Young Money continues to keep the ship afloat while the captain is away. Nearly seven months after hitting stores, the label’s compilation project, We Are Young Money, has officially reached gold status by pushing 504,217 copies. The LP was fueled by the chart topping singles “Every Girl” and “Bedrock” and the also successful “Roger That.”

One of the album’s more acclaimed tracks, the video for Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane’s collaboration, “Steady Mobbin,’” was also recently released. The album peaked at #9 on the Billboard 200 charts.

Via: Karen Civil

Via Rap- Up:

Shanell checks in with Rap-Up TV to share a new Cool & Dre-produced collaboration with Lil Wayne and Drake for her debut album called “So Good,” writing for Electrik Red’s sophomore album with her team The Girls Club, the Young Money member she’s closest with, and partying with her labelmate Nicki Minaj. Plus, is she dating Lil Wayne? Young Money’s singer-songwriter sets the record straight once and for all.

Whose excited!!

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Be sure to pick it up on newsstands this week!

Check out the MTV article below:

NEW YORK — For Lil Tunechi Weekend, MTV Jams and MTV2 are premiering four brand-new Lil Wayne videos, which the Cash Money star shot in quick succession earlier this year during Super Bowl weekend.

The videos include “Da Da Da” and “Get a Life,” both featuring the rock band ¡Mayday!, “Knockout” (featuring Nicki Minaj) and “Runnin’ ” (featuring Shanell).

While the full-length video for “Da Da Da” premiered on Thursday night, fans will have to get by for now on our previews of the other three clips. But luckily, MTV News caught up with Young Money songstress Shanell who offered to break down the concept for “Runnin’,” which she admitted she had yet to see in full.

“Well, it was a long day, and a lot of the videos we did that day were green screen,” Shanell told us during a trip to the Manolo Blahnik store in New York City on Thursday. “The song is talking about running and [asking] when will whatever it is that you’re going through that’s not a positive thing end. So ‘Runnin’ ‘ is about wanting whatever it is in your life to stop.”

Shanell explained that in the video, an earthquake and other natural disasters and even a war, are metaphors and not visuals she had in mind while she was writing her portion of the song. “That wasn’t in my head. It was whatever personal thing that I was going through that I wanted to end. That’s what I was expressing, but when you write a song you want everybody to kind of relate, so the audience can make it mean whatever it means to them.”

Asked about whether she’d recently spoken to Wayne, Shanell revealed she had seen and spoken to the MC since he began serving a yearlong sentence on Rikers Island in March. Despite his current circumstances, Weezy’s staying strong, according to the singer.

“He’s a very strong individual so he’s not going to get on the phone with any of us and be like, ‘Oh I can’t do it. I can’t’ … He sounds strong, and we’re all praying for him and all of the fans are praying for him.”

Special thanks to Ashland!

Check out the article below:

Get ready for the “Rebirth Rampage.” This weekend, MTV Jams will play four brand-new videos from Lil Wayne.

All the clips come from his Rebirth LP, and the lineup includes: “Knockout” with Nicki Minaj, “Runnin” with Shanell, and “Get a Life” and “Da Da Da,” both with the rock band ¡Mayday! For the rest of this week, we will be previewing all four videos. First up is the “Da Da Da” clip.

We told you about this particular video in February. It was part of Wayne’s incredible weekend of shooting almost a dozen videos in less than three days, when all the soon-to-premiere clips were shot.

David Rousseau, who had previously worked on Young Money’s “Roger That” and Kevin Rudolf’s “I Made It (Cash Money Heroes),” was commissioned by the Cash Money family to work with Weezy from Friday morning until Super Bowl Sunday morning.

“We shot some sh– from the [We Are Young Money compilation] album, we shot something from [Wayne's forthcoming] Tha Carter IV, some stuff from Rebirth,” the director told MTV News a few months ago. “We knew what our deadline was. We’re trying to get maximum coverage for Wayne.

“We were put on hold,” added Rousseau, who shot the videos in front of green screens and on a hotel rooftop. “Cash Money said, ‘This is our deadline. This is a hard deadline.’ It was basically a ‘Mission: Impossible’ [scenario]: This is your mission if you choose to accept it. Everybody is onboard, because everybody knows what’s at stake. Unlike T.I. and some of these other guys that’s disappeared while they were in, the point is to keep Wayne [visible] on TV and everything for whatever time he’s in. There was a plan in action. Slim and Baby really could foresee that. He’s at the height of his career. You can’t let that momentum slip.”

“Da Da Da” has the real-time feel of the “A Milli” video. We see Wayne, in the middle of Collins Street and 12th Avenue in Miami, get out of his tour bus and ride in a Maybach to the Marlin Hotel. The scene cuts to Wayne walking onto the rooftop of the hotel to a stage where ¡Mayday! is in place. The band begins to perform.

The performance in the video was live and unannounced, and we see everyone looking up while Weezy and company rock the strip. Onlookers whip out camera phones and flipcams to capture the moment. Weezy keeps his charisma high as he shows off for the crowd that forms in the street and fans watching from their terraces.

“He was in a zone,” Rousseau said of Wayne. “He was ready. It was a work mentality. He’s getting prepared for everything that’s about to happen to him. He knows it’s the fourth quarter. He was completely cooperative and completely professional.”

Check out the brief interview above! Special thanks to Linda!

In case you weren’t able to catch on TV, here’s Shanell’s featured on Mixtape Daily. Also check out MTV’s article below where she talks about why she joined Young Money and more!

This Week’s Main Pick

Artist: Shanell

Holding It Down For: Young Money

Mixtape: Shut Up and Listen

Real Spit: Young Money singer Shanell has been inspired by challenges almost her entire life. She grew up encouraging and battling her sister, former Danity Kane singer D. Woods, in songwriting.

“It was me, my sister, and we have an older brother,” Shanell said on a recent trip to NYC. “We used to watch him. He did music before either one of us. He did television, movies, and we used to run around the house singing his songs, until we started writing our own. It was friendly competition between me and my sister, because we would always help each other and challenge each other.

“I been real nice with the pen game,” she added with a smile. “I was good when I started, and I got better and better and better.”

While on the road with her sister during Danity Kane’s tour in support of their debut LP, Shanell, who used to be a backup dancer, crossed paths with Ne-Yo. She was writing to a track, and he asked if he could use it for his album. The song turned out to be “Say It” from Ne-Yo’s Because of You. Ne-Yo eventually invited the singer — who went to a performing-arts high school — to be down with his camp as a songwriter.

“It was really a great learning experience,” she said. “[Ne-Yo] listens to all different types of music. I know he sat me down one time and was like, ‘That’s great, but try to say all that in three lines.’ I was like ‘a challenge.’ So my writing has been influenced a lot by him.”

Shanell said she decided to join Young Money because, whereas Ne-Yo’s attention was on her writing skills, Wayne saw her as a performer.

“Wayne was kinda like, ‘You do this. Keep your music for yourself. You have the talent, I see what you do. You can come over here with Young Money and do what you do over here,’ ” Shanell said. “Which was the best situation I can be in. My music is a little bit different. It’s not R&B, it’s not pop, it’s not rock, it’s not alternative. It’s a fusion of everything. A lot of labels don’t let you do that, but at Young Money, they let you do that.”

Wayne also gave her the freedom to take several minutes from the America Most Wanted tour to showcase her skills. She had a mini-set within Wayne’s set last summer.

“It was great,” she said. “I brought dancers in. I did a lot of staging and choreographing. I loved that he believed in me enough to do that.”

Shanell said her debut LP won’t be out until sometime next year, but she did just drop the mixtape Shut Up and Listen. If you have a physical copy of the disc and look inside, you’ll see a baby carriage filled with headphones and other musical items. That is a playful middle finger to the rumors that she was having Lil Wayne’s baby.

“I’m trying to take a negative thing and make a positive,” ‘Nell said, who added that she was never romantically involved with Wayne. “That’s another reason I put this mixtape out, because a lot of people haven’t heard what I do. It’s all these rumors flying, that’s all they hear. So it’s here, this [mixtape] is my baby, this is what I’ve been sitting in the studio every night working on. This is my baby. This is what I’ve been pregnant with for the past nine months. So we’re just trying to take a bad rumor and turn it into something positive.”

What did Weezy think of the rumors that he had knocked up his artist? “We never talked about it,” the singer insisted. “Nobody ever talks about the negative stuff. We’re too busy making records. We get on the stage and perform, we get in the studio, we’re on the radio every day.”

Joints to Check For

» “Hair Down My Back.” “That is my ladies-anthem song,” she explained. “It’s a fun record. It’s about when you go to the store, you see the 14 inches, you see the 12 inches. For women to wear it, call it out. You don’t have to be ashamed. Nowadays, everybody knows girls wear weaves. Wear it as long as you want, as short as you want. I would say it’s kinda pop/R&B. It’s talking about extensions, but it’s still a club beat. I don’t think I’ll hear it in Club Crucial in Atlanta, but I think it will reach a vast amount of people.”

» “Tell Me” (featuring Jae Millz). “Millz actually thought about that, brought it to me, like, ‘I wanna do this Groove Theory record over,’ ” Shanell said. “I tried to sing it just like [Amel Larrieux]. I did the verse just like her and redid the bridge. It’s a feel-good record, and it’s a classic. I was a young’n [when the original came out]. It reminds me of the picnics in the park, sitting on the bleachers watching the boys play basketball in the park.”

» “Hear Me Calling.” “The music takes you from one end of music to the next. I wanted to ease people in,” she said about why she started her mixtape out with that song. “It’s a chill record. It feels good. It’s where I started, subject matter-wise. As the music transforms to the other side, which is the last record, that’s my growth and all the different types of music I listen to. I can go from here to there — that’s what I wanted to show people. [I'm singing about] life and memories, things that remind me of my ‘hood where I grew up: the corner store, the duplex, the white lines on the sidewalk.”

Here’s a sneak peek of her spread, courtesy of  TEAM_SNl_NYC!

Be sure you guys cop the magazine on news stands now!! Also keep it locked on MTV2 and MTV Jams to catch Shanell’s feature on Mixtape Daily! (Video coming soon)

Here’s a sneak peak at the Young Money Edition of Word Up Magazine. See below for pictures of the mag and be sure to cop your copy today!!

Special thanks to Natiqua

Be sure to listen live on http://v103.radio.com/ tonight at 7pm where Shanell will appear alongside Lil Chuckee and Short Dawg!