The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum calls on some all-stars to raise much-needed money

Hank Aaron and Jackie Rob/“Cool Papa” Bell and Hank Leonard/Yeah, they set the stage/But the baddest of them all was prob’ly Satchel Paige/Yeah, clear as the air you breathe/This beat is ballin’ like the Negro League.

That isn’t usual children’s rap, from some kind of square, after-school-special hip-hop dabbler. Far from it. That verse is intoned by none other than the Doggfather himself, Snoop Dogg, on a compilation album of raps and R&B, out March 24, to benefit Kansas City’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Snoop’s contribution, “Tha Bigg League,” like most of the songs on True to the Game, pairs a famous artist with one or more not-so-famous artists (the Hustle Boys, in this case). And unlike all but one other song on the album (Young Joc‘s clever crunk banger, “Knock It Out Da Park”), Snoop’s joint is actually about baseball.

The other tracks are true to the game, no doubt, but it’s not America’s pastime — unless, that is, hip-hop is suddenly more popular than baseball (hmmm). Love, lust, talking big, walking tall and getting down in the club are more the types of bases covered on this album, released by the brand-new, East Coast-based philanthropic label Stadium Entertainment. But don’t worry, Mom and Dad: The album is free of the profanity, violence and crime talk that pervade so much commercial rap.

The idea began three years ago as a long-shot dream of Negro Leagues Museum Marketing Director Bob Kendrick. He knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, and eventually Stadium Entertainment came aboard and began tapping artists from all over the industry — Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Chingy, Big Boi, Macy Gray and Kanye West — to contribute. Those who pitched in did so pro bono, waiving their fees to provide songs that hadn’t appeared anywhere else. (The exception is “Beam Me Up” by Tay Dizm, featuring T-Pain and Rick Ross, which came out last year as a single.) A portion of the proceeds go to the museum.

“Hopefully this will be the first of three to four volumes of releases in partnership between Stadium Entertainment and the museum,” Kendrick says.

If all the releases are this cool, by all means, keep ’em coming, Bob.

The cover may not scream hard beats and hella bling, but the tracks are short on neither. It has commercial rap tracks such as “Pretty Girls,” on which Ludacris describes an onion booty that makes him want to cry. And it has soaring R&B slow jams, including the achy “Still Hurts,” featuring Macy Gray and Marsha Ambrosius. It’s the kind of album your kids might actually thank you for — and then get freaky to.

When the project was announced last August, it didn’t promise to be nearly this intriguing. (The album was originally scheduled for an October release but was delayed.) Since then, some locals have blasted the museum for failing to find a baseball eminence to replace the widely loved Buck O’Neil, who died in 2006 at age 94. But even critics have to agree that the museum needs to reach young people just as much as it needs to please followers of baseball history. Kendrick says True to the Game is all about the kids — and also about finding “nontraditional streams of revenue” for the museum. (Of course he talks like that — he’s the marketing director.)

“You’re probably not going to find another museum that’s doing a hip-hop salute, you know what I mean?” he says.

The first artists to join the salute were West and fellow Chicago rapper GLC. The two contribute “The Big Screen,” a signature Kanye drum knocker about a young woman going to Hollywood to become a star. GLC (short for “Gangsta L. Crisis”) came to Kansas City in late March to talk with the local media about the album’s release. He and Kendrick answered some questions. (Read the whole interview on the Wayward Blog at pitch.com.)

The Pitch: You and Kanye were the first to agree to this project. How did it come about?

GLC: Wow, I did not know that we were the first. It came about by a friend of ours, a mutual friend by the name of No I.D. He approached us with the project and told us what was about, and we simply agreed to do it.

Did you know it was for this benefit?

Yeah, that was the key point. He told us a portion of the proceeds would go to the Negro Leagues Museum, and I guess to preserve the culture and to expand it, to let everybody know what’s going on, because there’s a lot of people that don’t even know this museum exists…. So just to be a part of this, man, I’m honored, because I’m about to be a part of history.

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