With nearly 40 million albums sold and a business empire that includes clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels, Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world

By: Anthony DeCurtis

"With education comes refinement," Jay-Z observes late one Friday afternoon. He's lounging on a couch in a studio at the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment complex on the far west side of Manhattan and speaking between nibbles of a takeout salad in a plastic container and sips from a bottle of water. In his everyday speech, as in his raps, Jay-Z is inclined toward aphorisms, the compressed expression of complicated ideas, delivered with rhetorical flair. It's hard-earned wisdom, graced by a poet's touch.

He is relaxing after a typically jam-packed day that included a photo shoot, an interview, and a meeting about his potential involvement in a forthcoming video game. He celebrated his 39th birthday the night before with the staff of his Rocawear clothing line, so a mild fatigue has set in. Slender and six feet three inches tall, Jay-Z is an imposing figure, even in relative repose. He's wearing distressed jeans that hang loosely from the middle of his hips, black sneakers, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that has replaced the pristine short-sleeved white one he wore before changing for his photo shoot. The look is studiously casual...until you glance at his left wrist and notice a diamond watch so thick it could pass for a weight band.

The winter sky is growing gray in the bank of windows behind him as the sun sets over the Hudson River. Jay-Z returns to the narrative of what, in the 19th century, would have been called his sentimental education, the education of his emotional life. That journey to refinement began in the rugged Marcy Projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, and now continues in arenas and boardrooms, in posh homes and VIP hideaways, around the world.

Jay-Z feels comfortable in all of these realms. "I've never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people," he explains. "I've always wanted to stay true to myself, and I've managed to do that. People have to accept that. I collect art, and I drink wine...things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?"

Staying true to yourself might stand as a succinct summary of Jay-Z's philosophy of success. The notion goes back to Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true," and further back than that to the Greeks. But for Jay-Z, it has an urgently contemporary meaning. Even, or perhaps, especially, in recessionary times, amid the thousands of entertainment and lifestyle choices consumers have available to them, what separates winners from losers is a commitment to a single proposition: You are the product. If people believe in you, they will believe in what you create. Jay-Z understands this and is down with it.

By selling nearly 40 million albums and building a business empire that extends far beyond music into clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels (to name just a few of his seemingly innumerable investments), Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world. But that brand retains its power only if people remain convinced that the product they are purchasing somehow genuinely reflects Jay-Z and his tastes. As he famously put it in one of his raps, "I'm not a businessman/I'm a business, man."

"My brands are an extension of me," he says. "They're close to me. It's not like running GM, where there's no emotional attachment." The reference is apt, given the government's ongoing potential bailout of two major automobile companies. Jay-Z notes that resonance with a pause and a chuckle.

"My thing is related to who I am as a person," he says. "The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in. And hopefully, everyone follows."

In conversation, Jay-Z's speech is slower, calmer, and more deliberate than in the propulsive, deep-voiced, and often incendiary raps that have made him a titan in the world of hip-hop, a man whose sales and staying power have elevated him above all but a handful of potential rivals. He's an engaged and animated speaker, quick to touch you in a friendly way to emphasize a point.

But as laid-back and accessible as he seems, he also exudes a calm air of confidence. He doesn't need to be aggressive or impose his will in a ham-fisted manner. Half a dozen people are floating around the studio, ready to read any sign of need or impatience on his part. He's cooperative and congenial in the way that only someone who knows he can immediately put an end to any experience that moves in an unpleasant direction can be. "Jay-Hova," he has called himself, echoing the name of the mighty, vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible. He has anointed himself the "God MC."

But he has also rapped that he "never prayed to God/I prayed to Gotti." Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between Jay-Z, the battle MC who to this day engages in raw exchanges with younger rappers looking to take him down, and Shawn Corey Carter, the far-sighted businessman who cofounded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1996; who served as president and CEO of Def Jam Records from 2005 to early 2008 and helped launch the careers of Kanye West, Young Jeezy, and Rihanna; who sold his Rocawear clothing line in 2007 for $204 million, while retaining a major stake in the company; and who, following a path blazed by Madonna and U2, forged a $150 million deal last year with the concert-promotion firm Live Nation.

Last summer, Forbes ranked Jay-Z seventh on its "Celebrity 100" list of the ultrafamous and ultrapowerful. The magazine estimated his annual income at $82 million, and other sources have reported his net worth at $350 million. If that doesn't seem enviable enough, last year Jay-Z married Beyonce Knowles, one of the world's most desirable women. It is part of his attitude of ultimate cool that he never publicly talks about her.

Jay-Z moves in exclusive circles of all types. Musicians, actors, designers, politicians, captains of industry, and athletes all want to get next to him. He has developed an easygoing manner that enables him to cross these cultural boundaries in ways that make him seem accessible but still dignified, always aware of who he is. "I'm a mirror," he says. "If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don't like what you see, then you've done something. If I'm standoffish, that's because you are."

Occasionally, stereotypes rear their heads and uncomfortable situations arise. "It's hilarious a lot of times," he says. "You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?' "

Growing up, however, Shawn Carter was far from the likeliest candidate for this sort of mind-boggling success. He was always recognized as bright--even today, the first word anyone who meets Jay-Z invariably uses to describe him is smart--and in the sixth grade, he tested at 12th-grade levels. But the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn were overrun by drugs and violence in the '80s. His father left the family when Carter was 11, and his mother had to raise him, his older brother, and his two older sisters. When he was 12, Carter shot his brother for stealing his jewelry. (They have since reconciled.) Carter attended high school with fellow Brooklynites the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes, but dropped out to deal drugs in a region that extended from Brooklyn to Maryland and Virginia--as he details in his music--and to dabble in the still-nascent hip-hop game.

Along with the dealers who ran the neighborhood around the Marcy Projects, Jay-Z remembers identifying sports figures as his first models of success. "Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes," he recalls. "They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real, he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses, and gave their families a better life. We were like, 'Wow, that's really cool.' These guys get paid millions of dollars to play the game they love."

Around the same time that he began to identify with athletes, Carter experienced another revelation: hip-hop. He began writing nonstop in notebooks, keeping his mother and siblings awake at night as he pounded the kitchen table to create beats. He hooked up with local rapper Jaz-O, who brought him to England when he toured there. Carter recorded with Jaz-O and also with Big Daddy Kane. But despite the acknowledgment of his skills (and his growing anxiety that either violence or the law would eventually catch up with him on the streets), Carter was reluctant to give up dealing. He was rolling in a Lexus and making more money, as far as he could tell, than most rappers.

Still, he decided to take the plunge, but no record company was willing to offer him a contract. So with two partners, Carter formed Roc-A-Fella Records, and, in 1996, released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, which established him as a major figure on the hip-hop scene. It was a heady moment, but Jay-Z barely realized it at the time. "I was naive," he recalls. "I made that album to impress my friends, so they would say, 'Oh, wow, look what you did!' It was my first album on the label that we owned. I was like, 'Okay, what happens now?' "

What happened was that Jay-Z left drug dealing behind and began to build his empire, moving steadily from "grams to Grammys" as he puts it in one song. But the process wasn't easy. The treachery of life on the streets, where he faced bullets at close range, turned out to be nothing compared with what he would encounter in the upper echelons of the music business. "I come from a world that's completely different from the music industry, and it wasn't recognizable to me at all," he says. "I come from a place where you had to keep your word, where people would stick with you no matter what. That's impossible in the music business, where if you're not hot, people are not talking to you. I just tried to be a man of my word."

The choice of Roc-A-Fella as his label's name would prove telling. On one hand, it's standard hip-hop braggadocio to establish a connection between a fledgling rapper and one of the richest and most powerful families in American history. But it also suggested the means through which Jay-Z would eventually establish his own business empire. The Rockefeller family and other 19th-century industrialists established a monopolistic hold on all aspects of the goods they produced. If you owned the mines that produced coal, for example, you also bought the railroads that transported it, the refineries that prepared it for market, and the utilities that provided its end product to the general population.

As Jay-Z's career has progressed in the past dozen years, he has sought to establish a similar hold on the lifestyle market for which his music provides the soundtrack, and in which he stands as the ideal model to emulate. Rather than providing anything as tangible as coal or oil, Jay-Z, through his myriad branded investments, manufactures a way of being that makes it at least theoretically possible to never leave the world of his products. You can enjoy his music while sporting Rocawear clothing (estimated as doing $700 million a year in business), wearing one of his fragrances, and sipping his Ace of Spades champagne. You can attend his concert and end the night at one of his 40/40 nightclubs. His videos, DVDs, and CD booklets provide free exposure for all of his products, all of which, in turn, enhance every other aspect of the Jay-Z brand.

The question then becomes how, with all this marketing and glossy brand extension, does Jay-Z maintain the credibility in the hip-hop world that made him such a marketable star in the first place? "We are excited to partner with an industry giant such as Elizabeth Arden," Jay-Z declared in the press release announcing his fragrance line, which made its debut last year. No matter how deeply you've absorbed the potency of Jay-Z's mainstream reach, that sentence still makes you do a double take. This is the man who took the film American Gangster as the inspiration for his most recent album? Jigga what?

But Jay-Z believes deeply in the aspirational power of hip-hop, the notion that the music's truest fans want to see their heroes succeed and want to emulate them. He draws a sharp distinction between hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, whose stars have often expressed disdain for business and success. "I noticed that difference early on, like if you were successful in rock 'n' roll, that was a really bad thing," Jay-Z says with a laugh. "You almost had to hide it. You had these guys selling 200 million records with dirty T-shirts on. I was like, 'Come on, man. Come on. We know you're successful.'

"Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth," he continues. "People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."

Consequently, any discussion of credibility, or keeping it real, elicits a response of disbelief from him. "That's an insecure emotion," he explains. "You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?"

Of course, Jay-Z has not been immune to those insecurities himself. In 1999, he was arrested for stabbing a record executive in a New York club, and in 2001, he was charged with possession of a loaded handgun. Against his lawyer's advice, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the stabbing case and was sentenced to three years' probation. The gun charge was dropped.

It's generally thought that those brushes with potential incarceration cured Jay-Z of the need to prove that he could still live the thug life. He has rapped about both of those arrests ("Put that knife in ya/Take a little bit of life from ya/Am I frightenin' ya?"), but has shown no further inclination to transform his words into deeds that would put an end to the extraordinary life he has created for himself. In fact, quite the opposite. He has been baited relentlessly by other rappers--Nas, to cite just one example, taunted "Gay-Z" for his "dick-suckin' lips"--and has responded in kind, but only in song. In real life, he has taken steps to ease those rivalries and ensure that tragedies such as the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. never happen again.

That's because too much is at stake now, far more than money or bling. At 39, Jay-Z is old enough to think about the cultural impact that hip-hop has already had, and the critical role he has played in it. "Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit," he says. "It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

"I'll explain why I say that," he continues. "Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' That's why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It's worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that." He pauses, as if marveling at the idea, and then repeats it for emphasis: "Hip-hop has done that."

Something else that hip-hop has done, in Jay-Z's view, is help to elect Barack Obama. "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk, and Martin walked so Obama could run," Jay-Z told a concert audience in the crucial swing state of Ohio shortly before the November election. "Obama is running so we all can fly, so let's fly." He recorded a get-out-the-vote message for robo calls to African-American voters during the primaries. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, after a particularly heated primary debate, Obama brushed off Hillary Clinton's attacks with a gesture of wiping lint off the shoulders of his suit, and hip observers recognized an unmistakable reference to Jay-Z's song, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder."

Jay-Z's eyes widen as he recalls that moment. "I felt like, man, what time are we living in, where a presidential nominee is making reference to a rapper?" he says. "What a beautiful place we've come to. Growing up, politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp, and Obama himself, reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner, and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.

"It's surreal," continues Jay-Z. "I couldn't imagine anything like that could happen. I didn't vote until I was an older adult. I didn't think I would ever vote, because it didn't matter who was in office. The situation never changed where we lived. Our voices weren't heard."

Jay-Z walks idly around the studio as crew members break down the set for his photo shoot. He's rapping along with a hip-hop track that's blasting in the room. When the sound system abruptly shuts off, Jay-Z continues rapping and moving to the music, like Wile E. Coyote in the moment before he looks down and realizes that he has run off the cliff. Jay-Z catches himself, looks around the room in mock surprise, and laughs. It's the sort of self-deprecating gesture he's good at, acknowledging that all eyes are on him, but humorously taking the edge off whatever intimidation factor his presence might have.

That's a quality he brings into the boardroom as well. He's far from just a figurehead or a media front man. He takes his businesses as seriously as his artistry, and he goes at both with the same level of determination. He's clear about his own views, willing to listen to others, eager to keep everybody loose and motivated, and far more interested in long-term strategy than short-term gain. Even in the current economic environment, which is challenging to say the least, he's insistent on executing his game plan rather than making changes that might not ultimately be right for his brands.

"He's smart as hell," says Neil Cole, chairman and CEO of the Iconix Brand Group, the company that bought Rocawear two years ago for more than $200 million. "He understands himself as a brand, and it's incredibly well thought out. We meet every week, and there's nothing impulsive about him. He's very consistent, and he won't settle. If something's not right, he's not going to do it for more money. He'll wait to get it right. He has a wonderful taste level about where he wants to take the brand. . .and himself."

Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Live Nation, echoes Cole's assessment of Jay-Z. "In meeting with superstars about potential deals, there are some who spit out 'How much can I get?' and the meeting is over, because you know you're starting out on the wrong basis," he says. "When we sat down with Jay-Z, 'How much money are you going to pay me?' came up in maybe the seventh conversation. The first conversation was, 'Can we change the business together?'

"Right there, we knew we had a common agenda," continues Rapino. "It was like, 'I'm hungry. The business is changing. I'm a change agent, and I have a lot of years left.' Then the creativity flows. You don't become the best in the world at what you do, and then flip the off switch. Jay-Z wants to win. And for him it's also about the integrity of the win. He's a true partner, always looking for the win-win. He's asking, 'How do we win together?' "

Indeed, part of the refinement Jay-Z has attained entails that big-picture vision of success. It's a vision that extends beyond business and beyond music. It's about what makes your life meaningful, and it goes beyond lifestyle to a way of life. "I'm hungry for knowledge," says Jay-Z. "The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

"That's what you should be doing your whole time on the planet," he concludes. "Then you feel like, 'My life is worth everything. And yours is too.' "

Labels: Business, Entrepreneur, Hip Hop, Hustle, Strategy

Dead mag helps VH1 talk about race, from Ice Cube to Elvis to Costello

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Deep in the Broadway offices of VH1, Gabriel Alvarez and Elliott Wilson, two-fifths of the Ego Trip brain trust, are debating an issue that could forever alter race relations in the Empire State—should Puerto Ricans be allowed to use the word nigga? "If these Spanish kids are on the train saying 'nigga this,' 'nigga that,' " says Wilson, "this old black man is looking at them like they're crazy because he's experienced some real-ass racism."
"I try to explain to him," says Alvarez, gesturing at Wilson, "that Puerto Ricans have African blood in their ancestry."

Oh yeah, that's real convenient coming from a goddamn Puerto Rican.

"That's the thing," notes Alvarez, laughing awkwardly. "I'm Mexican."

It is this type of inane yet complex racial debate that has helped Ego Trip go from defunct underground zine to arbiter of the color line. The Ego Trip crew has produced two books and, this year, a special for VH1's TV's Illest Minority Moments. Now they're slated to make three more specials for VH1 under the rubric of "Race-O-Rama." Proposed shows include Dude, Where's My Ghetto Pass? and Black-O-Phobia!

"Most of the time VH1 just looks back at the stuff we love, or makes us laugh or whatever," says Joey Anuff, supervising producer at VH1. "But when you take a look at Ego Trip's books, you see they're looking at the same stuff with a much more charged lens. In a way they're the perfect VH1 project."

Well, not on the face of things. While VH1 likes to focus on the intricacies of John Hughes flicks and the "Where's the Beef?" lady, the Ego Trip aesthetic wallows in such highlights of racial dialogue as Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles "a blind ignorant nigger," Ice Cube threatening to "go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up," or the black community's penchant for conspiracy theories.

Ego Trip came into being in 1994 as a magazine co-edited by Sacha Jenkins and Wilson, who at the time were both working as hip-hop journalists. The duo borrowed $8,000 and printed up a new issue whenever they had the funds. Ego Trip began strictly as a hip-hop zine, but later expanded to rock and finally to what Jenkins calls "the new pornography"—race. "A lot of people thought that a magazine that covers rock and hip-hop and has decent writing had to have some white boys behind it," says Jenkins. "So, we created a fake publisher, and he was a white, racist, and out of touch. He'd write these editorials he thought were progressive. That attitude that we created in the magazine trickled out into our other projects."

The magazine stopped publishing in 1998, which didn't bother Jenkins and Wilson much, because they'd always seen Ego Trip as a concept that could take a variety of forms. "We didn't look at ourselves as businesspeople," says Wilson, who now edits the hip-hop magazine XXL. "We were creative people, but we recognized that we were creating a brand. The Ego Trip brand became a magazine but it also became our own joint sensibility."

After shutting down the magazine, the Ego Trippers added three more members to their cabinet (Alvarez, Brent Rollins, and Chairman Jefferson Mao) and then published two books—Ego Trip's Big Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism. Both featured exhaustive research, but the second is both more arresting and more disturbing. What passes for race talk today usually amounts to painfully stilted arguments that seem not to have shifted since 1970. Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism replaced discussions of ethnic diversity and democracy with more pertinent questions like "Whatever happened to baseball players named 'Whitey?' " and "If I should associate with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan, what will be required of me?"

Flippant as it all may sound, Ego Trip's brain trust is convinced that the truth lies not in the polemic but in the mundane—and the insane. "We are always fascinated by ignorance," says Alvarez. "When you listen to people talk and say things that are ignorant, you have a better understanding of where they're coming from, and maybe they'll hear what they're saying."

The Big Book of Racism's penchant for abrasively noting the places where pop culture and race intersect eventually attracted the attention of VH1, and thus spawned "Race-O-Rama." And while the relationship has produced the occasional corporate headaches (like "Race-O-Rama" being slated to air during Black History Month), it's also afforded the crew an opportunity to launch a discussion that demonstrates exactly how much race matters—not that anyone will ever mistake them for Cornel West. "We're down with Cornel West," says Jenkins. "We think he looks like Gene Shalit. We're down with that."

Labels: Hip Hop, Racism, Stuff

In their latest book, the multiracial maniacally funny guys of the defunct hip-hop magazine ego trip turn their smart-ass, studiously well-informed attention to the subject of race.

With the disclaimer that "we just hate everybody," the book is a reference guide of sorts, crammed with lists, trivia, rants, and parodies. Together, they make a hilarious and occasionally insightful commentary on race and racism in culture, media, current events, and entertainment, with sometimes silly ("the hidden hate in Wite Out") and sometimes biting ("10 Popular Films in Which Middle Easterners Must Die in Order for the Good Guys to Win") results.

Have you ever been guilty of racial/ethnic stereotyping of certain groups-if so, which ones and why?

BRENT ROLLINS: This country was built on two things: competitiveness and racism--how can you not be prejudiced? Even blacks who talk a lot about white-man-this and white-man-that, go and turn around and treat some other struggling group like basura, sometimes. That's pretty hypocritical. People think that once they've established themselves, their little piece of the pie is sacred and no one can touch it, instead of realizing that we can always bake more pies.

JEFFERSON MAO Asians are constantly embarrassed or coming to grips with the stereotypes of our own behavior. When I watch the kids version of Jeopardy, I see the little Asian kid killing the math and science categories and then, when its time for "Final Jeopardy," he calculates and bets just enough to win the whole thing by a dollar. I'm both proud and horrifired.

What do you think of the contradictions of race in American culture today compared 'with those of previous decades?

GABE ALVAREZ People are so far removed from history it boggles the mind. How a white person can feel totally comfortable saying the n-word as a term of endearment is nuts! My feeling is that white people can't stand being told what they can and can't do.

The difference between those signs at restaurants that stated: "No Negroes, No Mexicans, No Dogs" as recently as the 1950s, and trying to figure out what happened with the last presidential election--where scores of black voters in Florida were kept from the polls through various devious means-comes down to what's worse: being obviously discriminated against? Or being opressed in manners that you have to dig beneath the surface to see?

BRENT ROLLINS: The '70s were great. GREAT. You had open dialogue and acknowledgement of other races and ethnicities--like the "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's bread" ad campaigns--showing black kids, Chinese, and Native Indian men eating Jewish rye bread. Who would have the balls to do advertising like that now? In our book we have a spread entitled "Whatever happened to?" which lists all these kind of "forgotten" racial pop-ephemera and terminology. It just sort of illustrates how American culture sort of neutralizes race.

What might the more recent immigrant groups do well to understand and be prepared to confront while in the U.S., in terms of race and how it's determined/experienced here?

SACHA JENKINS: They must understand that, at the airports, anyone who is a shade darker than J-Lo (hey, she's white now...ask her sexy hubby) will be detained and derailed and then told to have a nice day--and that that is their patriotic duty, this detention.

And they should ask: how come every time a boat load of Haitians arrives on American soil, looking for a better way...the Haitians are sent to detention camps while their Cuban hermanos often find warm soup and a nice firm bed waiting for them, just inches away from South Beach?

What aspects of race and racism do you take on in the book and how would you describe your approach?

GABE ALVAREZ: We tackle everything with humor, in a way that only non-white people could--and as the comedic greats like Richard Pryor proved, the best humor is based on truth. The book's info is presented in bite-sizes, and there's plenty of silly shit in it--but we were fully aware of all the jokes we were making, even the more offensive ones.

BRENT ROLLINS: Our approach is a blender. Throw it in there and watch it spin around. The entire concept of punk rock and hip-hop is central to our process.

While you have to be already a little predisposed to this topic to even think about picking up a book with the title Big Book of Racism, even those people are going to have preconceptions about how the topic of race should be presented. The intelligentsia and other people who write books spend too much time talking to themselves, but don't affect change. I respect anyone who devotes their lives to this race-shit, but really... who has more impact on shaping American culture--Cornel West or [pro wrestling star] The Rock?

Labels: Hip Hop, Stuff

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The carpet outside last Monday’s Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball was not red but green, in honor of Heineken, one of the event’s sponsors. The green also could have stood for the price of the ticket—five hundred dollars for general admission, twenty-five hundred for “Sky Level.” The proceeds were promised to Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a group that has spoken out about everything from ending the Rockefeller drug laws to defending hip-hop lyrics before the F.C.C. The ball was held at the Harman Center for the Arts, on F Street, where heated white tents had been erected to contain the green carpet and any overflow. Nick Cannon, a long white scarf around his neck, shook hands outside the main lobby. On the green carpet, Don King, in rhinestone-studded denim, posed in profile for the paparazzi. A few feet away, Simmons, the co-founder of Def Jam records, took questions. He wore a long dark jacket, a black Yankees cap, white shell-top Adidas, and a pin-striped shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie.

Upstairs, the V.I.P. area was called the Hennessy Lounge. African-Americans reportedly purchase as much as eighty per cent of the Cognac imported to the United States. Hennessy, knowing its customer, was premièring a limited-edition bottle “in honor of our 44th president,” with a portion of the proceeds going to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Smiling women in black blouses served cocktails engineered with the Presidential hooch. A flat screen flashed images of the bottle. A row of models of indeterminable race, wearing black dresses, stood off to the side having their photographs taken with various guests.

Simmons ambled in with a small entourage, and the room got tighter. He pulled aside the rapper T.I. and talked to him about the importance of mentorship. In March, T.I. is expected to go to jail on federal weapons charges. He was to be honored at the ball for “bringing an awareness to this election season,” according to his Web site. He introduced Simmons to a teen-age boy from Georgia whom he’d taken on as a mentee, along with a few others. “This is just one of them,” he told Simmons.

Simmons had flown in from Utah, where he’d been screening a new movie about Run-DMC’s late d.j., Jam Master Jay, and marketing SpongeBob diamonds, part of a jewelry line that he and his ex-wife had helped start. He stood next to a display of Hennessy 44 bottles and did a series of TV interviews, rattling off several packaged points. He called Obama’s election a “shift in consciousness.” He mentioned his own work on three elections. He talked up the environment and compared Obama’s rise to Run-DMC’s. “Nobody from the black congress believed,” Simmons said. “I remember when Run-DMC was on MTV. Nobody else black was on there but Michael Jackson.”

When he was done, he mentioned that Obama’s security team had come by earlier to check the place out. “I don’t think he’s going to show up,” Simmons said. But, he added, “I wouldn’t expect John Kerry to come.” Ushered onward by a handler, Simmons began making his way out. At nearly every step, he was stopped by an admirer and was asked to pose for a picture. He was tired, and his smile was work—the mouth forced to spread, the eyebrows at half-mast. Once outside the lounge, he darted down several flights of stairs, past different ballrooms with different d.j.s playing different music, until he was in the basement. He went through a door with his name taped to the front, into a makeshift dressing room,and introduced an Abercrombie & Fitch model named Katie Rost, his date. “She’s smart and she writes,” he said. “She went to Boston University and got a degree in journalism.” (Later, on her blog, Rost quoted from T.I.’s acceptance speech at the ball: “So I’mma thank Him for everything. . . . I’mma thank Him for making me sell crack. I’mma thank Him for making me have shoot-outs. I’mma thank him for allowing me to watch my partners die in my arms, so I’d be fearful enough for my life and paranoid enough to go out and cop machine guns and silencers so I catch a fed case and I have to put up $3 million for my bond . . . just so I be validated enough to get out there and touch the youth because they know that I done been through it.”)

In 2008, Simmons took a leave from H.S.A.N. and went around the country campaigning for Obama. The President’s relationship with hip-hop is complicated. Nas hosted an official event for the campaign, and the President’s staff has noted that he has some Jay-Z on his iPod. But he was forced to denounce the rapper Ludacris for writing a song with the lyrics “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.” The inaugural concert featured performers of all strains of American music, but, aside from Will.i.am singing a duet with Sheryl Crow, there were no rap performances.

Simmons talked a bit about Obama and hip-hop. “He embraced it as much as a politician can,” he said. “I was amazed by his willingness to put some of us in the room. If I was running for President, I wouldn’t want me to speak for me, so I was amazed. He let those of us who love him work for him.”

He also mentioned hosting Louis Farrakhan at his first Hip-Hop Summit: “I’m a big fan of Minister Farrakhan, but I was concerned that my association with him might rub off on Obama.”

Simmons had two more balls to get to, but he was considering heading to bed instead. He then ticked off his various projects—working with 50 Cent on the Jam Master Jay film, pushing Governor David Paterson toward retroactive repeal of the drug laws, teaching yoga classes sponsored by Smartwater. He said, “Every morning, I stand on my head for five minutes.” ♦

Labels: Entrepreneur, Hip Hop

Why should we care now?

By Raquel Cepeda

"Yo, my nigga, that nigga's crazy," declares a young Dominican guy in his late teens, early twenties. "Yeah, my nigga, that nigga was buggin' last night, my nigga," responds another hermano. Chatter like this floated in the air like the whiff of days-old garbage smoldering in the heat while I took my frequent summer jaunts along Vermilyea Avenue way uptown in Inwood, with my 11-year-old daughter in tow.

Initially, you'd find mostly Caribbean Latinos dropping n-bombs into rap lyrics—"Pigs," off Cypress Hill's classic self-titled 1991 debut, is just one example—but nearly two decades later, the profusion of the word into the New York City Latino vocabulary is reaching an almost caricaturist quality. In Spanish Harlem, el Bronx, and the Lower East Side, it's enthusiastically deployed in an almost faddish manner, as if it's going out of style literally tomorrow. With Nas threatening to name his latest album Nigga (he relented, eventually, but most fans still call it that anyway) a few months ago, and iconic Latino artists from the authentic urban native Fat Joe to one of my favorite internationalists, Immortal Technique, still flinging it about freely, the word, its meaning, and our sense of who can and cannot use it still dominates public conversation. The palpable racial tension that's been rearing its head this historic presidential election, the subject of race and who is truly considered black or white in this black-and-white race, is something Latinos need to pay attention to. For many of us, especially those of Caribbean descent who make up a sizable chunk of New York Latinos, race should matter, and so should that one particular word.

Personal feelings, premonitions, and politics aside, I took the two young boys' exchange as an interesting opportunity, an exercise in thinking about Afro-Latino identity in an unlikely way: through a hip-hop lens. Aside from the fact that we're in the thick of a predominantly Dominican enclave (for now) in our beloved Uptown Manhattan, and the first guy I'd overheard wore an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with our motherland's flag, homeboy could've passed for an African-American man on any other stretch of blocks stateside. By comparison, his comrade looked more like Fat Joe's skinnier brother, with light eyes and pale skin. Was it OK, or more OK, for the darker-skinned kid to use the term?

As many times as I've heard it yelled across the streets and in playgrounds lately, it doesn't take away the sting. But it's naive to think Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban kids in New York City aren't calling each other and themselves the n-word, especially in 2008. (It's a global phenomenon, too: In West African cities like Freetown and Accra, heads that find out you're from the States and part of the hip-hop community will find creative ways to work the word into a conversation.) For us, the word usually surfaces in the same context that arises among young African-Americans: as a term of inclusion and solidarity. "It's just a code of communication to us, a 'hood word people throw around frequently," says half-African-American, half-Dominican rapper AZ, who released his "rap thesis" on the subject, titled N.4.L. (Niggaz 4 Life), last month. "I guess people want to use it now for press and all that; I don't understand what's all the big fuss about."

Somehow, the n-word has found its way back into hip-hop's critical zeitgeist: I'm interested in exploring, as a Dominican New Yorker, how we as a community have propagated it. Recently, due to the mounting criticism of Boricua rapper Fat Joe's use of the term eight albums deep into his career (including his latest, The Elephant in the Room), Latinos are being challenged to introspect. But I can see why an impulse to laser-focus on the issue now would bewilder a veteran rapper like Joe; he's used the word consistently since emerging in 1993, as have the Beatnuts, Hurricane G, and his late Puerto Rican cohort Big Pun, to name a few. In an interview with Chicago-based WGCI radio personality Leon Rogers, Joe said that while he didn't know exactly when Latinos started using the n-word, he felt that "somehow it became a way to embrace each other." He added: "Crazy shit is, my man Reverend Al Sharpton, whenever I see him, he'll be like, 'Wassup Joe, my nigga,' and he's the dude that protests 'my nigga.' He's my friend, so he says it to me as a term of endearment."

"It draws the racial differentiations into the Latino community, which I agree with," says New York University Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Juan Flores, who regularly teaches courses on Afro-Latino identity here and abroad. "It's just an opportunity to check the power that Black Latinos reflect off each other and the Latino population." In other words, Latino artists use the n-word as a reminder that they too have been oppressed and are products of the transatlantic slave trade.

There may be a reason for the lack of attention: Many Caribbean Latinos are, to Americans at least, ethnically ambiguous products of miscegenation. Regardless of what we've learned in grade school, our history extends past Columbus and our Spanish conquistadores. "The European Spaniards have left a legacy of self-hatred and racism among the Latino population; without acknowledging that, we will not evolve past our own inequity," says Immortal Technique, an Afro-Peruvian hip-hop artist who also uses the n-word. "Racism in America, as horrible and ugly as it may be, still isn't as bad as what it is in Latin America, and the sad part is that we are being racist against ourselves."

Maybe, in a way, that's the statement Dania Ramirez intended to make when, as part of Nas's Grammy-night entourage earlier this year, the dark-brown Dominican actress sported a black T-shirt emblazoned with the n-word. Many folks in our parents' generation have rejected their blackness—I have older Latino neighbors who won't vote for Barack Obama simply because he's black—but those generations more informed by hip-hop are embracing their Afro-Latino identity and evolving past our own self-hatred. Perhaps. "One fallacy is that [the n-word is] blasé, like, 'Ah well, everyone can use it now that it has a different meaning,' because it's not completely meaningless," says Professor Flores. "The other extreme, though, is the absolutist who thinks no one can use it because it's taboo, under any circumstances. That's a problem, too, because every expression has the potential for ulterior meanings, depending on the circumstances of the person."

Crystal, a 13-year-old fair-skinned Dominican girl attending eighth grade in an Inwood public school, remembers first hearing the n-word in a song while hanging out with her aunt. "So then, we got on the computer and we looked it up, and it had the meaning and everything," she recalls. "I was like, 'Why would you say it in a song?' From there, you started hearing everybody on the street saying it, and then everybody started getting used to it." To be fair, parents aren't always able to interfere because they speak little to no English; those reared by hip-hop culture in the last two decades often use it themselves.

The similar term cocolo—most popularly used as an insult against Haitians by Dominicans, and by Puerto-Ricans against Dominican immigrants who look Haitian—is another word gradually being assigned a new meaning here among Latinos. Other words that translate to mean "black" among Caribbean Latinos are moreno/a and negrito/a, almost always used as terms of endearment. However, because none of these words have had the fraternal stamp of hip-hop approval, they have yet to receive their proverbial ghetto passes; speaking of which, Jennifer Lopez might've surrendered hers when she left the Bronx eons ago. While it's a fact that men in the hip-hop industry can get away with murder, women are held to impossibly high standards, and the question of authenticity played a role in how negatively the public reacted to J. Lo's use of the n-word on the remix for her 2001 single "I'm Real."

"I think with that, it was really based more upon class than anything else," Immortal Technique says. "Many people saw Fat Joe as technically black even though he was a light-skinned Puerto Rican, and he had affiliations with the streets that Jennifer Lopez probably lost on the way to Hollywood."

With few exceptions within our community—Raquel Rivera's 2003 book New York Ricans From the Hip Hop Zone devoted prime real estate to the discussion of Latino identity in hip-hop—this is a conversation we've failed to have, whatever our personal feelings. "It really don't matter if you're white, you're black, you're brown, or from the Boogie Down—it irks me to death," says Alain "KET" Maridueña, 37, an entrepreneur and artist. "Latinos in our neighborhood use it a lot—like every other word—and I'm trying to check people because I find that we're suffering, we're going through our thing, times are hard, there aren't enough opportunities out there, and I want us to rise up." But we won't rise up if we can't talk about the reasons why we haven't quite gotten there yet, and the words that've risen in prominence as a result.

Labels: African Americans, Hip Hop, Latinos

By J. D. CONSIDINE

IN their quest for rare grooves and ear-catching hooks, hip-hop D.J.'s do a lot of digging through old LP's. Anything is fair game, from classic R & B hits to corny movie soundtracks. But for many D.J.'s, nothing confers sophistication better than jazz.

Rap fans and jazz fans value markedly different things in their music, of course. You won't find many samples from John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk or Charlie Parker on rap albums. But you will find quite a few from George Benson, Bob James, Stanley Turrentine and Grover Washington.

What do these artists have in common? From a D.J. perspective, the answer is simple: they all recorded for CTI (or one of its subsidiaries), a label founded in the the late 1960's by the well-known producer Creed Taylor. Rappers from Run D.M.C. to LL Cool J to Snoop Dogg have all sampled CTI's stylish, groove-driven recordings. In fact, the label has gained a cachet among hip-hop D.J.'s, in part because its catalog has only sporadically been available since the introduction of the CD in the late 1980's.

But that situation may change: Sony Legacy reissued eight titles earlier this month, including albums by Mr. Benson, Mr. Turrentine, Milt Jackson and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Seven more are planned for this summer. Even so, dozens of CTI albums remain out of print.

The unavailability of CTI's catalog is especially puzzling given the label's great commercial success in the 1970's. It's best-known albums, like Mr. Washington's ''Mr. Magic'' and Mr. James's ''BJ4,'' were not just successful by the standards of jazz; they were also bona fide pop hits, often climbing high in the album charts. The label even released a few hit singles, notably Eumir Deodato's 1973 revamping of ''Also Sprach Zarathustra,'' the theme from the movie ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'' It went to No. 2 on the Billboard pop charts despite having an all-star jazz lineup.

That such success didn't win Mr. Taylor more friends in jazz is instructive. Where many jazz musicians wanted their music to be more like high art -- oblique, austere, intellectually demanding -- Mr. Taylor believed that jazz, having started out as popular music, ought to maintain a connection to a broader audience. His credo was that when cut off from its pop roots, jazz withers and dies.

By and large, Mr. Taylor's productions stressed recognizable tunes (often pop hits at the time or light classical favorites), sturdy, straightforward grooves and slick, hi-fidelity recordings. Jazz snobs carped that many of those values were middlebrow, pandering to commercial tastes. (When Steely Dan imported those qualities into rock, critics applauded.)

Mr. Taylor nonetheless managed to assemble a stable of first-rate talent -- including Paul Desmond, Freddie Hubbard and Chet Baker -- and to make the sound sell. His success shouldn't have been that surprising. Initially a trumpeter, he began his career in jazz production in 1954. A decade later, he produced one of the most successful jazz albums of its time, Stan Getz and João Gilberto's ''Getz/Gilberto,'' which included the Grammy-winning single ''The Girl From Ipanema.''

In 1967, Mr. Taylor began CTI as a boutique label within A & M Records. His first signings ranged from the Brazilian superstar Milton Nascimento to the arranger Quincy Jones. The album ''A Day in the Life'' by the guitarist Wes Montgomery showed that the producer hadn't lost the touch. Lushly arranged and favoring pop fare over jazz standards -- the title was that of a Beatles song -- it placed Mr. Montgomery's lean, swinging phrasing in a commercial package and earned him the only gold album (selling more than 500,000 copies) of his career.

CTI went independent in 1970, and ''Stone Flower,'' its reissue of an album by the Brazilian composer and guitarist Antonio Carlos Jobim, was one of the label's first releases. Jobim was a favorite of Mr. Taylor's, having written ''The Girl From Ipanema'' and many of the bossa nova songs that ''Getz/Gilberto'' helped popularize. ''Stone Flower'' isn't jazz as such -- there's little improvisation -- but it offers a stellar lineup, particularly the bassist Ron Carter (a CTI mainstay), the flutist Hubert Laws and the saxophonist Joe Farrell.

What ''Stone Flower'' lacks in solos is made up for in warmth and rhythm. As arranged by Mr. Deodato, the album casts Jobim's songs in the signature CTI manner, with the instrumental soloists treated almost like singers and the harmonies sketched in dark, velvety textures (whispery strings, throaty flutes, chocolaty trombones).

But it's the approach to rhythm that would ultimately become a CTI touchstone and endear the label to D.J.'s. Where most jazz albums relied on a standard bebop rhythm section of piano, bass and drums, CTI recordings frequently added guitar and percussion. Mr. Benson's 1973 album, ''Body Talk,'' not only paired his electric guitar with Earl Klugh's acoustic; it also reinforced Mr. Carter's acoustic bass with Gary King's electric.

In addition, most of the label's albums were recorded in the studios of the engineer Rudy Van Gelder, a jazz legend in his own right, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. He emphasized the rhythm instruments: the deep resonance of acoustic bass and the crispness of cymbals and percussion. By shading the sounds, Mr. Van Gelder created a sonic world that was CTI's own.

That ear for sonic detail is evident on Mr. Laws's ''Rite of Spring.'' Based on classical works, from Stravinsky's ''Rite'' to a swinging take on Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, the album wields an unusual array of instruments, including a bassoon. But even the arrangements tend to emphasize ensemble playing over improvisation. Notwithstanding, there are enough hot moments that the title track has been sampled by the Canadian hip-hop group Swollen Members.

MR. TAYLOR eventually augmented his CTI line with Kudu Records, a subsidiary devoted to soul jazz. Beginning with the organist Johnny Hammond's ''Breakout'' in 1971, it expanded on the formula that Mr. Taylor had established with Mr. Turrentine's 1970 album ''Sugar.'' Kudu releases were funkier and relied more on pop songs than most CTI offerings, making more of beats and arrangements than of solos.

It was the rhythm that made both the Beastie Boys and Fat Boy Slim sample ''Loran's Dance'' from the drummer Idris Muhammad's album ''The Power of Soul,'' just as the rappers Eric B. and Rakim drew from Hammond's ''Breakout.'' That connection may not be enough to make hip-hop listeners into a new generation of jazz fans. But it's nice to know that these recordings are again available in something more than just snippets.

Labels: Hip Hop, Jazz, Music

Keys N Krates : Snoop Dogg Next Episode Live Remix



Keys N Krates : Daft Punk Harder Better Live Rendition



Keys N Krates : Talib Kweli Get By Live Rendition



Keys N Krates : Aaliyah One in a Million Live Remix



Keys N Krates : Fugees - FuGeeLa Live Remix (The best one in my opinion)

Labels: Hip Hop

By Jean A. Williams

The Rockefellers. The Carnegies. The Mellons. The Pritzkers. The Hiltons. These are among America's most renowned entrepreneurial dynasties. They collectively represent billions of dollars of wealth that was built, often by lowly, bootstrapping, entrepreneurs of yesteryear, and passed down through several generations to their heirs, many of whom have never known a day of financial struggle or need, thanks to their lineage.

Today a new entrepreneurial dynasty could be in the works – this one within an African-American family: the Simmons family. The patriarch of that family – at least in its entrepreneurial ventures – would be Russell "Rush" Simmons, who currently is chairman and CEO of Rush Communications, a conglomerate with interests in fashion, filmed entertainment, finance, music and philanthropy.

Though his business and personal interests are many and varied today, they share a common denominator: their roots in the music and culture known internationally as hip hop. In fact, Simmons' focus on the music in its early history is credited with its evolution into the powerful cultural force that it is today, over a quarter of a century later. He is considered to hip hop what Berry Gordy was to R&B music when he founded Motown Records in Detroit in 1959. In fact, Simmons is recognized as the "godfather" of hip hop. Few would effectively argue against this moniker. However, he has blazed paths that even the storied Gordy did not.

His success begat success, so much so that today not only does he have the proverbial Midas touch with his business dealings, but it has spread through his family, with younger brother Joseph "Run" Simmons, older brother Danny Simmons, Run's children, Vanessa and Angela; and Russell's now estranged wife, Kimora Lee Simmons, joining him in the family businesses.

Simmons may not have seen it all coming, but he is at the core of where it is all going.

Humble Beginnings

Like many earlier captains of industry, Simmons had a rather inauspicious start. Born in 1957, Simmons and his elder brother, Daniel, and baby brother, Joseph, grew up middle class in Queens, N.Y. Their father was a teacher and their mother was a recreation director. When their middle class neighborhood began to experience the effects of the burgeoning street drug trade, young Russell flirted with a career in that illegal, not to mention deadly, industry. In fact, he admits that he sold fake coke on the streets before his run-in with the new sounds of hip hop sent him careening in another direction – that of club and concert promoter.

Spectacular successes followed. In short order, Simmons famously co-founded Def Jam Recordings with Rick Rubin from their dorm room while students at City College of New York in the mid-1980s. He systematically sold his pieces of Def Jam for hundreds of millions of dollars, selling his final stake in 1999. But his entrepreneurial empire had been fast evolving in other, non-music directions since 1990, when he founded Rush Communications, which served as a holding company for various ventures rooted in hip-hop culture. Rush Communications has encompassed Phat Fashions, including the trendsetting Phat Farm clothing for men and boys, Baby Phat for women, and Run Athletics; the Simmons Lathan Media Group; the HBO's "The Def Comedy Jam" and "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry"; the Tony Award winning stage production "Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway," and in the financial services industry, UniRush and its RushCard and Baby Phat RushCard debit cards.

All in the Family

One of the remarkable things about Simmons' business empire is the involvement of family in his pursuits, from the very beginning with Run DMC, a trio of Joseph, friend Darryl McDaniel and the late Jay "Jam Master Jay" Mizell, as one of Def Jam's founding acts. Today Run is an ordained minister and is co-owner and an executive with Run Athletics, while Danny works with both of his brothers in the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, established in 1995.

In March 2006, Simmons and wife Kimora Lee separated. However, they remain business associates, as she is the creative force behind Baby Phat, a Phat Farm offspring, as well as parents to their two daughters, Aoki and Ming Lee, who are models for Baby Phat Kids' Collection.

In 2005, MTV debuted "Run's House," a now popular reality TV series based on the interactions between Joseph "Run" Simmons' blended clan of his kids from a previous marriage and current marriage to Justine Simmons, all co-existing in his Saddle River, N.J., home. The show provided a platform for the family to extend its entrepreneurial pursuits, with Run's daughters Vanessa and Angela establishing a wildly successful line of sneakers for women that they named Pastry Footwear. Angela also founded a magazine, and Justine has introduced her Brown Sugar jewelry line. Run's son Joseph "JoJo" Simmons, Jr., is taking a stab at the music side of the family dynasty by trying to establish a career as a hip-hop performer.

Keys to the Kingdom: Do You!

Just how does Russell Simmons and his family keep their fingers on the pulse of what's hot enough to move markets? No doubt, they draw a page or two from Simmons' book on the topic of success. In early 2007, Gotham Books published Russell Simmons' "Do You: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success." In the book, Simmons espouses the hip-hop idea of doing you, which means follow your heart. Even when faced with peer pressure, you have to hold fast to the concept, Simmons suggested.

"You have to have faith that the only success anybody will ever have is that they listen to their inner voice," Simmons told THE BLACK COLLEGIAN in January. "It doesn't mean to be withdrawn or anything. It only means that you have to have a real appreciation inside for what you're doing. How does that happen? Somebody might say meditation. That might sound like a foreign concept. But really the time alone that you spend and the still time you spend allows you the freedom to make decisions. For example, the world is full of people following like sheep and for the most part the main driving force in their unhappiness is their lack of quiet time, the lack of stillness. The happy experience you have is when you are still or when you are here, the present. The past and the noise from the outside are what make you unhappy."

By being still and quiet, Simmons, a yoga aficionado, was able to tap into the power that he needed to take his initial business pursuits to higher heights. In the process, he also learned that he did not want to harm animals, and he became a vegan and an animal rights activist. "You know, you're selfish then, when you get to look inside," Simmons said. "It's to protect the self. So by doing harmful things to the world, you receive harmful things back."

Advice to College Students

Though Simmons started his business in college and didn't go on to earn his degree, he is adamant that education is key. There are plenty of success stories where entrepreneurs carved out lucrative niches. But launching and maintaining a successful venture is a tougher row to hoe without higher education, Simmons said, so he mostly surrounds himself with people who first proved themselves by accomplishing an academic degree.

"All the young people I work with came out of school," Simmons said. "I don't really end up with people that didn't come out of school. If you're not educated, you're really not useful. You can maybe become an artist, but you can't be a businessperson. It's very difficult."

Having an education doesn't negate your individual value. In fact, done right, education can heighten one's individualism, Simmons suggested. "College students—the most important thing about young people is that they are less followers and they ask more questions than the adults," Simmons said. "So they're more connected. They have a greater opportunity. It's much easier for them to say, ‘Wait a minute. I don't want to go along with that.' They always see the contradiction. They see the adult say one thing and do another. It's up to them to try to make a path."

"You can always find individuals in college. You can't find them at the workplace all the time. But in college you find a lot of independent thinkers and those people are the ones who not only change the world, but they build their own businesses, they start their own way to contribute to the world in a way that sometimes is really good for them, and they receive what they give."

For the Entrepreneurial Collegian

Even – especially, perhaps – if you intend to go into business for yourself, the value of an education cannot be overrated, Simmons says. "I think everybody that's an entrepreneur is enhanced when they have an education," he said. In "Do You" Simmons warns about becoming too docile upon receiving a formal education at the collegiate level.

"The caution about education – I didn't mean that you shouldn't go to school," Simmons said. "I meant that you shouldn't be trained; you shouldn't be put in line. You need to be able to be a cultural hero. In other words, you think inside box – which is inside the heart. The world would say it's outside the box, which is where the whole world exists. The little bit of stuff that's being told to you everyday is a small part of the entire picture. If you live in that little bit of stuff, you'll be stuck out of the big picture. Don't be controlled."

If you want to establish and build a business for the long haul, here's a big tip: know your market and your customer, Simmons said. Really, know them and don't limit yourself with marginal thinking, he suggested. For instance, your customer may not be limited to one demographic category, such as a specific race.

"It depends on your business, but you have to remember that 80 percent of the world is not black," he said. "If you're working on something that's kind of for black people, you have to then look and see the other 80 percent you're usually not marketing to might need it even more."

Passing the Torch

With his own family getting more and more entrenched in the business empire he founded, Simmons said he sees a day when the younger generation of Simmons are founding their own ventures.

"They'd better be!" Simmons said. "Diggy and Russy better run something. What? Mingy and Aoki are going to run the Aoki Lee Foundation and they're going to be like a big foundation that has an endowment and they're going to give, one of them, and the other one's going to run a business. That's what I think. I really do have faith that they're going to be still doing it, of course."

Labels: Hip Hop, Music

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7

Labels: Hip Hop, Stuff

How hip-hop is transforming the mobile marketing space
Feb 25, 2008

-By Shahnaz Mahmud

NEW YORK In his hit song, "People Like Myself," hip-hop artist Timbaland writes that people like him "only hang with self cause that's the way to go." But Timbaland found another way to go: He struck a precedent-setting deal with Verizon Wireless to distribute a collection of songs directly to the carrier's V Cast subscribers, and to create content such as behind-the-scenes video footage of his recordings. Timbaland's marketing effort helps Verizon as well, as the carrier aims to be a destination for young urbanites attuned to cutting-edge music and culture.

Timbaland is just one of several hip-hop artists and producers who are pioneering the mobile media space. And in transforming it into a major marketing platform, they can serve as models for brands ranging from packaged goods to autos trying to reach consumers on the move while leveraging new technologies.

Hip-Hop History

Hip-hop, born three decades ago at a Bronx block party when a DJ scratched a record to create the break-beat sound, has exploded into a culture that thrives on, and influences, music, fashion and art. It is the epicenter of cool for the young people driven to wear the newest styles and own the latest gadgets. It makes sense, then, that hip-hop artists more than those in any other genre have embraced the mobile medium as a tool for maximum audience reach.

"Hip-hop artists have done a tremendous job of tapping into the mind-set of who their consumer is," said Kerry Perse, director of digital relationship marketing at Horizon Media's interactive division.

Another recording artist using the mobile space is Rapper Murs (Making Underground Raw Shit), who is creating mobisodes (to be distributed across all carriers) to promote his new album, Murs for President. And fellow rapper Snoop Dogg -- both he and Murs work with The Cashmere Agency -- will launch a mobile video campaign this summer, for his new album, The Blue Carpet Treatment.

Additionally, late last year QD3 Entertainment, an independent production company led by Quincy Jones III that produces urban-focused content (e.g., documentary films), launched a QD3-branded channel on Helio.

"Hip-hop has been a viral phenomenon from day one," noted QD3's Jones, chairman, CEO and CCO. "I think that mobile and the Internet platforms provide an arena where they can do their own thing. I think it's the empowerment of it that's big as well. Like doing your own thing and being in charge of your destiny."

According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending will reach $1.6 billion in 2008 and jump to $4.8 billion in 2011. Yet some marketers have hesitated to jump in due to a lack of ROI metrics and success stories, high costs and other obstacles.

"I think a lot of clients feel as though getting into mobile has a high cost of entry, depending on the level of sophistication of the program they may want to run," said Horizon Media's Perse. "There can be a really large investment in the infrastructure up front."

Added Linda Barrabee, program manager, consumer research, The Yankee Group, "there's a lot of confusion due to the complexities of the medium."



But while technology issues, such as bandwidth headaches and handset applications, have been challenging the potential of mobile marketing, an increasing number of phones are faster and have the ability to show video.

Susan Walton, manager of digital and CRM marketing for the Saturn brand at General Motors, said for her the problems are less technologically based than legal. "This is a new platform for us," she said, "so it's new territory for our legal counsel and it's taken some time to get all of the approvals -- especially in dealing with such a small space."

Ringing in the Cash

The first true platform for music on a mobile device, ringtones, are still in demand. And according to Nielsen RingScan, nine out of the top 10 master tones in 2007 were hip-hop songs. (Like Adweek Media, Nielsen RingScan is a unit of the Nielsen Co.)

"I look at a ringtone as the new concert T-shirt," said John Franck, svp of marketing at independent label Koch Records. (At Koch, the mobile/digital space accounted for roughly 35 percent of its $40 million net revenue in 2007, according to Franck, with hip-hop accounting for the majority of that percentage.)

The early success of ringtones encouraged several top advertisers to use the technology, including Procter & Gamble. Last year, the company partnered with MTV to create a free ringtone program for Herbal Essences. "One of the biggest things we learned is that the ringtones [were considered] a reward for consumers," said a P&G representative.

Industry observers expect increased advertising activity in the mobile space.

Real Content Group, for instance, a digital distribution network for urban-content artists, said it's working on a strategic partnership with a U.S.-based ad agency looking to gain entry into the multicultural and youth space. The parties have been in talks to create products for marketers, such as branded ringtones, branded videos, video tones and branded avatars, said Troy Brown, CMO of Real Content, who declined to elaborate. (Interestingly, RCG was originally formed in 2005 as Real Hip Hop, but changed its name last year to reflect its expanding focus on additional music genres.)

The Timbaland-Verizon deal calls for the hip-hop producer to become Verizon's "mobile producer in residence." During 2008, Timbaland will produce one song per month, each time with an artist from a different musical genre.

The songs are being recorded on the road in Verizon's mobile recording studio bus, and each track will be released within days of being produced. Verizon's V Cast has also set up a dedicated Timbaland channel where subscribers can view footage of the artist producing the songs.

Murs plans to unveil new technology when he goes on tour next autumn to promote his new album, Murs for President, which will be released in early summer. The rapper said the technology would allow concert-goers to text messages and photos that will appear along with their names behind him on a screen as he performs.



"Murs for President" mobisodes will be running as early as April as a lead-in to the release of his album. The series follows Murs on his promotional tour, which is being described as similar to the campaign trail. It has yet to be determined how the shorts will be accessed.

The mobile-video component of Snoop Dogg's album, The Blue Carpet Treatment, will be taken from a film, The Adventures of the Blue Carpet Treatment, which will consist of animated videos of the songs. The Cashmere Agency is putting together a mobile campaign showing snippets of the videos, which will be accessed through a downloadable link, leading up to the DVD release in late summer.

QD3's branded channel will offer its content as well as behind-the-scenes footage on the making of its films. Jones said the entertainment company had been trying to do something similar with a few carriers for quite some time, but this was really the first opportunity where the technology has made it feasible.

"I know it's probably going to be a year until mobile video takes off, but we wanted to get in early and experiment," he said.

Both the V Cast service and the QD3-branded channel on Helio are subscriber based, and at present there is no advertising attached from the carrier side.

QD3 has the option to integrate ads into its content, noted Paul Campbell, president and COO, an option the entertainment company is exploring. The hope is that the channel, which falls under Helio's overall Music Mix service, will gain a large enough audience that advertisers would get the reach they desire. When deals do get made, the structure would be similar to a product integration ad buy.

Any such advertising, Campbell emphasized, would have to work organically with the content, "especially if people are paying for this as part of their subscription. Not all content is going to fit the model." QD3 said it's in talks with advertisers, though Campbell declined to identify them.

Murs' record labels will be approaching advertisers for the pre-roll real estate, said Rona Mercado, vp of marketing at Cashmere Agency/Stampede Agency. (Cashmere handles the marketing, while Stampede manages the artists.) Mercado added that if advertisers are interested in product-placement opportunities, that might become viable as well. MP3 and cell phone companies have approached the agency seeking such opportunities, she said.

Pre-roll spots may also be made available for the Snoop Dogg campaign, though Code Black Entertainment, which will be distributing the DVDs, is primarily treating it as a promotional vehicle.



Not There Yet

Chris Jones, senior brand manager at phone carrier Boost Mobile, said the ad-supported model has yet to come to fruition. The reason: There's not enough revenue coming in through mobile advertising to support the content through an ad-based system.

"We in the mobile space believe that's where we are going and it's [just] a matter of time before we get there," said Jones.

As issues of tracking and reporting make headway, the expectation is the space will begin to take off.

The time may not be far off, according to John Huffman, CEO of RCG and co-chairman of an urban special-interest group created a year ago within the Mobile Marketing Association. Huffman said one of the group's priorities is to set policy on these areas, which they hope to complete this year.

Labels: advertisement, African Americans, Hip Hop