In order to maintain some sort of relevancy, Pump has found himself latching on to the big stories of the day. Right now, that story is Lil Durk’s murder for hire trial. The rapper is facing life in prison as he stands accused of orchestrating a hit on Quando Rondo, leading to the killing of Lul Pab.

If you remember, Durk has actually dissed Lil Pump a couple of times on songs like “All These N****s” and “Hanging With Wolves.” Durk clearly does not take Pump’s art seriously.

With that in mind, Pump has decided to clap back while Durk is unable to respond. In a string of posts and videos, Pump called Durk a snitch, among other bad names.

Read More: A Guilty Verdict Still Doesn’t Bring Closure To Tupac’s Murder

Lil Pump Disses Lil Durk Out Of Nowhere

DJ Akademiks reacted to Lil Pump’s diss on his stream, and as you can imagine, he was pretty stunned that Pump was being this brazen. Additionally, he didn’t even know that these two were at war with one another.

You really can’t blame Ak for not knowing that. Quite frankly, this is one of those feuds that most probably memory-holed, as it never really made an impact beyond a bar here and there.

What is more consequential, however, is this current trial. Lil Durk is facing life in prison if convicted. The trial is supposed to wrap up at some point this week, which means a verdict could be coming in just a matter of days.

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

The post Lil Pump Delivers Ridiculous Lil Durk Diss Amid Trial appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

According to TMZ, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson revealed that Diddy could potentially face charges related to Tupac’s death if they uncover new evidence. However, Wolfson also made it abundantly clear that they don’t have enough evidence to proceed with charging him.

“At this point, we don’t believe we have sufficient evidence to charge anyone else with the death of Tupac Shakur,” Wolfson said. “But, like any other case, if we come into more information, more evidence, we can always consider filing additional charges.”

Read More: A Guilty Verdict Still Doesn’t Bring Closure To Tupac’s Murder

Prosecutors Don’t Rule Out Going After Diddy

The theories about Diddy’s supposed involvement in the case popped up during the trial as well, when jurors heard police interview recordings where Keefe D claimed Diddy put up $1M for Tupac and Suge Knight’s murder. Keefe said that Diddy told him to “get rid of those dudes.”

But before the trial began, these allegations gained more prominence in Sean Combs: The Reckoning, which explored the claims of Diddy’s involvement. More recently, 50 Cent said he would put $1M bet on Keefe D testifying against Diddy in the future.

Sources close to Diddy have already shut down these allegations. “Diddy had absolutely nothing to do with the Tupac murder. He did not pull the trigger or set it up,” they told TMZ. 

Keefe D faces a possible life sentence and is scheduled to be sentenced on October 13th. He has already announced plans to appeal his conviction. 

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

The post Diddy Could Face Tupac Murder Probe If New Evidence Emerges, Prosecutor Says appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

Twenty-one years later to the date, the clip is striking for reasons that stretch beyond its original controversy. This was Kanye using the unpredictability that had already become part of his public persona to challenge a sitting president over the treatment of Black Americans. He was confrontational and willing to make a nationally televised celebrity fundraiser uncomfortable. Those characteristics never disappeared. However, what eventually changed was where much of that defiance was directed and what many of the Black fans who first embraced him believed it represented.

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Read More: Mike Myers & SNL Recreate The Infamous Kanye West Hurricane Katrina Statement On 20th Anniversary

Katrina was not the first indication that race and inequality occupied a serious place in Kanye’s work. The College Dropout had already examined Black consumerism and the limits of education as protection against racism. A 2004 review in The Guardian called him an “intelligent social commentator” and specifically recognized the album’s interest in materialism and the obstacles facing Black graduates. Late Registration, released only days before the telethon, pushed further into government policy and the damage inflicted on Black communities.

That history makes the anniversary more complicated than a nostalgic look at an outrageous television moment. The Kanye who confronted George W. Bush did not suddenly discover politics because a camera was live. He was amplifying concerns already present in his music and, increasingly, in his public statements. Over the next two decades, the artist who once used his platform to challenge how America treated Black people would embrace Donald Trump, declare that 400 years of slavery “sounds like a choice,” and eventually alienate large portions of the same Black audience that once saw his refusal to stay quiet as one of his greatest strengths. Kanye never stopped disrupting the room. The meaning of that disruption changed.

The George Bush Moment Didn’t Come Out Of Nowhere

The records make Ye’s earlier politics easier to see. On “All Falls Down,” Kanye tied status and consumption to insecurity while questioning what success was supposed to look like for Black Americans. “Spaceship” turned his own retail experience into something less celebratory, focusing on low wages and racial discrimination in the workplace. In a review of The College Dropout in 2004, The Guardian recognized that social commentary as part of what separated him from many of his peers.

Late Registration sharpened some of those ideas. “Crack Music” reached directly into the political history of the crack epidemic, invoking Ronald Reagan while framing drugs as something that devastated Black communities rather than simply another piece of street mythology. Kanye later told XXL that after concerns that “Jesus Walks” was too Black for Pop radio, “Crack Music” was his answer. He described it as “real Black music.”

His willingness to push those conversations beyond the records was becoming visible, too. Weeks before Katrina, Kanye used an MTV interview to condemn homophobia in Hip Hop and urged rappers to stop discriminating against gay people. The Los Angeles Times reported on the comments at the time. What mattered was not only the position he took, but his growing willingness to use promotional spaces for arguments that had nothing to do with selling an album.

That was the version of Kanye who walked onto NBC’s Katrina telethon.

Katrina Turned Kanye’s Politics Into A National Moment

The reaction to Kanye’s accusation exposed a racial divide that spread far beyond one celebrity. In a survey conducted days after the telethon, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Black respondents believed the government would have responded faster if most Katrina victims had been white. Seventy percent said they were angry about the aftermath. Kanye had given unusually blunt language to distrust that was already widespread.

Moreover, he did not retreat once the comment became national news. A week later, Kanye appeared during BET’s S.O.S. (Saving Ourselves) fundraiser and again criticized the coverage of Black survivors. He said the media had “really tried to make the Black people seem like animals” and told viewers that he felt “the world needed to hear what was going on,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Two days later, during an MTV-sponsored concert, he mocked suggestions that he should worry about professional retaliation while people in New Orleans had gone days without food or contact with their families.

The controversy pushed Kanye into a role larger than the socially conscious rapper critics had identified on his records. He had challenged the president during a humanitarian crisis, then continued pressing the racial argument after NBC cut his statement from later broadcasts. Many in the Black community understood that, as they operated under the same refusal to soften themselves for mainstream audiences, this now carried political weight.

The Politics Didn’t Disappear Overnight

That association between Kanye’s defiance and Black political critique survived well beyond the Bush years. On 2013’s Yeezus, “New Slaves” attacked the surveillance of Black shoppers and the private-prison system, while his interview with Zane Lowe that same year widened the argument to Black creative ownership. Kanye described repeatedly reaching a “glass ceiling” as he tried to move beyond music into fashion, telling Lowe that Black artists could achieve enormous visibility without gaining comparable power inside the industries profiting from their influence.

Read More: Kanye West Remains Loyal To Trump: “I Still Got A Red Hat On Today”

His framing of those barriers began to shift over the next few years. In a 2015 interview with Clique TV, Kanye called racism a “dated concept” and argued that class had become the more important dividing line. He was not denying that racial discrimination existed, but the emphasis had moved away from the structural language heard on records like “Crack Music” and “New Slaves.” Increasingly, his public complaints about exclusion also centered on his own battles for access to corporate power.

The first major political rupture arrived after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. During a Saint Pablo Tour stop in San Jose, Kanye told the crowd that he had not voted but would have supported Trump if he had. He praised Trump’s campaign style and told Black people to “stop focusing on racism,” even as he acknowledged that the country itself was racist, according to The Washington Post. The reaction inside the arena included boos.

Weeks later, Kanye met with Trump at Trump Tower. He said afterward that they discussed issues including education and violence in Chicago, but the image carried its own significance. The artist who had once become nationally famous for accusing a Republican president of indifference toward Black people was now publicly aligning himself with another. That tension would become much harder to explain away once MAGA became part of Kanye’s identity.

Read More: Nipsey Hussle On Kanye West Wearing The MAGA Hat: “It Was A Kick In The Gut”

When Kanye’s Politics Took A Different Turn

MAGA made the political shift inseparable from Kanye’s broader identity. In 2018, he posted a photo of himself wearing a hat signed by Trump and continued to defend the president even as longtime fans questioned the alliance. Months later, he wore the hat into the Oval Office. The Washington Post documented how firmly Trump support had become part of Kanye’s politics that year. The artist who once used national television to accuse a Republican president of failing Black Americans was now embracing another as a symbol of independent thought.

The break with much of his Black audience deepened during his appearance at TMZ that May. While discussing free thought, Kanye said 400 years of slavery “sounds like a choice,” prompting staffer Van Lathan to confront him in the newsroom. Kanye later explained that he was referring to mental imprisonment rather than suggesting enslaved people had willingly accepted bondage, but the damage was substantial. The distance from the artist who had once invoked the Black Panthers and the crack epidemic in his music was becoming difficult to overlook.

Read More: Rare Times Kanye West Said He Was Sorry

His public rhetoric eventually moved far beyond Trump. Antisemitic remarks beginning in 2022 cost Kanye major business relationships, and his later statements included praise for Hitler and the use of Nazi imagery. He created “White Lives Matter” merchandise to combat the BLM movement. The escalation pushed his politics into territory that could no longer be framed simply as conservative rebellion or a refusal to follow Black political expectations. In January 2026, Reuters reported that Ye took out a full-page Wall Street Journal advertisement apologizing for his antisemitic behavior and stating that he was neither a Nazi nor an antisemite.

He addressed Black people directly in that apology, saying, “To the Black community, I am sorry to have let you down. I love us.” Twenty-one years after Hurricane Katrina, that acknowledgment gives a new meaning to the footage of Kanye standing beside Mike Myers. The man on that stage was already confrontational and unwilling to follow a script. Those qualities never left him. That 2005 moment now makes the distance between Kanye’s early politics and where he eventually landed impossible to ignore.

Read More: Kanye West Doesn’t Need Redemption—He Needs To Be Held Accountable

The post Kanye’s Katrina, George Bush Criticism Hits Differently 21 Years Later appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

Last week, Ye’s longtime employee, who just so happens to be an infamous white supremacist, Milo Yiannopoulos, was arrested by ICE. He has since been let go by ICE and has gone back to working for the artist.

In fact, this week, Ye announced three more concerts. After performing in New Orleans, West is planning to go on a small tour of the American Southwest. This tour includes a show in Houston on October 31, Dallas on November 7, and Phoenix on November 21.

Read More: A Guilty Verdict Still Doesn’t Bring Closure To Tupac’s Murder

Kanye West Continues To Tour

These shows have proven that Kanye West is still in high demand. There is still a portion of his fanbase that looks past the controversies. While the morality behind that is dubious, Ye is a big enough artist that there are going to be fans who love him, no matter what.

These concerts have also proven to be successful because of the setlist. Instead of forcing new material on the fans, he has been going back in his catalog and playing all of the hits. The setlist is nostalgic, and it certainly makes us yearn for a time when Ye was respected.

Will you be going to any of these shows, and if so, which one? Let us know in the comments below, and stay tuned to HNHH for more news from around the music world.

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

The post Kanye West Announces Three New Concerts In The American Southwest appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

Per TMZ, his father, Dawud Burke, reportedly sold a 1,819-square-foot home in Houston, Texas, for $229,000 at the top of July, marking the second real estate sale of the year. Months prior, he took out a $138K loan on another home in Houston. He currently resides in a home with an estimated value of $850K in Hampstead, TX–a 4,426-square-foot home equipped with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms.

Read More: A Guilty Verdict Still Doesn’t Bring Closure To Tupac’s Murder

D4vd Attorneys Withdraw

The sales of these assets are quite noticeable, especially after recent developments in D4vd’s case. His financial issues were brought to the attention of the court after his legal team withdrew. D4vd previously hired Blair Berk, Marilyn Bednarski, and Regina Peter to represent him. He’ll now be represented by a public defender. 

“This morning the court granted our request to withdraw as counsel and appointed the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, after it was determined David qualified for appointed counsel,” they said in a statement. “We continue to support David and his defense against these serious charges. We are grateful that the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office has taken over the representation and that David has a highly capable and committed team of attorneys and investigators behind him.”

Los Angeles D.A. Nathan Hochman said that the death penalty remains on the table, though they haven’t reached a decision on whether they will explore that option. 

D4vd will be back in court on October 19th for his next pre-trial hearing. He has already pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

The post D4vd’s Dad Sold Home, Pulls Out $140K Loan Amid Financial Struggles appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

Release Date: September 1, 2026

Genre: Hip-Hop

Album: COOL AZZ SUMMER

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Release Date: September 1, 2026

Genre: Hip-Hop

Album: N/A

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Jurors were not asked to solve every mystery that has attached itself to Shakur’s death. Prosecutors did not argue that Davis pulled the trigger, nor did they need to prove who did. Their case was that he supplied the gun and helped direct the retaliation that ended with Shakur being shot just off the Las Vegas Strip. The defense countered by emphasizing what investigators lacked, including surveillance footage, phone records, or other physical evidence placing Davis inside the white Cadillac. Yet some of the state’s most consequential evidence came from Davis himself, through accounts he had repeated in interviews, in conversations with investigators, and in a memoir.

Read More: Keefe D Found Guilty In Tupac Shakur Murder Trial

That is what makes the conviction such a strange endpoint for one of Hip Hop’s most persistent mysteries. Davis spent years presenting himself as one of the few people still alive who could explain what happened from inside the story. His connection to Orlando Anderson and his repeated claims that he rode in the Cadillac gave his words a weight that conspiracy theorists and outside observers could never quite claim. Eventually, those same stories followed him into a courtroom.

A guilty verdict settles the question Nevada prosecutors put before the jury. However, it can’t erase the competing versions of the murder that have circulated since 1996, or the documentaries, interviews, and books that turned Shakur’s death into something larger than the criminal investigation itself. Tupac’s murder finally has its first conviction. What it does not have is the kind of ending capable of undoing everything built around it.

Keefe D Wasn’t Just Another Man With A Tupac Theory

Plenty of people have spent the last three decades claiming to know who killed Tupac Shakur. Former detectives have offered theories. Death Row associates have disputed one another’s versions of events. Documentaries and interviews introduced enough alleged insiders to make the case feel crowded with people who were somehow one conversation removed from the truth. Davis occupied a different position. He was Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson’s uncle, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips and, by his own repeated account, one of four men riding in the Cadillac when Tupac was shot.

That proximity is what made people listen. Davis was not working backward from police reports or recycling something he heard from somebody else. When he discussed the shooting, he described the night as someone who claimed to have witnessed it from inside the alleged murder vehicle. In a 2008 interview with investigators, he said he obtained the gun and passed it toward the back seat after the Cadillac pulled alongside the BMW carrying Tupac and Suge Knight. He identified Anderson as the shooter in that conversation, although the question of who fired the weapon remained outside what prosecutors ultimately needed to prove against Davis.

Read More: Keefe D Suffers Major Blow As Judge Allows 2008 Police Interview At Tupac Murder Trial

His connection to Anderson also made the account harder to dismiss as ordinary Tupac lore. The MGM Grand fight earlier that night was not a distant piece of the story to Davis. Anderson was his nephew, and prosecutors convinced jurors that the beating became the motive for retaliation. Davis’ descriptions put him with Anderson afterward, armed and looking for Tupac and Knight. Whatever contradictions emerged over the years, he was speaking about people in his own family and gang circle rather than inserting himself into a story populated by strangers.

Time made his position even more unusual. Anderson died in 1998. Terry Brown and DeAndre Smith, the other men prosecutors said were inside the Cadillac, also died before Davis was charged. By the time Nevada prosecutors brought the case to trial, Davis was the only surviving member of the group alleged to have been inside the car. For anyone trying to reconstruct what happened there, his voice carried a kind of access that was increasingly impossible to find elsewhere.

Being Close To The Mystery Became Its Own Currency

Access to one of Hip Hop’s most infamous unsolved murders carried its own value, and Keefe D eventually understood how much people wanted what he claimed to know. His account had already entered the public record through Greg Kading’s Murder Rap, which drew from Davis’ protected conversations with investigators. When Davis began speaking for himself years later, he was stepping into an audience that had already spent decades demanding answers about Tupac’s death.

He acknowledged that during BET’s Death Row Chronicles. “People have been pursuing me for 20 years. Newspapers, magazines,” Davis said while explaining why he had finally become willing to speak publicly, per Sky News. He also described himself as the only person still alive who could tell what happened that night. It established the role he would increasingly occupy in the Tupac story. Davis was selling proximity that almost nobody else could offer.

Read More: Tupac Told Police ‘We’ll Take Care Of It’ After 1996 Shooting, Officer Says

His 2019 memoir made the proposition even clearer. Compton Street Legend did not market Davis simply as a former gang figure telling his life story. Its full title promised “street-level accounts” of the Tupac and Biggie murders, Death Row Records, and some of the most long-lasting controversies of 1990s Hip Hop. Promotional material emphasized his firsthand connections, while his growing list of television appearances became part of the reason readers were supposed to trust him. The mystery surrounding Tupac was no longer just something Davis knew about. It had become part of his public identity.

Then, VladTV showed how large the appetite could be. Davis’ first full interview with the platform in 2019 was split into multiple clips focused on Tupac, Orlando Anderson, Suge Knight, and Diddy, and the full conversation also promoted his memoir. VladTV later ranked Davis among its biggest interviews of the year, reporting roughly 12 million combined YouTube views across the interview and its clips. He returned in 2023 to revisit old claims and offer still more details about a murder he had already discussed extensively.

That is the currency Davis possessed. His access gave him authority, and the absence of a conviction kept that authority renewable. For years, there was always another unanswered question about Tupac’s murder. Keefe D had positioned himself as someone who could answer it.

The Stories That Made Keefe D Valuable Became Evidence Against Him

The bargain changed once Keefe D was charged. Publicly, his value had depended on the idea that he possessed firsthand knowledge no one else could offer. In court, his defense needed jurors to see those same interviews and memoir passages as exaggeration or storytelling shaped by money and attention. The persona that had made him useful to documentaries and interview platforms suddenly became something his attorneys had to dismantle.

That reversal gave the prosecution an unusual advantage. They did not have to present Davis as a perfectly reliable narrator. His accounts changed over the years, and prosecutors acknowledged as much. What mattered to the state was that certain elements remained intact across versions, particularly his claim that he was involved in the retaliation after Orlando Anderson was attacked. His own archive gave prosecutors years of material to compare against itself.

The irony is difficult to miss. Keefe D spent years benefiting from audiences believing he knew the truth about Tupac’s murder. Once his freedom depended on it, the argument became that people had believed him too much. Jurors rejected that version and found him guilty in less than three hours. The storyteller had become part of the story he spent years helping keep alive.

A Guilty Verdict Still Cannot Untangle What Tupac’s Murder Became

A conviction can establish criminal responsibility without settling the story people have spent 30 years building around a murder. Keefe D is now legally responsible for Tupac’s killing, but that verdict does not make every account he gave over the years true, identify the gunman through a judicial finding, or erase the competing narratives that flourished while no one was being prosecuted. As Reuters noted after the verdict, prosecutors still have not publicly identified who fired the fatal shots.

The longer Tupac’s murder remained unsolved, the more people surrounding it became characters in a story that could be retold indefinitely. Former associates became interview subjects. Detectives became authors and documentary figures. Claims that might once have disappeared into old police files could be revived years later on television or YouTube. Keefe D was particularly effective inside that environment, but he did not create it. He became one of its most recognizable products.

Read More: Keefe D Demands An Appeal Following Conviction, Receives Sentencing Date

There is an uncomfortable consequence to all of that attention. Tupac can become secondary in conversations about his own murder. The focus shifts toward who was in the car, whose account changed, which investigator believed whom, and which new interview promises another revelation. A 25-year-old man was killed, yet nearly three decades without a conviction allowed the unanswered questions surrounding his death to become their own form of entertainment.

Keefe D’s conviction changes his place in that history, but it cannot dismantle the culture that grew around the absence of an answer. His attorney has already said the verdict will be appealed, and FOX5 Las Vegas reports that sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 13. The first conviction in Tupac Shakur’s murder is historic. Still, it can’t make 30 years of competing stories disappear.

The post A Guilty Verdict Still Doesn’t Bring Closure To Tupac’s Murder appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

The testimony also found Vonnie explaining how Lil Durk’s lyrics also connected to his plot for revenge. Prosecutors brought forth one particular bar (“If you can’t get the main n***a, then you better get his guy”) and asked Vonnie, “That’s what you did in LA, right?” Vonnie responded, “Accidentally, yes.”

Vonnie also revealed that he and Durk communicated during the hit as the alleged hitmen followed Quando Rondo around, with Vonnie saying, “We moving sloppy so far… It’s not really planned. It’s like a free-for-all.” When Durk asked if they “got him,” Vonnie said he wasn’t at the scene. However, Durk’s attorney, Drew Findling later applied pressure during cross-examination by playing a recording of jail call where Vonnie says it’s his “time to perform.”

This led to a contentious back-and-forth when Findling asked if his cooperation was for a reduced sentence. “You were hoping for home confinement,” Findling said.

“Same as your client,” Grant responded while maintaining that his testimony has been truthful.

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

Vonnie Testifies In Durk Trial 

According to reports from Complex and additional reporting from Taylor Parise and youvegtMEL, he also detailed the first alleged attempted hit on Quando Rondo in Georgia in 2021.  Vonnie said that they initially began plotting on Quando Rondo’s whereabouts at Von’s Atlanta home hours after his death. He also testified that Durk expressed issues about people in his circle not taking immediate action. “I ain’t celebrating cause my dawg dead and nun happen,” Durk allegedly wrote. “I’m not putting a dollar up till mf show me it’s a team thing from this day on.”

Vonnie said that “everybody’s antennas went up” after they found out that Quando Rondo had a concert in Waycross, Georgia. Vonnie said that Durk told him to “put it together” shortly after within 48-60 hours ahead of the concert.

“We left our cell phones, had masks, guns, normal stuff, typical for when you’re going to commit a crime,” Grant said, according to youvegtMEL. There was footage shown in the courtroom from May 2, 2021 at 3:18 a.m. with Vonnie, MuWop and two others ambusing Rondo at a gas station, though Parise noted that Vonnie was the driver.

Elsewhere, Vonnie also testified that 6ix9ine’s constant mockery of Lil Durk over King Von’s death “drew more attention like lighter fluid to a fire.” “It’s already a problem, now this person is talking about it,” he said. 

Read More: How Hip-Hop Media Is Dividing Over The Lil Durk Trial

The post OTF Vonnie Reveals Lil Durk’s Reaction To Lul Pab Shooting, Details First Attempted Hit On Quando Rondo appeared first on HotNewHipHop.

Release Date: September 2, 2026

Genre: Hip-Hop

Tracklist for B.I.L.L.Y

1. BLACK COFFEE
2. LABELS STILL CALLIN’
3. CRUCIAL ft. 1900Rugrat
4. LINDSEY
5. STILL A YOUNGBOY ft. Maxo Kream
6. BANDZ 2 MAKE
7. EYE LIED ft. Ski Mask The Slump God
8. FUCK FAIRYTALES
9. LOVE STORY
10. PARANOID
11. SHOTS
12. DENIM BLUES
13. STILL
14. TESTIMONIES
15. BILLY

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