![]() Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best.From Soup Nazis to Nuts: 100 Best 'Seinfeld' Characters.Wale Previews ‘Seinfeld’-Themed Album at Tom’s Restaurant Party.Celebrity Breath Match: On the Set of TV’s New ‘Lip Sync Battle’.Ying Yang Twins on ‘Haaanh’ Theft, New EDM Track and Adam Levine.Read Next Disney CEO Finally Takes Stance on Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Bill After It Passes the State Senate.He had turned Nothing into, well, a thing. ![]() ![]() Ross lets me be me.” Ross, for his part, congratulated the man he calls Wallace on a job well done. “Interscope would never let me put out an album like this. Throughout the night, he gave plenty of thanks, shouting out the fans for sticking by him and Rick Ross for allowing Wale to be Wale. make me happy.” (And, as the Earth revolves around shoes in Wale’s universe, he says, “I go to Texas for the no-Timberland weather” on “The One Time in Houston,” which is otherwise filled with xans, black bottles and droopy-eyed sex.) As is tradition, most songs feature some sort of Seinfeld inclusion, either from 2015 Jerry or his Nineties counterpart, his voice filtered and glitchy as if from an old VHS tape. The production has that new car smell, light and ethereal, inspired by Jerry once saying, “I don’t know. Later, playing “The White Shoes,” Wale proudly noted that he was the one singing. There are winks at Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper” and Groove Theory’s “Tell Me,” and on “The Need to Know,” SZA covers Musiq Soulchild’s “Just Friends” under a cloud of echos. When Wilson called for Ross to hop on “Success,” a bombastic Just Blaze-like production, Wale laughed it off, saying he stole Ross’s ad-lib for it already. “I knew it was a hit when Meek Mill fucked with it,” he said. Another stand-out, “Girls on Drugs,” co-starring a ghostly flip of Janet Jackson’s “Go Deep,” had been kicked around for a while and was finally written in “15 minutes while waiting for the Uber to show up.” Though swirling and oily, it’s his most exciting song. Ten songs were played: He described the direction as “transparent,” saying, “I did enough to show I’m a good musician in my first three albums, now I’m in a place where it’s like, ‘OK, what do you have to say?'” On “The Helium Balloon (featuring Seinfeld)” he says, “First you get picked up, then you get picked apart,” and on “The Pessimist,” he calls himself “America’s dream and nightmare, in the same being.” So yes, Wale still feels under-appreciated, but he also addresses new themes (a miscarriage, broken relationships) and new sounds. “This is just a preview, not for review,” he said in introducing the album, which apparently is still being recorded. Of course, the gathering wasn’t for nothing – Wale played music, too. He paired Belaire Rosé with salad and took a phone call from Diddy mid-way through. Rick Ross squeezed into a booth, casually breaking New York’s anti-smoking laws while flaunting a fur coat dyed burgundy. DJ Drama pushed through to the back, as did industry heavyweights Todd Moscowitz and Julie Greenwald. The menus were branded with his face and song titles: “The Middle Finger Cheeseburger,” “The Omelette About Nothing,” the “Girls on Drugs Grilled Chicken Breast Sandwich.” Twice, the rapper circled the room, joking with writers – “Don’t come here and hit on girls” – and Hot 97 personalities before engaging in light Q&A with Rap Radar‘s Elliott Wilson. Wale could be seen on the paper cups, on T-shirts and hand-towels and taped to the walls, alongside Al Hirschfeld caricatures of Elaine and George. Even Seinfeld, its number-one cultural landmark, famously called itself “a show about nothing.” And so it’s appropriate that Wale – whose love of Seinfeld spans two mixtapes and a shared Complex cover with Jerry – previewed his upcoming The Album About Nothing at Tom’s Restaurant, its exterior familiar to anyone who’s crossed a television these past twenty years. Nothing ever happens on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a place where corners have long been dominated by several varieties of frozen yogurt shops and a Banksy lives under plexiglass.
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