Jay-Z explains twins’ names; Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper are over
JAY-Z and Beyoncé had good reasons for the names they chose for their newborn twins, who were born in June. The “Empire State of Mind” rapper, 47, opened up on Friday to Rap Radar hosts Elliot Wilson and Brian Miller about how he and the “Formation” singer, 35, came to choose the names Rumi and Sir.
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“Rumi is our favorite poet, so it was for our daughter,” he shared. “Sir was like, man, come out the gate. He carries himself like that. He just came out, like, Sir.”
The father of three also revealed how the couple’s firstborn, 5-year-old daughter Blue Ivy, ended up rapping a freestyle on his new album, 4:44, while they were in the recording studio together.
“She got the headphones and she climbed on the little stool, and then she just started rapping,” JAY-Z said. “I was like, ‘Oh, s—.’ I haver [her full freestyle] on my phone. Five minutes! Five minutes of her doing that. She kept doing that ‘boom shakalaka, boom shakalaka.’ I was like, ‘Oh, she understands the concept of a hook.’ She’s 5, and she understands the concept of a hook. I was like, ‘What the f— is going on here?’ One of the great memories.”
Besides talking about his oldest daughter’s music skills, the Grammy Award winner said his family will be joining him on tour.
“I booked the tour for October so I could have at least four months to just really bond and see their fingers and s— like that,” he said. “They’ll be with me [on tour] anyway, but I’m just saying, like, [I needed] a space where I’m not doing anything,” he continued. “I’m just focused on them. I’m not thinking about a show at night or anything like that. That’s why the tour is so far away from the release of the album.”
[From People]
Kathy Griffin Ends Her Friendship With Anderson Cooper
It definitely stung Kathy Griffin when her friend of nearly 20 years, Anderson Cooper, went out of his way to slam her in unusually harsh language for that picture she posed for, in which she appears to be holding Trump’s severed head.
In a long, deep dip into Kathy Griffin’s mind published in The Cut, the besieged comic tells Yashar Ali she is no longer in an apologetic mood regarding that kerfuffle wherein she posed for a pic holding what appeared to be Donald Trump’s decapitated head:
Why are people still expecting me to apologize and grovel to a man that tweets like this? I’m a comedian; he’s our fucking president … President Trump just pardoned Joe Arpaio, who was essentially running a concentration camp in the Arizona desert. He said there are some good Nazis, and he’s kicking out young adults who were brought here as kids by their parents, and I’m the one who has to continue to apologize?
She gave the first two sentences of that quote just over three weeks after the photo had hit the Internet causing a maelstrom of controversy, and distracting people for a week or so from the much more serious wrongdoing Trump was either in the act of committing, or attempting to get away with having done during the ’16 election. Their truth is only magnified by the events she refers to in the more recent quotes.
In addition to enduring a ridiculous Secret Service investigation (who could really believe she was a serious threat to Trump, a man who has a verifiable nutjob standing right behind him in many rallies?) and being fired from her CNN New Year’s Eve gig, Griffin also had to deal with close pal Anderson Cooper tweeting his condemnation. Though Cooper more recently said he was still friends with Kathy, that no longer appears to be the case:
In the following days, Griffin says four of Cooper’s CNN colleagues reached out repeatedly to Griffin to check on her and offer private support (I independently confirmed this). But Cooper didn’t contact Griffin until August 10, CNN confirmed to me.
On July 26, when asked about Griffin on Andy Cohen’s talk show, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Cooper claimed that Griffin was still a friend. “Yeah, we’re still friends, and look I said what I said about — I didn’t think what she said was appropriate, but I wish her the best and I hope she bounces back,” he told Cohen.
The fact that Cooper was telling people publicly they were friends, while not checking in with her, hurt Griffin deeply. When he finally reached out to her in a series of text messages, she told him their friendship was over.
A source close to Cooper tells me that Cooper was “shocked and upset by the photo, and while he was not ready to talk to her personally about it, he still considered her to be a friend, and was publicly supportive when asked about the controversy.”
