Star Stories with Toure`

Touré played poker with Jay-Z one night in a swanky Manhattan penthouse suite. Each hand was worth thousands of dollars. Why was Touré in the game? He’s not rich enough for a game like that. It could have bankrupted him. The answer: He’s insane. Also, he was willing to risk everything to glean the very interesting bit of psychological insight he could get from being head-to-head in a hand of poker with Jay-Z.

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Touré hung out with Snoop Dogg at his unassuming ranch house in southern California. As his children played nearby, Snoop seemed like a dedicated family man, and he was. He had constructed a whole youth football league for his sons and kids throughout the area. But not long before this chapter of his life, Snoop said, he had been a pimp. He talked about how he got into the life, controlled women, and went to a player’s ball, a virt...

Touré first met Kanye back when he was first becoming a superstar and Jesus Walks was on the radio. He had just bought an expensive neck chain with lots of colored diamonds and a pendant that was an image of Jesus Christ… with blonde hair and blue eyes. When Touré asks, ‘Why is it a white Jesus?’ Kanye goes into a tailspin that is only made worse hours later when they run into Jay-Z and get Jay’s opinion.

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KRS-One is one of the legends of hip-hop, but before the fame, he was a teenage runaway who ended up in a homeless shelter. That became the source of his rap name and the place where he met his partner DJ Scott La Rock. Scott was a counselor at one of the shelters KRS stayed at. They talked about hip-hop, formed a duo that rewrote hip-hop history, and lifted KRS out of homelessness.

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Touré goes to Death Row Records to interview Suge Knight at the height of his power. In the middle of the interview, Touré asks the wrong question, and Suge gets angry. Touré gets up to leave, but Suge won’t let him go. Suddenly there are gangbangers at the door threatening a beatdown, and Touré sits in his office for an hour in absolute terror as Suge slowly applies psychological torture.

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Touré played one-on-one basketball with Prince at Paisley Park, which was glorious. The purple man had game. He shot, moved, and dribbled like a ballplayer. Eventually one on one morphed into two on two with Touré and Prince on the same team. One problem. This was during Prince’s symbol era when his name wasn’t Prince, it was an unpronounceable symbol. So what do you do when you pass the ball to Prince, and he doesn’t see it coming...

Star Stories with Toure` is an animated series about the unpredictable and sometimes unbelievable backstage interactions with some of the most iconic men in music today.

These animated stories are unforgettable recollections of the larger-than-life experiences with music journalist Toure` and Black celebrities.

“I spent over two decades working in music journalism, and it left me with a wealth of awesome stories about ...