If, way back in 1989 (“The number, another summer…”), Air Jordan wearers needed any further proof that their shoes were the shit, they got an indelible stamp of cool when Spike Lee’s remarkable Do The Right Thing came out. Even as a small moment dropped amid the movie’s rapid-fire shots of on-point social analysis and witty one-liners delivered by an insane cast (do you realize that this movie featured Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Richard Edson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Harris, Martin Lawrence, Rosie Perez and John Turturro?!), few scenes were as memorable as the one where neighborhood protagonist Buggin’ Out (played by Giancarlo Esposito) gets his “brand new Air Jordans” scuffed up by a Larry Bird-shirt wearing white dude who is not welcome on the movie’s Bedford-Stuyvesant block.

It goes without saying that anyone reading this magazine should already have seen the flick, and not for the Jordan love. But just to recap…As Buggin’ Out rolls on his scorching hot Bed-Stuy sidewalk, the aforementioned Bird dude clumsily rolls his bike down the block and bumps into Buggin’ Out, messing up the latter’s prized AJIV’s. It’s worth noting that it appears Mr. Ten-Speed hits Buggin’ in the back and the shoes get messed up in the front, but that’s a cinematic mystery that will not be solved right now, since Mr. Lee is on vacation and could not be interviewed for this piece. In any event, the scene includes repeated close-ups of Buggin’s formerly crispy white and gray AJ’s, along with several lines of dialogue that show the passion people had for their Jordan’s back then. As if the hot-tempered Buggin’ Out wasn’t already angry about being bumped on his block (“Who told you to walk on my block on my side of the street?”), he’s further incited by his boys, Ahmad and Cee, who play off of the power of his Jordans. “Man, your Jordans is busted,” begins Ahmad, played intensely by Magic Johnson’s homie Steve White. “Yeah, you might as well throw them out. Them shits is broke,” adds a young, hilarious, lisp-having Martin Lawrence as Cee.

The outward love that Buggin’ Out has for his state-of-the-art Nikes is actually just the most obvious example of some serious swoosh placement throughout the flick. Lee’s Mookie rocks the dope Bo Jacksons on his extra-long pizza delivery runs, while hulking Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) troops up and down the block in white, red and black Revolutions. About the only footwear shown prominently that isn’t Nike belongs to the three hysterical guys on the corner, who chill in sandals all day. The scattered Nike plugs-not to mention the white Jordan Bulls jersey that Lee’s Mookie wears at the beginning of the movie-were probably no accident, given Lee’s role at the time as an active Nike pitchman through the Mars Blackmon ads.

Several scenes after Buggin’ Out gets his sneakers run over, the Jordan love is shown once more. As Guy’s “My Fantasy” (word to Damion Hall) plays in the background, Buggin’ works hard to clean up his Jordans, leaning on a fire hydrant while scrubbing his beloved kicks with a toothbrush. This scene represented the first time I’d personally ever seen such a strategy, and within days I was using it on my own Jordan IVs.

Just think about all this again. You had a major film—not some shoot ‘em up flick or ditzy comedy, but a critically acclaimed drama with top-notch actors and a very real look at urban racism—that spent a couple scenes showcasing shoes. Even if Spike was partly going the other way and spoofing the love folks have for their kicks, you could throw that sentiment out the window on the strength of his freelance work as a shoe pitchman.

Either way, the realistic love for the shoes was there. Air Jordan owners who saw Do The Right Thing felt even better  about their pair, while those who didn’t own any yet felt a further need to cop them. That influence is the stuff Hall of Fame slots are made of.

And that’s the quintessential truth, Ruth.

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Hip hop’s lyrical narrative often gets unfairly abbreviated to being about nothing more than posturing and persona, a never-ending series of mostly meaningless boasts about how nice my rhymes sound, and so on. That’s been a component of the story for a long time—recall Sugar Hill Gang’s proud pronouncement, in 1979, that “I got a color TV, so I can see/the Knicks play basketball”—but hip hop verses are also a place for confessions, specifically for those of black men. There’s a reason, for example, that Scarface once wrote a song in the form of a diary entry, or that The Notorious B.I.G. recorded a song for his suicide at age 24, or that Jay-Z wrote an entire hit song about not crying, and that each of them felt comfortable doing so on 16 bars.

The break beat is, and always has been, a haven for hyper-masculine confessionals that might otherwise go unspoken.

But Kanye West, long as the public has known him, has never needed the break beat to say what he wants to say. He’s not like Nas, who often sounds shy and characterless in interviews despite being a hell of a storyteller in his rhymes, and he’s not like Eminem, who always depended on his alter ego to share his darkest thoughts. His problem—especially outside of the recording booth—has always been the opposite: Kanye has always struggled to withhold (or at least to measure) his confessions.

His fourth studio album, 808s & Heartbreak, is the best musical and lyrical manifestation of Kanye’s need to say everything all at once. He released it in November 2008, after three hit albums that effectively branded a Kanye style of hip hop—and yet 808s wasn’t really a hip hop album. On it, Kanye doesn’t say anything we were accustomed to hearing on any hip hop track, and he doesn’t really sound like Kanye. He sounds like a cyborg. The album is a close partnership with machine (he used the vintage Roland TR-808 drum machine for his beats) and with a kind of artistic dishonesty (he used the modern Auto-Tune device to adjust his subpar singing voice in nearly every track on the album). At the time of its release, the final result was rather startling. Kanye had a style, and the 808 and the Auto-Tune just didn’t jibe with it. And yet the collaboration with those devices allowed him to sing real, unfiltered heartbreak—something that he hadn’t yet done in his career, and something that hip hop as a whole had never really dealt with before.

On 808s, Kanye doesn’t tell stories, and he doesn’t confess anything in any of the ways we’ve come to expect. There are none of the quintessential Yeezy lines, simultaneously self-critiques and boasts stitched into the songs’ stories: “Well all self conscious,” he rapped on “All Falls Down,” off of his debut album College Dropout, “I’m just the first to admit it.” But on 808s, if there are insecurities to be named, Kanye only seems to be admitting them to himself.

808s is not exactly subtle about its intent. The year before its release, as we all must be aware by now, had been rough for Kanye. His mother, Donda West, died of complications related to cosmetic surgery in November 2007, and a few months later he and his fiancé broke up. 808s & Heartbreak is, well, his heartbreak album, and that’s a hip hop subgenre that didn’t really exist at the time. On these songs, Kanye sounds hopelessly and intentionally lost. Unlike Jay-Z’s “Song Cry,” there is no masquerade at play: The only way Kanye is able to communicate his sadness is to state it, clearly and unapologetically and over and over again until the listener becomes quite sure that human sorrow has never sounded so processed before. It certainly hadn’t been sifted through a voice filter and laid out over sparse, electro-pop beats quite like this, at least in hip hop.

That was one of many perceived problems with the use of the 808 on the album. Kanye’s production had been celebrated because he’d created his own sound and perfected it until it became familiar, even the norm. On 808s, that sound shifted so dramatically and so forcefully, it sounded unnatural. The 808 took the place of the Kanye soul sample (there are just four samples on the entire album), and it did so prematurely. Kanye’s emotional burden is expressed in every layer he piled onto “Love Lockdown”—from the pulsing, opening beat to the jumpy piano line and his strained singing. The singing, it must be said, is just never very good on 808s. Throughout the album, Kanye is crying to himself and shouting at us at the same time.

Beautiful as the album sounds (and that’s a fact that’s been documented extensively enough), it is wholly exhausting to listen to. There’s never a mention of his Louis Vuitton shoes or his Maybach to relieve us from the heartbreak. The songs have names like “Coldest Winter,” “Welcome To Heartbreak,” and “Bad News.” Kanye says things like, “Chased the good life my whole life long/Look back on my life and my life gone” and “Let me know/Do I still got time to grow?”

Judging by the album’s reception, most people did not want to give Kanye West time to grow. A lot of people hated 808s and a lot of other people tolerated 808s (I loved it). The collaboration here, between man and machine, made for sparse, electro-style instrumentals that often stretched on—rather indulgently—for two or three full minutes after the final verse. Coming from a normally meticulous producer who was known to thrive on bombast, this just sounded unfinished, even boring. The immediate reaction to the album might have been similar to the one in Newport, Rhode Island in 1965, when Bob Dylan went electric at the Folk Festival. We don’t like drastic changes from the artists we’ve come to depend on for a certain kind of musical narrative, even if those artists happen to be going through drastic changes themselves.

Hip hop, especially, hadn’t really endured or welcomed creative leaps like 808s. There have been shifts to the music’s sound, of course: groups like A Tribe Called Quest brought jazz to the mix in the early nineties, and back in ’86, Run DMC and Aerosmith made the “Walk This Way” remix, which was one of the first merges between rap and rock and a total commercial success. Kanye has even credited himself for reintroducing soul sampling to hip hop in his early years as a producer. But all of these leaps sounded in keeping, in some way, with the music we’d come to know and love.

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A cross between the stylings of Flava Flav and Dick Tracey, NYC-based rapper Theophilus London’s fashion line is growing even larger than his music career.

Trinidad-born London has been busy developing his fashion brand with names like Gucci, Cole Haan and Tommy Hilfiger. During this year’s New York Fahion Week, London’s newly designed and Haan-collaborated, Nike-owned Theophilus Blue Suede Buck (yup, they’re blue suede shoes!) premiered in Lower Manhattan’s Soho Haan store. Unfortunately, these highly coveted dressy-dress shoes are limited edition and only available in New York.

London’s take on his new shoe: “It was fun to do, but I wish I made them for women. That’s all I really care about is pleasing women, not so much men.”

Shoes and women aren’t the only things keeping this rapper busy these days. London is also occupied with “grandmother jewelry,” a term used to describe slightly less than bling, yet still quite chunky pieces of gold and silver.

“Basically, I’m just into classic, vintage jewelry,” says London. “I would say it’s grandmother jewelry because only grandmas wear jewelry the right way. I like gold. My style is pretty much just raw.”

Joining the music industry in 2008, London has “managed to create one of contemporary music’s most diverse catalogs,” according to The Daily Texan. His music is a blend between indie-rock, electric, hip-hop, pop and soul. And his style is even more eclectic. He mixes trends like vintage, large-rimmed hats with Jordans, and classic blazers with Clubmaster glasses. London has been compared to, and even praised more than one of his own inspirations, rapper and hip-hop fashion guru Kanye West.

As far as any up-coming projects go, London is cheery about his ventures into “writing some cool lyrics on the walls of a good friends’ bathrooms, learning to live with dogs, and hanging with fans. These things inspire my art, which leads to inspire my projects.”

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“If we can’t get the Israelis and Palestinians together in this next couple of days, then what signal is that for the future process?” King Abdullah asked in a WSJ interview in New York ahead of the UN General Assembly.The Jordanian ruler said that while he had been encouraged at times by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “positive statements,” the reality on the ground was disappointing.

“I think my best way to describe my view toward Israel is my increasing frustration because they’re sticking their head in the sand and pretending that there’s not a problem,” said the monarch, whose country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

His comments came as Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas vowed to seek a vote on UN membership for a Palestinian state this Friday, setting up a collision with the United States and Israel.Washington has already said it will use its veto if the UN Security Council votes on the issue, while Netanyahu on Monday urged Abbas to hold direct talks in New York ahead of the showdown.

In the interview, King Abdullah also said the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was contributing to the instability in the region.”I have talked to him (Assad) twice in the first part of the year to discuss about the challenges we are facing and how we could be supportive in lessons learnt, but at that point the Syrians were not really interested in what we had to say,” he told the WSJ.

According to UN estimates, at least 2,600 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian regime’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests since mid-March.

King Abdullah meanwhile expressed optimism about his own country’s reform programme.

“On the issue of political reform, yes and again four months from now, God willing, I want to feel much better,” he said.Jordanian MPs are currently debating constitutional amendments proposed by a palace-appointed committee and announced by the king last month.

The recommendations include the creation of an independent commission to oversee elections, lowering the age of candidates for parliament from 35 to 25 and limiting the jurisdiction of the military state security court, accused by activists of being illegal, to cases of high treason, espionage and terrorism.

“I think that we are way ahead of the curve because we have a plan, and the job of the leaders is to make sure that government and parliament stick to those benchmarks so that we have a new Jordan as quickly as possible,” the king said.

“I do not know if that could be said for a lot of countries in the region, some of them maybe going from an Arab Spring to an Arab Summer to an Arab Winter and maybe it takes a while for them to come back up to the Arab Spring again.”

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Oswald Gruebel, the chief executive of UBS, has dismissed calls for his resignation as politically motivated, even as the Swiss banking giant raised its estimated loss by a rogue trader to $2.3 billion.

UBS AG had previously put the loss at $2 billion when news of the scandal first broke Thursday.

In a bid to reassure investors, the Zurich-based bank said Sunday it has “now covered the risk resulting from the unauthorized trading” and its equities business “is again operating normally within its previously defined risk limits.”

UBS also confirmed for the first time that the trader, 31-year-old Kweku Adoboli, was already under investigation by the bank when he revealed his actions to authorities Wednesday.

“The loss resulted from unauthorized speculative trading in various S&P 500, DAX, and EuroStoxx index futures over the last three months,” UBS said, adding that the magnitude of the bank’s risk exposure was hidden by fake trades.

Adoboli remains in custody in London, charged Friday with acts of fraud and false accounting dating back to 2008. His next court appearance is Thursday.

The fact that the fraud took place over three years raises serious questions about the bank’s ability to manage its risk. UBS said it has set up a special committee chaired by David Sidwell, the bank’s senior independent director, to investigate the incident.

Speaking for the first time since UBS revealed the loss, Gruebel told the Swiss weekly Der Sonntag that the loss couldn’t have been prevented.

“If someone acts with criminal energy, then you can’t do anything. That will always be the case in our business,” the former trader said in the interview published Sunday.

But some Swiss politicians and commentators have called for Gruebel’s head to roll over the loss, which is likely to put UBS’s third-quarter results deep in the red. Such a move would signal defeat for the gravel-voiced German, who was brought in more than two years ago to revive the bank’s fortunes after a series of missteps that included vast losses in the U.S. subprime mortgage market and an embarrassing U.S. tax evasion case.

Gruebel told Der Sonntag that he has no intentions of resigning.

“I’m responsible for everything that happens at the bank,” Gruebel told the paper. “But if you ask me whether I feel guilty, then I would say no.”

Gruebel pledged to stamp out risky business practices at UBS when he came out of retirement in early 2009 to take the helm of Switzerland’s biggest bank. UBS had just suffered its biggest losses ever due to mistakes by the very investment unit that is now making headlines again, and had to take a $60 billion bailout from the Swiss government to stay afloat.

Swiss media on Sunday cited unnamed UBS board members saying the 67-year-old Gruebel retains the confidence of major shareholders, including the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. The sovereign wealth fund holds more than 6.4 percent of UBS’s stock, whose value dropped almost 10 percent following the announcement about the fraud.

Gruebel is expected to survive until at least Nov. 17, when he presents investors with an update on the bank’s activities. Banking experts in Switzerland have suggested the investors day may be used to announce a downsizing or even a spin-off of the investment unit.

In a previous case of rogue trading causing massive losses, the chairman of French bank Societe Generale, Daniel Bouton, stepped down more than a year after the bank revealed that a single trader lost €4.9 billion ($6.7 billion). Bouton said that repeated attacks on him were becoming a threat to the bank’s health.

So far, it is unclear who could even replace Gruebel.

The only name that has been mentioned is that of Sergio P. Ermotti, chief executive of the bank’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business. Promoting Ermotti would satisfy those who want to see a Swiss at the head of the country’s most important financial institution, to counterbalance incoming chairman Axel Weber, another German and a former president of Deutsche Bank.

Meanwhile, UBS has sent a letter to major clients seeking to reassure them that the bank remains on solid financial footing.

The letter, confirmed by UBS spokesman Dominik von Arx, also claims that UBS “is taking the matter extremely seriously and is doing everything possible to get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible.”

“Your assets are safe with us,” the Sunday Times of London quoted the letter as saying.

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