BKS1 Radio Network

He became persona non grata in the celebrity world after his infamous assault on Rihanna.

But two years after his very public shaming, Chris Brown has been nominated for an impressive six BET Award nominations, more than any other artist.

Rihanna may like things "out the box, out the line," but the "S&M" singer gets censored in Kuwait.

The original Reb'l Fleur fragrance ad shows the 23-year-old sniffing a single flower and her matador red locks in loose curls, while wearing a pink satin robe that exposes a bit of cleavage and her torso. But a snapshot of the ad in a Middle Eastern newspaper, reveals a much more modest Rihanna with her midriff concealed, possibly thanks to a few clicks in Photoshop.

It has been reported that the cover-up was done to attract Kuwaiti women in the predominately Muslim state.

While Rihanna and Parlux Fragrances, the company that produces Reb'l Fleur, have yet to make a statement on the ad censorship, we have a feeling this won't deter sales of the songstress' scent.

What do you think of Rihanna's Reb'l Fleur fragrance ad censorship in Kuwait?

Leave a comment and click here to check out the Hindu goddess Lakshmi swimsuit that has caused quite a stir within the religious and cultural communities.

Amidst all the controversy over her “Man Down” video, Rihanna gained some praise this weekend from Gabrielle Union, who applauded the pop singer for getting people to talk about rape. Gabby just returned from D.C. earlier in the week where she attended the National Advistory Committee on Violence Against Women meetings.

Domestic Violence

It’s an all too familiar sight these days seeing a celebrity, or celebrity couple in the news for a domestic violence act perpetrated against one or the other.  As Domestic Violence incidences increase, has society reached a point where it has become accepted in today’s culture as the norm? Has the fame of the celebrity or marrying for money played a major part in how the public views the offender and victim?

Just as we unite and band together against other injustices in society, we need to band together against one of the worse forms of violence in today’s society. A persons financial status, celebrity or fame should not cloud our views on how violent and hurtful the act of domestic violence really is.

Let's talk about it!

Artist Review: Rihanna

Rihanna, is a Barbadian recording artist and actress. Born in Saint Michael, Barbados, her career began when she met record producer Evan Rogers in late 2003. At age 16, she came to the United States to pursue a recording career and began recording demo tapes under Rogers' guidance, subsequently signing a contract with Def Jam Recordings after auditioning for Jay-Z.

Rihanna's debut studio album, Music of the Sun (2005), peaked at number ten on the Billboard 200 and features the Billboard Hot 100 top five hit single "Pon de Replay". Her second album, A Girl Like Me (2006), peaked at number five in the United States, and produced her first Hot 100 number one single, "SOS". Rihanna's third album, Good Girl Gone Bad (2007), spawned the international hit singles "Umbrella", "Don't Stop the Music", "Take a Bow", and "Disturbia". The album was nominated for nine Grammy Awards, winning Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for "Umbrella". Her fourth album, Rated R (2009), produced the top ten singles "Russian Roulette", "Hard", and "Rude Boy", with the latter achieving the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Rihanna's fifth album, Loud (2010), spawned the number one hit singles "Only Girl (In the World)", "What's My Name?", and "S&M". Her sixth album, Talk That Talk (2011), served the worldwide chart topper "We Found Love" and the top five single "Where Have You Been". Rihanna's seventh album, Unapologetic (2012), was preceded by the lead single "Diamonds", which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Rihanna's work has earned her numerous awards and accolades, including five American Music Awards, eighteen Billboard Music Awards, two BRIT Awards and five Grammy Awards. She has achieved a total of twelve number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, becoming the youngest solo artist to achieve the feat. Billboard named Rihanna the Digital Songs Artist of the 2000s decade, and ranked her as the seventeenth artist of the same decade. She is the highest-selling digital artist in US history, having sold 58 million singles as a lead artist as of 2012. Furthermore, she has also sold 8.7 million album units in the United States as of November 2012. In the United Kingdom, she has sold 20 million records as of 2012,^[9] of which, she has sold a combined singles sales tally as a lead artist of 11.4 million, being listed as the UK's second biggest selling female singles artist of all time. In June 2011, Forbes reported that Rihanna had earned $29 million between May 2010 and May 2011.^[11] The following year, the magazine ranked her as the fourth most powerful celebrity in 2012 with earnings of $53 million between May 2011 and May 2012. The same year, American magazine Time named Rihanna one of the most influential people in the world. Also in 2012, Billboard placed Rihanna at the top of their 'Top 100 Pop Songs Artists of 1992–2012' list, while she was named Germany's biggest selling digital singles artist of all time, with sales of four million.

Rihanna has sold more than 25 million albums and 60 million digital singles worldwide since the beginning of her career in 2005, which makes her one of the best selling artists of all time. Some of Rihanna's singles have earned their place on the list of best-selling singles worldwide.

Read more Rihanna Bio: www.wikipedia.org/Rihanna

Topic: Unjustly Imprisoned The Story of Brandon C. Jackson

Life can take a sudden change without warning.  In the case of Brandon C. Jackson, a young 21 year old black man, sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime where by all accounts he was the victim acting in self defense against a group of white men yelling “kill the nigger”.   Tonight we will be joined by Brandon C. Jackson’s mother Gloria Fisher as she shares Brandon’s story, the seemingly cover up and her fight for justice for Brandon.  As in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. “In Justice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere”.

We must stand up and be heard.  Everyone needs to be sharing this story and demanding a fair process.  Join us tonight “Live in the Vocal Booth” Who knows your son or daughter could be next.  We cannot be silent. Also joining us tonight will be Actor Antonio Vargas to tell us what he has been up to, new projects and where he is at in life.

Special Guest:  Gloria Fisher

Special Guest: Antonio Vargas

Antonio Juan Fargas was born on August 14, 1946, in New York City, to a Puerto Rican father and a Trinidadian mother.  He and his ten siblings grew up in a housing project on Manhattan's Lower West Side.  Fargas's father was a garbage man who later worked in public relations, and his mother, Fargas told Boston Herald reporter Paul Sullivan, "was a great domestic engineer.... There was always bread on the table, not in abundance, but we always had what we needed."

When Fargas was a sophomore in high school in 1961, he noticed a story in New York's Amsterdam News saying that auditions were being held for an independent film called Cool World.  He got the part. Around the same time, Fargas was a member of a youth group called Harlem Youth Opportunities Limited that offered theater programs to aspiring actors.  After receiving instruction from actor Robert Hooks in Hooks's apartment, which wasn't far from that of Fargas's family, he got a part in an off-Broadway stage production called The Toilet in 1963.

Early in his career, Fargas was known primarily as a stage actor. He made the first of what would become a lifetime's worth of trips to England in 1965 to appear in the play The Amen Corner, and he won positive reviews back in New York two years later when he appeared as Scipio in the original Broadway production of The Great White Hope, a play about the life of boxer Jack Johnson.  Just 20 years old, Fargas convincingly played the part of a 90-year-old witch doctor. Fargas also made notable appearances in a 1968 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet and in the 1969 play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.

Dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles, Fargas began to break into movies. He had parts in some of the popular black-oriented films of the early 1970s, like Shaft (1971), Cleopatra Jones (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974). In 1974 he also played Quickfellow in Conrack, a film made from author Pat Conroy's autobiographical novel about his experiences teaching in an African-American community on one of South Carolina's coastal islands. Fargas also garnered roles in episodes of such hit television series as The Bill Cosby Show, Police Story, Kojak, and Sanford and Son.

Fargas had appeared in the 1972 film Across 110th Street, directed by Barry Shear, and when Shear was signed to direct the pilot episode of the ABC network's Starsky and Hutch in 1975, he cast Fargas in the role of Huggy Bear. The role wasn't initially intended to be an ongoing part of the show, but producers noticed the chemistry that quickly evolved among Fargas and stars David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser. Fargas ended up remaining with the cast through the entire run of Starsky and Hutch, which left primetime airwaves in 1979 but lived on for years in syndication.

Huggy Bear was a bar owner and streetwise police informant who directed tips to police officers Starsky and Hutch. Dressed to the nines in a leather trench coat that was widely imitated during the run of the series, he was often surrounded by beautiful women; his status as a pimp was suggested but never directly stated. Huggy Bear was charismatic, fashionable, a bit lovable, and unfailingly entertaining. Such traits anticipated the rise of rap music's "gangsta" variant, and thus it was no surprise that Fargas was later cast in films such as the Wayans Brothers' I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), even if he took some criticism from activists of the 1970s for perpetuating stereotypes of blacks in the entertainment industry. Fargas was matter-of-fact about his role, telling Mark Grossi of the Providence Journal that "I was a character actor and it was a typical role for a black actor at the time. It was good for me because it helped my career." The role of Huggy Bear was played by rapper Snoop Dogg in a 2004 film based on the series.

The end of Starsky and Hutch barely slowed Fargas's career. He returned to the stage for a time in the 1980s, explaining to the Providence Journal that "I hadn't been on stage for a long time. Your acting muscles atrophy when you don't use them." He had the lead role in a 1985 play called Toussaint, Angel Warrior of Haiti, which traced the life of the 19th-century Haitian independence leader Toussaint L'Ouverture. That year he also appeared in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and in 1986 he had a role in a Philadelphia production of The Amen Corner, the play that had taken him to England as a teenager.

Fargas continued to act in films, and in the 1990s he kept up a steady schedule of television guest star appearances in such series as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, Living Single, and The Steve Harvey Show. Married and divorced twice, he moved in with his partner, real estate executive Sandi Reed, in the late 1980s, raising her two children and Fargas's two from a previous marriage. One son, Justin Fargas, became a football star with the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League. The early 1990s offered real challenges for Fargas. He conquered alcohol and tobacco addictions. The 1994 earthquake centered north of Los Angeles trapped him and his wife in different parts of their Northridge, California, home, with each thinking the other had been killed, but Fargas broke down a door and they were reunited.

Traveling to England as often as four times a year, Fargas had the chance to test his survival skills once again in 2002 as a member of the cast of the British reality television show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! He also toured in a stage version of the film The Blues Brothers that had been rewritten to include a Huggy Bear role, and he teamed with David Soul in a serious play called The Dead Monkey. His theatrical career rolled on in the U.S. as well as he starred in 2003 in a St. Louis production of the acclaimed The Gospel at Colonus, an African-American adaptation of a drama by ancient Greek author Sophocles. And Huggy Bear remained a household name after three decades.

After starring in a string of blaxploitation movies in the early '70s, such as his role as Link Brown in the movie Foxy Brown and in Across 110th Street: he gained recognition as streetwise informant "Huggy Bear" in the mid-'70s television series Starsky and Hutch. As a nod to his early roles, he had a part in the blaxploitation spoof, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, as well as another Wayans brothers "hood" parody, Don't Be a Menace. Some notable appearances on British television shows include participating in series 4 of the reality series I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! which began in November 2004 and an appearance on Frank Sidebottom's Proper Telly Show in early 2006. He also appeared in ABC's All My Children in the mid-1980s as the father of Angie Hubbard. He guest starred in the sitcom Living Single, and recently played the part of Toledo in a revival of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (2006). He has a regular role as 'Doc' on Everybody Hates Chris. Fargas also played the driver in the music video of Backstreet Boys hit "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)". Fargas appeared recently on an episode of Fox's Lie to Me as the father of a murdered firefighter.   He currently lives in Las Vegas.

Argentine band Babasónicos released a song in their 1998 B-sides album Vórtice Marxista called Antonio Fargas. The song's chorus repeats the phrase "Antonio Fargas is Huggy Bear", in Spanish, and is meant to be homage to Antonio.

Films

• The Cool World, 1963.
• Shaft, 1971.
• Across 110th Street, 1972.
• Cleopatra Jones, 1973.
• Foxy Brown, 1974.
• Conrack, 1974.
• I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, 1988.
• The Celluloid Closet (documentary), 1995.

Plays

• The Toilet, 1963.
• The Amen Corner, 1965.
• The Great White Hope, 1967.
• Romeo and Juliet, 1968.
• Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1969.
• Measure for Measure, 1985.
• Toussaint, Angel Warrior of Haiti, 1985.
• The Amen Corner, 1986.
• The Dead Monkey, 1998.
• The Blues Brothers, 2000-02.
• The Gospel at Colonus, 2003.

On-line

• "Antonio Fargas as Huggy Bear," Starsky and Hutch, www.starskyandhutchonline.com/antonio_fargas.htm (January 20, 2005).
• Antonio Fargas Online, www.antoniofargas.net (January 20, 2005).