Before They Were Famous

Before becoming a part of the next wave of Afrobeat hitmakers, the artist known as Tems was born Temilade Openiyi on June 11th, 1995 in Lagos, Nigeria. With her father being British Nigerian, Tems and her family moved to London when she was still just a baby. Still, they’d return to Nigeria some four years later where her parents got divorced shortly thereafter. From that point forward, Tems was r...

Despite most of us having to spend 2020 under lock-and-key, Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng spent the majority of last year spreading his name all around the world thanks to some great tracks. Without a doubt, the last year has provided Skillibeng with a string of breakthrough moments, including the release of his single “Brik Pan Brik”, jumping on a remix of Pop Smoke’s “Dior”, and dropping...

BEFORE CRIS CAWLEY would forge an impressive career for herself as the mastermind behind Game Changer Publishing. BEFORE CRIS CAWLEY would extend her brand by offering her clients a suite of professional programs designed to help them become their very best. BEFORE CRIS CAWLEY would have nearly 1K Subscribers on YouTube and 108K followers on Instagram at the time of this recording. One sure fire w...

Before almost single-handedly winning France the World Cup with a rare hat-trick in the Final match of the tournament, Kylian Mbappe was born on December 20th, 1998 in the city of Paris -- and as the athlete himself once suggested in a children’s book made about his life, from the very beginning, Kylian Mbappe was born into football. In a lot of ways, you could also say that Kylian was born in the...

Another year, another list of celebs who passed away, 2022 saw its fair share of celebrity deaths with many of those we grew up with passing away of natural causes but also some young stars like Takeoff and PnB Rock who lost their lives at young age needlessly. As we have become accustomed to, its been another challenging year for the world of rap and hip hop but also for other stars to Gen Z like...

Aubrey Drake Graham, the everyman of hip-hop, is a man who can dominate an entire year musically without even releasing his own album, it's happened before. However, this was not one of those years, at least with being prolific because Drake did still dominate but he did so by releasing a ton of new music including two new albums, one of which was an experimental house album, the other a collabora...

Genius, tyrannical, revolutionary, and dangerously egotistical, those are four descriptions that contrast in their own unique way, however, they are also 4 ways that one could describe the artist Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and even then that's a very surface level way to put it. In the year 2022 Ye had probably one of the most unique years of his career from his creative endeavors to contro...

There were plenty of crazy moments in Hollywood and the world of Social Media. MrBeast passes PewDiePie, The return of Brenda Fraiser, Heidi Klum dressed as a worm for Halloween, Rihanna had a baby, Julia Fox & Kanye West, Ben Affleck back with J Lo & off the Jamesons, Pete Davidson dating everybody, every school teacher on earth quitting to get on Only Fans, Elon Musk taking over Twitter,...

After turning himself into the biggest childhood actor of all time with the holiday classic “Home Alone”, Macaulay Culkin would see his acting career dry-up by the time he turned 14. And yet -- he still somehow managed to wind up a perfectly happy 42-year-old with a fiancée and baby, living the type of life few childhood stars ever get the chance to experience. Before all of that, Macaulay Culkin...

The actor, former child star and teen heartthrob that captivated a generation, Jonathan Taylor Thomas also known as JTT has had quite the career. Once a pop culture mainstay that you'd find a photo of on the inside of a teenage girl’s locker in the late 90s, now the man is something of an enigmatic presence that is able to go 8 years without anybody taking his photograph. But before his rise and f...

American YouTube star, TikToker and Instagram personality Lofe has been steadily building a reputation for himself as one of the internet’s most promising new voices in comedy over a period of almost four years now. After a particularly tumultuous youth which would see him battling with depression, loneliness, and fixating on failure resulting in suicidal thoughts, Lofe would finally find his call...

BEFORE a just barely thirty-year-old man with a mop of brown hair would earn himself enough crypto-currency clout to be known simply by his initials -- SBF -- Sam Bankman-Fried was born on March 6th, 1992 on the campus of Stanford University. As the son of two Jewish Stanford Law professors, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, Sam spent a large percentage of his childhood playing games like chess, b...

BEFORE becoming one of the most promising female Emcee’s to emerge out of New York City in a hot minute, Murda B was actually born in late October in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, which means there’s a pretty good chance that that “B” in her name – well, it might stand for Boston. So, how did Murda B become the next big thing out of Sev-Side if she’s really from Bean-town? Well, to hear her t...

BEFORE being detained in Russia and eventually being exchanged in a prisoner swap for the notorious criminal known as “The Merchant of Death”, women’s basketball star Brittney Yevette Griner was born on October 18th, 1990 in the city of Houston, Texas. For the most part, Britney’s upbringing was relatively ordinary as the youngest of four children being raised by a homemaker and a police officer....

BEFORE being used as a bargaining chip in a one-for-one prisoner swap that freed women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout otherwise known as the “Merchant of Dеаth” -- was born on what’s believed to have been January 13th, 1967. Douglas Farah, a senior agent at the International Assessment and Strategy Center who once co-authored a book on Bout told CNN in 2010 th...

BEFORE becoming one of the most successful and prolific underground rappers of recent memory, Lucki was born Lucki Camel Jr. on May 30th, 1996 in Chicago, Illinois at Masonic Medical Center on the city’s North Side. While he might have entered this world on the city’s North-side, Lucki was primarily raised on the West End where he attended school in the suburb of Maywood. During his earliest years...

After becoming one of the hottest reality television stars of an entire generation, Tila Tequila has gone on to live one of the strangest and most troubling lives of recent celebrity memory. Make a fortune off her love life? She’s done that too. But those moments of glory feel like a million years ago compared to her more recent ventures into anti-Semitism, self-harm, and some truly bizarre religi...

BEFORE becoming the latest twist in the ongoing Megan thee Stallion and Tory Lanez courtroom drama, Kelsey Nicole was born on August 28th, 1995 in Victoria, Texas. That’s where she grew up in what she’s described as a relatively lower-class family, which inspired her to work as hard as possible to develop her own financial freedom. Kelsey’s ties to the music industry go as far back as the day she...

AFTER making waves in the adult entertainment industry that are still reverberating to this day, Mia Khalifa is now earning nearly as much money in 24-hours as she once made throughout the entirety of her adult entertainment career while continuing to hold the medium accountable. Long before all of that, Mia Khalifa was born Sarah Joe Chamoun on February 19th, 1993 in the city of Beirut and was ra...

Before becoming the first openly transgender solo artist to earn the top spot in the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, singer Kim Petras was born on August 27th, 1992 in the small German town known as Hennef. Located about 40 minutes from Cologne, Petras’ hometown was very heavy on what she likes to call “farm vibes” and boasted a ton of livestock including cows and horses. In fact, her family’s nearest ne...

BEFORE becoming “SteveWillDoIt’s” on and off again girlfriend, Celina Smith was born on February 22nd, 1999 and grew up an only child in a single-parent household in Orlando, Florida. Now, I’m not going to lie to you – a whole bunch of the “finer” details about Celina’s life have yet to be revealed. In fact, outside of her relationship with Steve -- which goes back considerably farther than you mi...

Ever since Georgian fashion designer Demna became the artistic director of the European fashion-house Balenciaga in 2015, the once lauded brand has become far more infamous for its controversy than its clothing. But the surprising thing to discover is how often that’s been by design – like that time they remade IKEAS’s 99-cent shopping bag as a $2,000 luxury good. Hell, they even dressed one of th...

AFTER kick-starting her wildly successful career with a viral video that asserted her as hip-hop’s “icy girl”, rapper Saweetie has been hard at work on her debut studio album. Unfortunately, a high-profile lover’s quarrel and some questionable sales-numbers have recently thrown a wrench into all of her best laid plans. But long before all that would come to fruition, Saweetie was born Diamonte Val...

These days everybody is looking for love, some people never find it while some people find it in the wrong places, but sometimes you find it in the wrong person. Social media has a paramount effect on the way we view and navigate relationships whether we like it or not. Gone are the days when we would only hear about famous power couples on talk shows or media tabloids now we are able to keep up w...

Before earning her first cross-over hit with “Big Energy” and seeing over a hundred of her unreleased tracks leak onto the internet, the rapper Latto was born Alyssa Michelle Stephens on December 22nd, 1998, in Columbus, Ohio to bi-racial couple, Misti Pitts and Shayne Stephens. At the age of two, her parents moved the family from Ohio to Atlanta, Georgia where Alyssa grew up on the South Side in...