Master P Responds To Mia X's Refusal To Perform With Him At ESSENCE Fest
Taking to her Instagram account Sunday (June 29), the New Orleans artist let followers know that, despite being featured on advertising materials, she will not be hitting the stage with her former label head due to being contacted on short notice and dismissed when she mentioned her performance fee to the 'Bout It Bout It' rapper's team.
'It's still unbelievable that I'm actually saying this. I will NOT be performing at Essence Fest as a featured artist in Master P set,' Mia X, born Mia Young, wrote. 'We started talking about my involvement last week. At first his management didn't want to entertain my performance fee.'
She went on to say she spoke with P, born Percy Miller, on June 26, and that he said their lack of communication was due to his busy schedule. She was then sent a contract on June 27, but with the festival beginning July 4, feels it is too late to produce a quality set worthy of such a large platform. 'I felt disrespected because the show had been booked for many months, and I had been advertised as a featured artist,' she wrote. 'No schedule in place for rehearsals, no contract, no deposit, and the fear of a repeat of 2018.'
The MC then added that she was also upset with ESSENCE for using her within marketing materials without confirmation of her participation. 'I felt like once again, no matter who's saying protect and respect Black women, they always sell us out to the boys club,' she wrote. See her full post below.
Master P has since responded to Mia's complaints, essentially chalking it all up to a misunderstanding.
'I don't know where the miscommunication came from, but Mia X @themamamiax can get whatever she wants from me,' P captioned a clip of him speaking on the matter via Instagram. 'This a Master p celebration! Mia can perform or don't have to. This will be the MASTER P farewell show at Essence Fest.' The businessman added that he told Mia to 'give him a number' regarding her fee and he'd be more than happy to pay it, but chose not to pressure the spitter into agreeing, as it is short notice. Check out his post below.
The 2025 ESSENCE Festival of Culture will be hosted by Anthony Anderson and Kenny Burns from July 4 through July 6, with performers including Boyz II Men, Maxwell, Davido, The Isley Brothers, GloRilla, Buju Banton, Summer Walker, Donell Jones, Muni Long, and Nas.
Tickets can be purchased here via Ticketmaster.
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Master P, Boyz II Men, Maxwell To Headline ESSENCE Fest 2025
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Axios
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Before she met Felber, Dunham was mulling tapping into her experience of spending extended periods in England for work and the culture clash of a brassy American coming to the U.K. Then she met Felber, and 'it was the first time I ever felt like I was living in a romantic comedy,' she says. 'I always felt like I was living in a sad, gritty romantic drama where they don't end up together in the end, and someone falls asleep in a puddle.' 'Too Much' features episode titles that pay homage to romance films like 'Notting Hill,' 'Pretty Woman' and 'Love Actually.' Dunham says the rom-com genre was the first she ever loved, but developed internalized snobbery around it as she got older. 'I felt like I was having this innocent romantic forced out of me,' she says. 'By the time I was in my 20s, I felt embarrassed to be that romantic person. I felt as though to even feel that way was sort of naive and silly. 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Los Angeles Times
39 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Messy L.A. millennial plots deliverance from her student loan debt in ‘The Payback'
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The book opens at Phoenix, the clothing store at the Glendale mall where Jada now works, and includes a hilarious yet mostly sincere appreciation for the beleaguered centers of suburban America: 'I loved mall smell,' Jada narrates, waxing poetic about the scents of the bins at the candy store and the ever-present pizza smell before admitting that she sometimes even leans down to smell the plastic kiddie ride horses. 'Sometimes, when there were no kids, I'd lean into the horse and sniff it to get a whiff of plastic, childhood dreams, and dried piss. Yes, I know, nobody's supposed to savor the aroma of pee, and I wouldn't rank it first among the smells of the world, but pee is life. It's humanity. It's the mall.' Jada loves the mall, and she even loves her job, which is not a given for anyone who's lost their dream career like she did. She's passionate about helping people find the clothes that look and make them feel good, even if she's doing that for 20% commission. She's definitely gotten over her sticky fingers habit, too, except that, well, on the day the book opens, someone leaves an expensive watch in the fitting room, and Jada can't help but pocket it. This eventually leads to her getting fired, but not before the boss she likes, Richard, dies on the store's floor and Jada and her co-workers get to witness the newly formed debt police in action chasing and beating up Richard's grieving widower during his wake. The debt police are exactly what they sound like: cops who come after people in debt. Cauley, a former writer for 'The Daily Show With Trevor Noah' who has contributed to the New Yorker, has fun with this concept: she dresses them up in turquoise and makes them all obnoxiously hot and as annoying as the worst Angeleno cliché you can think of (they're especially obsessed with overpriced new age treatments and diet culture). The cherry on top is their true apathetic evil. 'These Leo moon incidents are always the worst,' a debt policeman says, for example, while literally beating Jada up. Six months after she's fired, Jada is making money by 'eating food on camera in the hope that internet people, mostly guys, according to their screen names and Cash App handles, would pay [her] rent.' She eats shrimp for its pop and the way she can lick it; graham crackers for their whisper and crackle; almonds for their snap; celery sticks for their crunch. On the one hand, she's paying her rent; on the other hand, her relationship to food has become sonically focused and exhausting. The saving grace is that Jada manages to stay friends with her former Phoenix co-workers, Lanae (frontwoman of a punk band, the Donner Party) and Audrey (a runner and hacker in her spare time). Together, they come up with a plan to erase their own — and everyone else's — student loan debt. It's a heist, of sorts, except instead of getting rich, they'll stop being in the hole for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the real pleasure, just like it is in any good heist movie, is witnessing the three women spending time together and becoming closer over the course of the book. Jada is a deeply imperfect narrator. She's quick to judge others, slow to trust, and even steals a watch on page 12 (Gasp! She's a thief!) So, yes, she's a messy millennial who has some issues to work through, but neither she nor anyone deserves to spend the rest of their life indebted to a system that claimed a college education as the only way to break into the middle class, and which instead ends up keeping so many from it. The novel is a satire, of course, and the debt police are over the top because it's generically appropriate, but also because Cauley is using humor to approach the horrifying reality that people really do go to prison for having debt in this country. And even when they don't, student loan debt ends up increasing the racial wealth gap. According to the latest data from the Education Data Initiative, 'Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates.' Flash-forward four years after graduation, and 'Black students owe an average of 188% more than white students.' Yet the job of a novelist isn't to hit you over the head with statistics but to entertain you — if you learn anything along the way or think more deeply about something you'd never considered, that's great, but it's not the main point. For all that it deals with systemic racism and economic precarity, 'The Payback' is a terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter. Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel 'All My Mother's Lovers' and the forthcoming novel 'Beings.'
