Rap Group Prepares For Some Awkward Street-Team Marketing Meetings
It’s buried underneath a bunch of news items about Rihanna’s Cover Girl endorsement deal, but Vibe.com has one of the skeevier stories we’ve read all week: Apparently, while in the middle of reporting a story on Atlanta rap group Crime Mob (“Knuck If You Buck”), Vibe discovered that group member Killa C pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation last December; after a reporter pressed the label for details, Killa C was dropped from the band, just a few weeks before the release of its sophomore album, Hated On Mostly.
Now Killa’s group members are distancing themselves online: Last week, the MySpace page belong to Mobber Diamond had a “Free Killa C!” picture, though that appears to have been removed. And while the rapper still appears on the group’s official site, we’re guessing that Killa will be killed when it’s revamped for the new album. And since Hated On was likely to be positioned as the group’s breakthrough, the Lil Jon-founded label BME Recordings–a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records–is now stuck with some of the worst pre-release publicity imaginable. Maybe that’s why, just a few days after the potentially damaging Vibe story went online, a new distraction ploy Crime Mob track wound up on the web..
