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Seth Rogen Cover Story For Complex (Feb/Mar 2011)

March 18th, 2011 | Q&A, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Me So Hornet

Think fame is easy? Spend three-plus years working on your passion project—while dashing off a few certified classics along the way—and get back to us. As he prepares to drop The Green Hornet, the genre-bending, big-budget opus he wrote, produced, and stars in, Seth Rogen muses on the good life, and how hard it is to make time for It. By Noah Callahan-Bever.

Seth Rogen is just like you and me. You know, that affable, well-liked stoner who fills silences with awkward laughter, reads comics, collects KAWS toys, plays Xbox, and yearns to be romantically un-challenged. But this is a lie. You have been hoodwinked. BAMBOOZLED! We didn’t land on Seth Rogen, Seth Rogen landed on us! Wait…what? Never mind. The truth of the matter is that the 29-year-old auteur who’s managed to be the funniest man in Hollywood for the last three years is absolutely all of the above things—but he is nothing like you. Or me. For all of his laid-back jokes and seeming mellowness, Rogen is a relentlessly ambitious creative with a definite vision and the follow-through to see it executed.

Kanye West Cover Story For Complex (Dec/Jan 2010)

March 18th, 2011 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Project Runaway

In the space of six months, Complex editor-in-chief Noah Callahan-Bever confided in Kanye, flew to Hawaii, and found himself in rap nerd Nirvana.

“Did you look at my eyes?” asked Kanye West over the phone. He was calling from Milan. It was the middle of October 2009. It had been over a year since the completion of his last LP, 808s & Heartbreak, but this conversation was my first glimpse of what would become My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “I mean, really look in my eyes in the ‘Run This Town’ video. If you do, you can’t tell me you’re surprised by what happened. It was all there in my eyes.”

Kanye West Feature for Mass Appeal (September 2002)

November 22nd, 2010 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Soul By The Pound

Kanye West brought the soul back to hip hop beats, but just wait ‘til you hear what his rhymes bring back. By Noah Callahan-Bever.

Kanye West is a confident guy. Supremely confident. If you want to be a jerk about it, you might even call him gassed. He says things like, “If you think about it, I’ve produced the most classic albums of the century.” Which, strictly speaking, is true. He had the most beats on Jay-Z’s The Blueprint [Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, ‘01] and Scarface’s The Fix [Def Jam], both judged to be classic by many, including…gulp…The Source.

Clipse Feature for XXL (August 2002)

November 17th, 2010 | Feature Style, Things I Wrote | ncb | No Comments

Way of Life

They’re two hustlers, baby! And they want you to know, it ain’t where they been but where they’re about to go. Pharrell’s prized pupils, CLIPSE are the leaders of the new school. By Noah Callahan-Bever.

Though Malice, the older of the two Clipse brothers, may laugh at the suggestion, it’s clearly true. If one were to reduce the content of the duo’s surprisingly mature and sonically sophisticated new album, Lord Willin’, to one essential sentence, it most surely would be: “I lived off cocaine, way before I lived off rap.”