In news that should not surprise anybody, Snoop Dogg this week invested some of his vast, THC-dusted fortune into Eaze, an app that gets your medical marijuana delivered directly to your door (in less than 10 minutes!) for the toker who appreciates convenience.
It isn’t the first time D.O. Double-G. has shoved his money into something completely ridiculous, as we’ve covered before, so in the spirit of things we’ve taken a look at some other baffling business ventures by some of hip hop’s finest.
5. Flavor Flav – Flav’s Fried Chicken
Look at that consummate businessman grinning so shit-eatingly above you. You can just tell (from the giant clock around his neck) that this man’s time is money and the world is his marketplace, waiting to be capitalised on.
Uh… kind of. Aside from being out-rapped by Chuck D on every Public Enemy song ever made and popularising the phrase ‘Yeeeeeeahhh boiii’ while bouncing around like a dickhead, Flavour Flav is also the man behind MTV’s eye-clawingly terrible Flavor Of Love and, yes, Flav’s Fried Chicken.
You’re saying you DON’T want this man anywhere near your food?
Flav reached for the stars with this one, claiming he wanted the franchise to be in the vein of KFC and have restaurants worldwide. He even claimed to use a secret recipe, also just like KFC.
Crazy. The secret ingredient was all the crazy.
The first restaurant opened in January of 2011… and closed in April of also that year, ending Flav’s run as the hip hop Colonel Sanders. Key factors cited included expired coleslaw, unpaid employees, drugs and domestic violence, but I like to think that the good people of Clinton, Iowa simply loved themselves too much to eat at an establishment run by a wizened old gremlin in a Viking helmet.
4. Memphis Bleek – Shampoo Spokesman
The majority of you are right to be scratching your heads and wondering who I’m talking about right now. Memphis Bleek was at one time the Robin to Jay-Z‘s Batman, only if Robin were somehow more useless. Probably the biggest thing he ever did was hide behind Jigga on The Takeover and hurl water balloons at Mobb Deep and Nas. Also, Jay-Z lyrically ruffled his hair in a condescending fatherly manner on the Sierra Leone Remix of Kanye’s Diamonds. That’s pretty much it for Memphis Bleek and notability.
So to help dismiss all these claims that he’s only around because Jay-Z, Bleek went solo and got his.
In the form of uh… shampoo commercials?
Yeah this was awful. It’s difficult to call it a ‘total failure’ because Garnier as a company is still around and successful today in spite of this, but if you can find me one person who bought their shampoo because this guy danced around in the commercial, spitting drivel like ‘Garnier, it strong all day’, then I can tell all my friends that I’ve met Memphis Bleek’s mother. He was for some reason never used as their spokesman again.
3: Lil Kim – Se Swa Salons
Without Lil Kim we wouldn’t have Nicki Minaj… should be the prosecution’s closing statement from her trial for war crimes.
Also, in her (hours upon hours, every single waking day) of spare time since becoming completely irrelevant once the 90s ended, Lil Kim has a passion for both pointless Twitter feuds and also the beauty industry. To the latter end she has opened five beauty salons across North Carolina and left me to ponder, who in the name of all that is FUCK, would pay to have their cosmetic beauty organised by somebody whose very idea of that is this:
KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!
Despite her only clients being sewer rats and the blind (probably) and her cousin and business partner being arrested for stealing money from employees and other fraudulent business practices, Se Swa Salons are, by some hateful machination of the universe, still around today. Proof that fuck everything.
2: 50 Cent – Magic Stick Condoms
50 Cent has his diamond-encrusted fingers stuck in a whole mess of pies. He’s in the underwear business, the mining business, the embarrassing Floyd Mayweather business and, for a brief and hilarious period, he was in the condom business.
’50 Cent brand ‘Magic Stick’ condoms, for people who are gross’
Because the first thing anyone listening to lyrics such as ‘I touch the right spot at the right time. Lights on or lights off, she like it from behind’ was thinking of was ‘hey, I bet that guy knows all about birth control!’. Nonetheless, these are just perfect for keeping your G-Unit wrapped, if you overlook the small fact that they totally don’t work.
‘Surprise, motherfucker’
Yep, Fiddy tried to add an ingredient that would prolong sexual performance and it made those raincoats combust faster than Young Buck‘s career and with the potential for almost as many tears. With his market whittled down to ‘people who don’t care if their condoms work or not’ (the profoundly miserable), 50 Cent and his business partners made the wise decision to swiftly abandon the birth control racket.
‘Bye!’
1. Birdman – Bronald Oil and Gas
Ugh, Birdman. That creepy, soulless, unquestionable piece of shit behind Cash Money Records. You would think with all the time and effort this man puts in every year into turning contemporary hip hop into a joke with an elbow to the crotch as a punchline, that he wouldn’t have time for any zany outside business ventures like the above artists. Well guess again you doubting fuckface.
Birdman and his sister are less than amused with your lack of faith.
According to Birdman himself and this totally official and not-at-all-fake-looking website, he and his brother, Slim, are oil barons. Specifically, the ‘founding visionaries’ of Bronald (A combination of their actual names, Bryan and Ronald) Oil and Gas, which is how all the enormous corporations come up with their names, of course.
Somewhere in the middle of ruining rap music, Birdman had allegedly stumbled across oil (also, some gas) and now he’s as oil baron-y as the There Will Be Blood guy, only, you know, without the old-timey pipe and the mustache or probably any actual oil.
Even these guys were more legit.
Yessir, despite setting up an entire website featuring heavily detailed claims like ‘a trillion dollar energy oasis’, giving interviews where he claimed to have been in the oil business and providing for his family with it for ‘four or five years’ and even tattooing an oil pump on his head (because it has to be true if it’s in permanent ink!), it turns out that the official regulators in charge of issuing permits for oil and gas had never heard of any of this.
It’s almost as if this upstanding citizen was full of shit.
And it seemed as though he’d begrudgingly admitted this bullshit after covering up his head tattoo in 2010 and deleting the official website, but no, it came roaring back in 2014, his tattoo-covering merely a genius Birdman ploy to trick us all into leaving him alone ‘to restructure the company’ (as though people were kicking his door in instead of not giving two shits about him in the first place). Bronald Oil and Gas also promises this year to ‘launch with innovative technology, products, and projects that will shock the American oil and gas industry’.
Well shut up and take my money!
Or, you know, maybe just fuck off.