With Little Brother's The Minstrel Show hitting stores next week, SOHH.com has heard BET is refusing to air the album's first video, "Lovin' It" because it is "too intelligent for the BET audience."

The video begins with a delivery truck dropping boxes labeled "gangsta," "backpackers," "earthy" and "icy" onto a street. The rest of the clip mostly sees LB and Joe Scudda, who is also featured on the song, performing in front of a capacity crowd. The clip also pokes fun at the Hip-Hop subgenres by depicting overly exaggerated backpackers and gangtas characters in the audience. "Lovin' It" also jokingly features typical scenes with Big Pooh sitting next to champagne-sipping models in the venue's VIP section while LB's entourage pop bottles. The video concludes with a car running through the boxes dropped on the street earlier.

The statement of the video being "too intelligent for the BET audiece" was discussed recently on Columbia University's college radio station, 89.9 hosted by Timmhotep Aku. Aku says this statement was made verbatim by the program director from BET to one of the Atlantic records label reps.

SOHH.com contacted several officials at BET, including their vice president Stephen Hill, their program director, and publicist, Michael Llewellen who offered this response.

"It's not true, not in that context. BET reserves the right to show or not to show music videos of any type based on the network's own standards and decision-making processes," Llewellyn told SOHH.com.

When questioned further as to whether the words "too intelligent for the BET audience" was used, Llewellen did not respond. Atlantic Records has refused to comment.

The LB incident doesn't mark the first time BET has allegedly banned underground artists from its video rotation. In December 2004, SOHH.com reported that BET snubbed De La Soul's "Shopping Bags" video and The Beatnuts' "Find Us (In the Back of the Club)" clip featuring Akon.

In a meeting with BET heads, De La reportedly said BET told them they "weren't relevant to the BET audience" while The Beatnuts were told that "BET doesn't break new artists." The Beatnuts had previously garnered heavy rotation for videos like "Off The Books" from 1997's Stone Crazy, "Watch Out Now" from 1999's A Musical Massacre and "No Escapin This" off 2001's Take It or Squeeze It.

The network has also been under fire from the black community for cutting its news coverage to make room for more videos in the past few years. Recently, the community has been frustrated with BET for its failure to cover the Hurricane Katrina's crisis.

Little Brother's The Minstrel Show featuring "Lovin' It" hits stores September 13th
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Kanye West will appear on The Ellen Degeneres Show -- his first television appearance since he sparked controversy last week during an NBC hurricane relief telethon by saying "George Bush doesn't care about black people".

Kanye West shocked the world and co-presenter Mike Myers when he went off-the-cuff last week during NBC's hurricane relief telethon, sharply criticizing the president for his failure to respond swiftly to the Katrina crisis. Since then, the Chicago super-producer, who recently graced the cover of TIME, has been keeping a low profile avoiding appearances on various news outlets.

On the Ellen show, Kanye takes time to respond to the media backlash to his comments, saying he simply spoke what he was feeling.

"If I can have the opportunity to talk," Kanye tells Ellen, "I'm like, yo... don't ask me to talk if you don't want me to be sincere."

Kanye's comments have resulted in mixed, although mostly positive, reactions. Some complained the statements were ill-timed and inappropriate. Those, such as Chicago alderman Fredrenna Lynne, strongly disagree.

"The people in my community feel exactly as what you heard by an impassioned Kanye West, that this country has failed us."

The Ellen Degeneres show featuring Kanye West airs Friday, September 9th on NBC and will include a performance of "Gold Digger" by the Chicago MC. Check local listings for specific air times
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