1,153 / 8:42

When you hear “NBA,” do you think “National Basketball Association” or “Nuttin’ But Azz”?

Newark, New Jersey, that bleak post-industrial mega-ghetto posing as a city, doesn’t have a professional basketball team, so all signs point to “Nuttin’ But Azz.”

As of the 2020 Census, Newark was 47% black, 36% Hispanic, and a piddling 8% white. In 1934, the scorchingly anti-white poet Amiri Baraka was born in Newark as Everett Leroy Jones.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

He stylized his name as LeRoi Jones up until 1967 — the same year as the deadly riots from which his hometown never recovered. In his 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus,” Jones/Baraka wrote:

Come up, black dada
nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape
their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.

Newark’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, is the son of the man who wrote that.

Newark is exactly the sort of place where you’d expect a mini-scandal to emerge over the specter of lard-assed black women in bikinis dribbling and twerking in a high-school gym for cash prizes in a basketball competition called “Nuttin’ But Azz.”

The now-canceled event, which was also billed as “NBA Baddies Basketball Tournament NJ,” was slated to be held at Newark’s West Side High School on July 21 — until parents and educators saw the promotional video.

The video, filmed in West Side High School’s gymnasium, showcases a gaggle of egregiously overweight black women clad in microscopic thongs and bikini tops running onto the court with feverish yass-queen energy and proceeding to twerk their monstrous posteriors for the camera. An unidentified black man dressed as a referee mumbles something about the NBA and a $10,000 prize for the best basketball team. One couldn’t be faulted for thinking the competition also has something to do with Nicki Minaj, a rapper/signer with a net worth of $150 million, but alas, we seem to be talking about “Thicky Minaj,” an adipose twerker who has apparently recovered from breaking her leg during a game as part of some pudgy-black-women-in-bikinis-playing-hoops league that calls itself “Buns and Basketball.”

The “Nuttin’ But Azz” logo designed for the now-aborted event seems suspiciously similar to the logo that “Buns and Basketball” has been using for at least three years now. And the man who produced the promo video for “Nuttin’ But Azz” is a music manager who calls himself “Big Fendi” and claims to be the man who discovered superstar Nicki Minaj, despite the fact that it’s clearly some iteration of Thicky Minaj in that video.

After the event was canceled, Big Fendi hurriedly issued an “um”-laden apology on Instagram:

Uh, first of all, I want to start off by saying I apologize to the whole city of Newark, New Jersey. Um, my deepest apologies. Um, most importantly, I want to apologize to Principal Cook and Councilman Dupre, um, Kelly Dupre, I deeply apologize, um, the content of this video, um, you guys knew nuttin’ about, um, we were doing an event and then, you know, things went a little left and out of control and I take full responsibility for that ’cause you guys had no knowledge, uh, what would these girls will be wearing in this, um, celebrity game and whatever and whoever was affected by this video, I want to apologize to the parents, to the students, um, for affecting anyone and who and anybody else that was involved, man, my deepest apologies, um, my deepest apologies, um, hopefully this, this helps.

The above-referenced “Principal Cook” is Akbar H. Cook, Sr., who is indeed the principal at West Side High School. He also describes himself as “a divine leader who builds other leaders just like himself while focusing on the love.”

“Councilman Dupre” is Dupre “Doitall” Kelly, who went from being a member of the hip-hop trio Lords of the Underground to becoming the “first platinum-selling hip-hop artist to be elected to public office in a major U.S. city.”

Adjacent to Fendi’s video apology is a post from Buns and Basketball’s Instagram profile:

*Public Announcement* For liability purposes only. THICKY MINAJ and BIG FENDI are not affiliated with BUNS AND BASKETBALL. This terminated High school gym event has NO AFFILIATION with Buns and Basketball. Thank you for your time in this matter.

So, if I’m reading this correctly, despite the fact that someone who called herself “Thicky Minaj” in the “Nuttin’ But Azz” promo video looks strikingly similar to the “Thicky Minaj” who broke her leg in a “Buns and Basketball” event, they are not the same person — or at least they aren’t for “liability purposes.”

During a public meeting of the Newark Board of Education on Tuesday, June 20, members addressed the “Nuttin’ But Azz” debacle, promising to get to the bottom of this proposed incident involving big bottoms in skimpy thongs playing B-ball.

Board member Josephine Garcia vented thusly:

I am appalled that such [an] inappropriate video was associated with that school or any of our schools. That’s just not acceptable. The fact that a video featuring women in very little clothing dancing provocatively was filmed inside the school gym while students were present is very alarming.

Board member Allison K. James-Frison ululated:

I was deeply disgusted to find out that anyone could use our facilities, but when the parents go to schools, they’re being denied access to our buildings. So I have a concern with that. That’s my first concern. Secondly, I also would like to know who actually put in for the permit. I watched all the videos with individuals apologizing, but I’m not accepting their apologies. Not one bit am I accepting any of their apologies. Why? They only apologized because the video was leaked. If the video wasn’t leaked, that event would still tooken [sic] place on July [21st], and there would have been more than basketballs bouncing in that gym, okay?

According to her bio page, Ms. James-Frison is “a product of the Newark Board of Education and a proud valedictorian parent of a future graduate of the Newark Board of Education.” She also currently holds court as the Newark Board of Education’s Co-Vice President. And yet she still said “tooken” rather than “took.”

In a segment for his short-lived 2008 Comedy Central show Chocolate News, black comedian David Alan Grier dressed in a fat suit as “Phat Man,” a foul-mouthed rapper who’d been commissioned to do a Public Service Announcement for the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind” program. Phat Man’s resulting song was a hilariously inappropriate explosion of blacktardation as strippers in schoolgirl outfits twerked to lyrics such as

Yeah, ho
Yeah, bitch
Show me how your coochie twitch
Don’t you leave no child behind!

. . . to a group of shocked schoolchildren.

Sixteen years later, that absurdist sketch has become reality.

Instead of Big Fendi apologizing to “the whole city of Newark,” maybe it’s time for the whole city of Newark to apologize to the world.