Hov’s dropped freestyles and propaganda vacays have landed him in hot water. But when the man says he’s a business man, he’s not kidding.

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Over his vanity Twitter account this morning, it was announced that the second official signing to the Roc Nation Sports imprint is college basketball and future WNBA star Skylar Diggins.

While Diggins may not be the best women’s hoopster in her draft class, she’s arguably the most popular female athlete on the planet. She pulls off the rare balancing act of being considered feminine and desirable, but not a slut. Her competition for that title is USA Soccer’s Alex Morgan, but Morgan lacks Diggins’s celebrity cred. Her 2011 Final Four was as notable for Lil Wayne’s Twitter P.D.A as it was for the Fighting Irish finishing second.

The Jigga-Diggins partnership will be fascinating to watch. There was much trolling on Jay-Z’s 1/15 of 1 percent ownership of the Brooklyn Nets, but Jay’s fellow owners recognized that putting him in charge of branding would immediately transform the middling Nets into an ‘it’ franchise. Applying that kind of know-how to an athlete like Diggins could have huge consequences.

Be on the lookout for Diggins on billboards in Times Square and courtside at Miami Heat games. But also be on the lookout for the caption when you see “WNBA’s Skylar Diggins.” H.O.V.A.’s got to make something from this opportunity, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jay-Z brings Blue Ivy to a Tulsa Shock game. WNBA games are mostly attended by dads bringing their daughters anyway.

Jay Z embodies so much of what makes New York New York. A kid from a tough neighborhood who grows up in public housing, overcomes lots of bad influences on the street, never lets go of his dream, makes it to the top — and then keeps going, pursuing new outlets for his creativity and ambition. When no one would sign him to a record contract, he created his own label and built a music empire — before going on to design clothing lines, open sports bars and, most recently, represent professional athletes. He’s an artist-entrepreneur who stands at the center of culture and commerce in 21st century America, and his influence stretches across races, religions and regions. He’s never forgotten his roots — “Empire State of Mind” was a love song to our city — and as a co-owner of the NBA Nets, he helped bring a major league sports team back to Brooklyn, not far from his old neighborhood. In nearly everything he’s tried, he’s found success. (He even put a ring on Beyoncé.) And in doing so, he’s proved that the American Dream is alive and well.

Jay-Z embodies so much more than what Mikey listed, however. Allow me to add:

• When caught with guns, it’s always his weed carrier’s fault.
• Like most New York entertainers, he commits ‘highway robbery’ by pricing his fans out of his shows.
• After the birth of his daughter, his wife’s lavish maternity suite and hired bodyguards forced hospital staff to neglect other mothers.
• He donated only $6,000 to charity in a year when his income was $63 million.
• He waited for Joe Biden to endorse gay marriage so Obama could endorse so Jay could endorse. Gay marriage. So trendy.

“What makes New York, New York”? Sounds about right.

“A big surprise–as someone who is well-known to be challenged in the department of popular culture, I had to tell my chief of staff who Jay-Z was,” Lew said at an event at Johns Hopkins University.

Jay-Z and Beyoncé traveled to Cuba on a license issued through a Treasury Department office.

Lew was speaking to the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel on the state of the global economy.

Hat tip to Politico’s Morning Money.

Your new record, Open Letter, the latest diss track responding to critics (raises hand) who’ve lambasted you and Beyonce for celebrating your fifth wedding anniversary in the communist dictatorship of Cuba, dropped this morning. It’s primed to be parsed by cable television resident hip-hop stans Chris Hayes and Jake Tapper. The anchors will be racing each other to find out who can slobber the most over it. Hayes’s public trysts with musicians and Tapper’s reading of Rap Genius on Biggie lyrics make James Lipton’s legendary mouth breathing look tame.

Here are two bars from the song that we’re bound to hear as bumper music for the next two days:

Would’ve brought the Nets to Brooklyn for free
Except I made millions off it, you fuckin’ dweeb

Before this poor excuse for a record starts to gain a reputation as anything close to good, let’s remind ourselves that you’re the architect of Takeover. A record that ended the career of Mobb Deep. That dropped in 2000, when you were the sensational MC battling it out for rap supremacy.

Iceberg, I hate to break it to you, but Open Letter sounds like an excuse for an over-the-hill spitter to pick fights with people just because that’s what he does. Having a public beef with a fellow rapper is good for image. Sen. Marco Rubio and Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, on the other hand, aren’t Nas. They are politicians who represent constituents who have sought sanctuary from an oppressive Castro regime. They have serious and legit concerns over why, of all the glamorous places on the planet, you and your bride picked the home of a despot to celebrate your anniversary.

Even Open Letter‘s producer’s Swizz Beats and Timbaland are losers in this episode. Swizz and Timbo haven’t produced a legitimate U.S. Billboard top-100 hit since 2009. Swizz is better known for being Mr. Alicia Keys, and Timbaland’s recycled beats are largely responsible for Justin Timberlake’s uninspiring comeback.

Why don’t you aim your dulled pen at an actual rival? Someone who can actually respond to you through a cypher? Someone like a fellow 43-year-old rapper who shares your first name? Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has been rumored this week to be macking on Kate Upton. D-I-D-D-Y has topped H.O.V.A. for three years straight in being the richest hip-hop artist in the game. Throw some bars at Diddy. Reference Biggie while you’re at it. Tapper no doubt will appreciate it.

Obama said chill, you gonna get me impeached
But you don’t need this shit anyway
Chill with me on the beach

Don’t worry too much about that, Shawn Corey. In 2017, you won’t be so lonely.

Sincerely,

Rob John

Never has it been less important that a rapper commit some sort of crime in order to appear authentic. Why sell drugs so you can rap about it and a make shedload of money, when you could just as easily not sell drugs, rap about it anyway, and still make a shedload of money?

Crawford bases his thesis on the following quote from the most mainstream rapper alive (R.I.P. Tupac), American’s newest minted Cuban anthropologist, one Shawn Corey Carter:

I’ve said the election of Obama has made the hustler less relevant.

And yet, after writing off today’s hungrier and more skilled MCs for being less “relevant” now that 44 is president, Jay-Z nonetheless feels compelled to stay one step in front of the law.

Armed with a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control to engage in “cultural work,” Jigga and Queen Bey recently paraded around Havana enjoying their fifth anniversary. The Carters, with the aid of the Fidelista state media, apparently intended to educate helpless Cubans, who suffer from an obscenely high 70 percent divorce rate, in the arts of a healthy marriage.

But forget what American or Cuban media outlets say. Those of us who want to the bottom of the Carters’ trip, just like in the case in of Hov’s verse to Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe, need to examine Jay’s lyrics.

As we learn from a close reading of 30 Something, his celebration of adulthood, Jay eschews rolling marijuana joints for a fine Cuban cigar. We might also surmise from Otis (released in 2011) that Shawn Corey has been looking to smoke a fine Cuban with communist dictator and human rights abuser Fidel Castro for at least two years. This trip was long in the making.

It’s also kind of pathetic. Jay-Z trying to remain edgy by celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary in Cuba gets about as far as a guy can get from being an O.G. hustler. He’s modern day royalty, not the slangin’ hustler on the block that became a star 20 years ago. Would a real MC stoop to rewriting 99 Problems for the campaign trail?

Maybe there’s an upside to this controversy. Now that he’s selling his one-fifteenth share of the Brooklyn Nets, Jay can finally get around to releasing new material.

I heard LL Cool J could be in the market for a new record.

The Democratic National Committee chair said she was “uncomfortable with” and “concerned about” tourist trips to Cuba like the one the entertainer couple took to Cuba in a new interview with the Sun-Sentinel:

“I’m absolutely uncomfortable with the way, and concerned about, how not just Jay-Z and Beyoncé but some of the travel, the ‘people to people’ travel, that has been occurring in Cuba, has resulted,” Wasserman Schultz said in a brief interview Tuesday with the Sun Sentinel.

“I would be interested to know what type of people to people qualifying activity they did during their trip. The travel that exists in Cuba that was allowed by the Obama administration was specifically to make sure that you could have educational opportunities and there is supposed to be interaction at every step of a trip between the participants and the Cuban people. And I hope that that happened with this particular trip. We need to make sure that people to people travel complies with the law,” she said.

The critique is notable in that it splits Wasserman Schultz, a top official and prolific fundraiser for the Democratic Party, with two of President Obama’s most prominent supporters.

Florida Republican Reps. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart posed a series of questions to the Treasury Department about the licensing for the trip. Treasury is now investigating whether the couple’s anniversary trip violated the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

Reactions to Jay-Z and Beyonce’s trip to Cuba on their fifth wedding anniversary highlighted the diversity of opinions within the group of senators charged with crafting the new legislation.

Senators Jeff Flake (Az.) and Marco Rubio (Fl.), both Republicans, took to Twitter revealing polar opposite opinions.

So, @beyonce and Jay-Z @s_c_ are in Cuba? Fine by me. Every American should have the right to travel there.

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) April 7, 2013

If interested in what life really like in #Cuba @s_c_should have visited persecuted rapper #AngelYunierRemon#99problems&dictatorsareone

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) April 8, 2013

This is not the first time Jigga Man and Mrs. Carter have acted above the law, parading around the world like the hip-hop Barack and Michelle. Rap’s First Couple previously popped into the White House for an unscheduled visit to stroll about the West Wing and the Situation Room.

Musically, the First MC and his First Lady have been on a steady decline, focusing their sizable clout on helping Obama instead of the fans that made them stars in the first place.

Hov’s steady musical decline was most apparent when he joined Obama on the campaign trail, recycling lazy hooks such as I Got 99 Problems but Mitt Ain’t One. B is perhaps now best known more for her lip-syncing snafu at Obama’s Second Inauguration and her publicist’s demands that the Internet stop making fun of photos taken during her Super Bowl performance.

The Blueprint 3 and 4, Jay and B’s respected albums that were released during Obama’s presidency are considered largely forgettable. Even Jay’s collaboration with Kanye West failed to generate the acclaim attached to previous releases.

Iceberg Slim and Sasha Fierce’s Cuban vacation inadvertently revealed how tense and delicate immigration reform is. Reports this week from Capitol Hill pertaining to the Gang of Eight compromise suggest Obama is going to fall short on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform. Again.

In a letter to the Treasury Department office that controls travel licenses, Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart “express concern” about what appeared to be a tourist trip taken by the famous and politically connected couple, despite prohibitions against American tourism:

We write to express concern and to request information regarding the highly publicized trip by U.S. musicians Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (Beyoncé) and Shawn Carter (Jay-Z) to Cuba. We would like to respectfully request, within all applicable rules and guidelines, information regarding the type of license that Beyoncé and Jay-Z received, for what purpose, and who approved such travel.  [...]

Despite the clear prohibition against tourism in Cuba, numerous press reports described the couple’s trip as tourism, and the Castro regime touted it as such in its propaganda. We represent a community of many who have been deeply and personally harmed by the Castro regime’s atrocities, including former political prisoners and the families of murdered innocents.  The restrictions on tourism travel are common-sense measures meant to prevent U.S. dollars from supporting a murderous regime that opposes U.S. security interests at every turn and which ruthlessly suppresses the most basic liberties of speech, assembly, and belief.  We support the Cuban people by refusing to sustain their jailers.

Up in the clouds, me and my spouse
Rumors on the ground gettin’ too loud
Please turn them shits down, can’t hear myself think
Turbulence, shit, almost spilled my drink
In the White House with a mink
Running through that bitch like it’s my house
All up in the hall like a mall
Told you motherfuckers, all I do is ball

That verse reveled critical information on the Carters’ visit to Washington for the 2013 Inauguration. The public learns that their plane encountered turbulence, which probably led to Beyonce feeling unprepared for the day’s events and her lip-syncing the National Anthem. We also learn that, like the loving husband that he is, Jay lent his mink coat to his wife.

No, I don’t ‘member you, I don’t intend to empty my memory bank
It’s a million dollars in it, baby, Hilary Swank
Sittin’ next to Hilary smellin’ like dank
Presidential pardon, name one nigga out there harder than him

In this verse, Shawn Corey exaggerated a bit: Jay sat two rows behind the former Secretary of State.

Mr. Carter also exaggerates here, claiming that he was pardoned by President George W. Bush in conjuction for his stabbing of a record producer in 2001. Instead, Jay-Z pled down to a charge that netted him three year’s probation for third-degree assault.

Far from a case of a presidential pardon.