanye West's 'Runaway' is off his album 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,' which is up for four Grammys.

PICK OF THE WEEK

Runaway, Kanye West
For nine-plus minutes, the alternately brazen and humbled rapper spits hilarious and wistful rhymes over guitar feedback, cellos and piano. It’s one of the more adventurous yet accessible tracks from the brilliant My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which got four Grammy nods but inexplicably not in best album.

THE PLAYLIST
Highlighting 10 Grammy-nominated tracks:

The Plains/Bitter Dancer, Fleet Foxes
Ambling psych-folk bursts with ringing choruses on this gem from Helplessness Blues, a folk album candidate.

Holocene, Bon Iver
Justin Vernon’s fragile, pretty and melancholy tune may lose the best song and record races to Adele, but it’s a sterling runner-up.

Raise Your Weapon, Deadmau5
Greta Svabo Bech’s vocals soothe this house/dubstep whopper from 4X4=12, up for dance/electronica album.

Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, Skrillex
On this dance recording nominee, the dubstep prodigy’s lilting synth melody and vocal shards segue into a monster drop.

Down by the Water, The Decemberists
R.E.M.’s Peter Buck lends lively guitar to a harmonica-charged slice of Americana, in the rock performance category.

Dem Bobo, Femi Kuti
Horns, bass and organ fatten this reggae-leaning tune from the soulful, message-driven Africa for Africa, in the world music slot.

Codex, Radiohead
Gorgeous strings silken a muted piano ballad, from The King of Limbs, up for alternative music album.

New Orleans, Emmylou Harris
The singer/songwriter examines Katrina’s aftermath on this song in atypical protest rock from Hard Bargain, up for Americana album.

Sleepless Nights, Eddie Vedder
Pearl Jam’s singer duets with Glen Hansard on a vintage Bryant/Bryant charmer from Ukulele Songs, up for folk album.

Rolling in the Deep, Adele
Ears haven’t tired of this shoo-in for best record and song, proof that a great song and sublime singer can still unite the masses.

In October, Kanye West announced that the G.O.O.D. Music roster was working on an upcoming compilation album, slated for Spring 2012. Seems like the record has found even more star power. Within the past week, Pusha-T has revealed that he’s been hard at work on the G.O.O.D. Music album with Frank Ocean and Jay Electronica. The two newcomers joined Pusha, Kanye, Mannie Fresh, and Big Sean in London to work on the highly anticipated record.

Pusha-T first unveiled the new collaborators on Twitter early this morning (Jan. 17), tweeting, “Learned in London: NOBU is always 500+ for dinner, @HitBoy_SC is the future, I’m a car hoe, Frank Ocean already won, and G.O.O.D can’t lose!” He also confirmed Ocean and Electronica’s presence on his website.

Singer/songwriter Marsha Ambrosius (of former Floetry fame) also shared her excitement, tweeting, “In the studio with Frank Ocean, Big Sean, Pusha T, Manny Fresh Kanye West is on the way!!! I’m having fun today thx Che ,” and later, “And @JayElectronica just arrived fun times in the studio – Kanye sessions Day 2 .”

Earlier this month, Mannie Fresh spoke with Billboard about working with West, admitting, “Kanye inspires me through his work ethic and his approach. He’ll tell you his whole warm-up speech: ‘When we’re doing a song, we’re not doing a song just to be doing a song. We’re striving for a No. 1 song.’”

Here’s some never before seen footage of Yeezy and a then partner in rhyme Phenom rocking in Chi-Town at the legendary Double Door spot. As you can see Kanye’s energy and voice is relatively the same all these years later, the video captures a teenage Ye, approximately 18 or 19 since this was recorded circa 1996. Take a look and listen to the rhymes he was kicking, very ATCQ influenced (in my ear’s opinion)..the hook on the first song takes a line off ODB’s “Brooklyn Zoo”. At the end of his set (2:10), a very winded and confident Mr. West proclaims “Kanye represent the sexy niggas, fly niggas”..yeah that’s the Kanye we know, alright.

Highlight line: “Perverted like Clarence Thomas”

[Shortened Version]

[Full Version]

Kanye West’s older cousin and singer Tony Williams reveals some behind the scenes footage of the recording of Ye’s album “Graduation”.

Features a clip of the first time Kanye West played Big Brother to Jay-Z.

Tony Williams recalls the recording sessions for Gradaution and the footage also shows a young Big Sean.

Props: The Source

The Breakfast Club Interviews Amber Rose [Video]

Wiz Khalifa’s main squeeze stopped by The Breakfast Club and chopped it up with DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne Tha God.

The arm candy discussed her new single, “Fame,” as well as her beef with Kim Kardashian and her breakup with Kanye West.

Also in case you missed it, peep her new “Fame” single here.

January 5^th I find myself on my Twitter timeline, per usual. As I scroll down the list and read what the lovely people I follow are thinking, I notice that Kanye is on his rant tip. What could it be this time? Another public apology to Taylor Swift? No. A bunch of consecutive tweets about some sort of art we’re supposed to appreciate? Sort of. A brilliant showing of using his prestigious prowess for inspiration and innovation? Yes. Say what you want about the guy, but can you truly hate on him for what he’s saying he wants to do here? It all makes sense, and some of what he said I’ve been saying for years. There are many great thinkers and talented people out there that are constricted creatively by the confines of today’s curriculum.

Math classes should teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, accounting and money management aaaaaand cut!!! ….

I couldn’t agree more, Kanye. One of the most important aspects of our life isn’t taught to us as an important class growing up. How to manage your money. Instead we’re left with requirements that involve all types of equations that the general public will not use in their lifetime. People have been preaching to me for years that you use math every day. Right. How often will I be using the Pythagorean Theorem or a Venn diagram? Keep it to simply what we’re going to use to get by in life. Anything past that is your choice to take classes to boost your transcript you send out to colleges and what not. I realize this isn’t exactly what Kanye was preaching, but felt that I should touch on it. I could go all day, but for your sake I will stop here. Ha.

People might see the irony in someone who is self proclaimed “sophisticatedly ignorant,” cutting up a $350,000 Maybach for a music video trying to change the world and laugh. Open your minds though people. Could he have put that money to a better use? Most definitely. But it’s almost a metaphor for what he’s trying to do with this DONDA movement. He invested in something unique and creative to express himself and for the entertainment of his fans. Now he’s trying to reach out to those fans, include them into his plans, and try to change the world. He also mentions that he hasn’t bought a car or jewelry in two years. I don’t know how much truth is in that, but it’s great to see where he invests his money. Just like 50 Cent’s “Street King” movement, it’s admirable to see them giving back.

The world is our office.

‘Ye might be on the right track here with something that he may not have mentioned as well. Hope. The hope that this thing really takes off, and people who are sick of conforming to the standard options we have in life and do their part to power a movement as innovative and unique as DONDA. For too long the hip hop community has been looked at in a negative light by the general public. DONDA has the power to change that. I know I’m not the only that one that thinks daily how I can stick it to society by just being an average student, living an average life and making a huge impact on the world. It starts with your inner circles. Hopefully Kanye can get this going and you can expand. Many of you out there have unbelievable ideas, and thoughts but just don’t have the right backing. This may be your shot. I know I believe in it, and one day hope to be contributing to this movement.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then we will each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then we will each have two ideas.

A great quote that Kanye tweeted by George Bernard Shaw. Think of the possibilities if we have thousands or even millions of ideas being exchanged. Our generation is the future, and the future starts now. So here’s to DONDA, and later in life when asked how we made this all possible, we reply with “Yeezy taught me.”

Follow me on Twitter: @KanyeWest_Live