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Case Study: Insane Clown Posse

2009-10-26T18:37:15-05:00

(I know. But it works. And we’ve gotta study what works.)

In 1994, a New York record executive caught a glimpse of a Detroit music kingdom in the making.

Jeff Fenster, a vice president with Jive Records, had jetted into town for a show by Insane Clown Posse, a hometown rap duo with a fetish for Faygo and painted faces. He was struck by the sight: hordes of Michigan teens decked out in ICP gear, many in wicked-clown makeup like the group’s Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope.

“We just watched these kids at the merch table, buying multiple T-shirts for a band most of us had never heard of,” he recounts. “They were ponying up to buy into this culture.”

Hours after the concert, a group of teens spied Fenster at a nearby diner and promptly confronted him with an offer: $100 for the backstage pass around his neck.

For Fenster, who went on to release the group’s third album, the tale still encapsulates the indelibly deep bond between ICP and its audience. It’s a lucrative love affair that has become one of Detroit music’s enduring success stories—and a triumph for a group often scorned by the showbiz establishment.

“ICP created this vibrant business outside the mainstream, and they’ve managed to keep it going,” says Fenster. “You look at the longevity of it, and it’s quite amazing, actually.”

Amid a crummy Michigan economy and a crumbling music industry, ICP’s achievement stands out. Enjoying the top revenues of its career, the group now commands an entertainment empire that pulls in up to $10 million annually: Wrestling exhibitions. An annual 20,000-person festival called the Gathering. Comic books. DVDs. A second feature film, “Big Money Rustlas,” due in January. A twice-weekly Web radio show.

And there’s a dizzying array of branded collectibles—from apparel to action figures—lapped up by fans (who call themselves Juggalos) with a fervor to rival the Kiss Army.

“The rest of the industry is dying,” says Violent J. “And we’re still here. We’re still putting in lots of hard work.”

“Bang Pow Boom,” the group’s latest album of horror-show rap with a wink, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 last month. The release included three separate covers and an online 3D game.

Such frills aren’t new. The pair discovered the power of collectibles early on, when a 1994 comic book drawn by Shaggy quickly sold out. It pointed the way to an ICP future where nonmusic merchandise—merch, in industry parlance—would get star billing.

“We weren’t trying to be brilliant businessmen. We were just trying to come up with things that were cool,” says Violent J. “Because the first thing to understand about ICP is that we’re fans of the band ourselves. We can step out of it and look at it that way. We’re just always thinking of ways for Juggalos to have fun.”

ICP has carried a dicey reputation since emerging nationally in the mid-1990s: Snubbed by critics, reviled by social conservatives, mocked by the rock and rap establishments, the duo has relied on the grassroots energy of its fans.

Evolving characters and supernatural story lines have kept the rapt attention of fans, who proudly play up their outsider status. ICP gear is a way to assert membership in the tribe.

“It’s about the culture,” says Steve Ross, merchandising chief for Psychopathic Records, ICP’s label. “This is how they proclaim to the world that they’re Juggalos.”
Keeping it in-house

Many music acts extol independence. But when it comes to solo control, say industry experts, the ICP operation is unusual, even unprecedented. From its Farmington Hills headquarters, the group runs its own manufacturing and distribution operations, with nearly 30 full-time employees handling the business of ICP and Psychopathic Records.

Since coming aboard in 2006, manager Bill Dail has rebuilt the company’s financial structure, resolving debts and cutting out middlemen to leverage ICP’s selling power.

The group’s 4,500-square-foot warehouse is lined with towering shelves of Psychopathic stock, including merch for acts such as Twiztid and Boondox. Forklifts negotiate big pallets of boxes destined for retailers such as Spencer’s Gifts and Hot Topic, while staffers process Web-order sales.

Overhead is a new embroidery shop, where machinists stitch ICP’s distinct hatchet-man logo onto jackets, shirts and hats, all made in-house.

Most acts farm out merch duties to specialty firms, who take a cut of revenue. Keeping it in-house likely saves ICP up to 20%, estimates merch industry veteran Bill Blackwell.

“It’s a pretty unique situation. I think ICP realized early on that it helped to control their merchandising,” says Blackwell, president of Blackwell Productions. “A third party risked losing that fan connection.”

As ICP rolls through a 64-city club tour, the future looks bright. And the world may be starting to come around to ICP. Violent J, now a 37-year-old father of two, points to an upcoming positive article in Spin magazine—which once trashed the band in cartoon format.

“We’re not done. We’ve got a lot more to say,” he says. “We have a new goal in our career: We want to be an arena band. If we work hard enough, if we get the right breaks, I think this thing could become even more incredible.”

Lil’ Wayne sets records for concert profits

2009-09-09T10:58:57-05:00

Source:

By Mitchell Peters

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - The final numbers are in for Lil Wayne’s 2008-2009 North American touring, and it appears the rapper will have the highest grossing hip-hop outing of the year—and the most lucrative rap jaunt that Billboard has ever tracked.

Seventy-eight Lil Wayne headlining arena and amphitheater concerts in North America from December 14, 2008, through September 6, 2009, grossed about $42 million and drew nearly 804,000 fans, according to Shawn Gee, Lil Wayne’s tour producer and tour business manager.

“It’s definitely one of the biggest in the last couple of years,” Gee tells Billboard.com. “Our plan was to prove that Wayne was a viable headlining arena artist.”

The second highest-grossing rap tour that Billboard has tracked was Jay-Z’s 2008 jaunt with Mary J. Blige, which grossed $34.6 million and drew 310,694 concertgoers to 28 shows. Kanye West’s 2008 Glow In the Dark tour comes in third, having pulled in $30.8 million from 49 concerts that attracted 507,853 fans.

Other lucrative hip-hop tours in recent years include 2005’s Eminem/50 Cent Anger Management tour, which grossed $22.7 million from 23 shows; and a 50 Cent tour in 2003 that rang up nearly $23 million in ticket sales, much of it co-headlining with Jay-Z on the Roc-the-Mic tour.

Hip-hop tours rarely crack the Billboard year-end list of the top 25 grossing tours, but it’s likely that Lil Wayne’s 2009 trek will earn a spot on this year’s tally.

The concerts promoted Lil Wayne’s 2008 album, “Tha Carter III,” which has sold 3.2 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The rapper’s oft-delayed next album, “Rebirth,” is due November 24.

Although no specific touring plans are currently in the works, Gee believes that Lil Wayne will continue as an arena-sized headliner.

“We definitely want to capitalize on the success we’ve had and want to continue building Wayne as a touring artist and not just an artist that tours,” he says. “We established him as a headline artist and I think it grows from there.”

(Editing by Dean Goodman at Reuters)

Case Study: Stones Throw

2009-08-31T20:55:00-05:00

Source:
http://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2006/12/rebel-central-the-fantastical-real-life-story-of-l-a-s-stones-throw-records-a-hip-hop-legend-in-the-making

Rebel Central. The fantastical real-life story of L.A.’s Stones Throw Records, a hip-hop legend in the making
Rebel Central. The fantastical real-life story of L.A.’s Stones Throw Records, a hip-hop legend in the making

* John Payne
* LA Weekly
* December 09, 2006

There’s a grit in the air: Can you feel it? These are weird times, grim times, happy times, sexy times. Good god, these are the funkiest of times. In times such as these, music becomes more important, not less. People need sustenance — and many are finding it through an independent record label based out of an old converted industrial space in Highland Park. Down there on Figueroa Street, bathed in the ginger light of late autumn, you will find the elegantly funky headquarters of Stones Throw Records: L.A.’s pre-eminent indie hip-hop label, an aesthetic beacon of national stature, and a model for anyone who might dream of handcrafting a record label — and making it good.

Here you will also find a low-key, levelheaded and stylishly dressed young man named Chris Manak — the one they call Peanut Butter Wolf. He’s the fellow who started the whole thing 10 years ago, after spending years fantasizing about it as a kid in San Jose. “This was always kind of a dream in the back of my mind,” he explains. “Like in high school when they’d have you write What do you want to do when you grow up? That’s what I put. I wanted to start a record label.”

He’s done that, clearly, but he — and his partners at the label — have done so much more. Over its 10 years, Stones Throw has managed to distill and bottle a mysteriously diverse yet distinctive aesthetic, pickling the roots of great black American music — hip-hop, soul, R&B;and jazz sounds — dicing it all up, then serving it back fresh, fun and freaky. This aesthetic is a Zen-like conflation of total existential foolishness with the most sincere of spiritual sonority and rhythmic poetry. And it’s an aesthetic open-armed enough to accommodate divergently pioneering raps, songs and avant mixes by Madvillain, the late J. Dilla, MF Doom, Yesterday’s New Quintet, J. Rocc, Percee P, Aloe Blacc and Georgia Anne Muldrow — and even the demented free expression of San Diego chronic outsider Gary Wilson, or the electronically mangled ’70s kool bop of the Stark Reality.

Stones Throw is like a state of mind, a fantastical one — albeit one rooted in the coarse realities of urban life, and the fetid stank of the record industry. Don’t forget: The Stones Throw aesthetic is emerging at a time when so many superficially similar major-label hip-hop-type endeavors drop like flies into the barrel-scraping depths of commercially calculated crappery. Better still, the label is breaking new creative dirt and coming out ahead $$-wise by doing only what it feels like doing — such as releasing recent big-selling items like J. Dilla’s Donuts and Madlib’s Beat Konducta. The Adult Swim cable network has jumped onboard, helping to release the label’s new Chrome Children CD/DVD compilation and co-presenting Stones Throw’s recent 10th-anniversary national tour. And get this: Nike has commissioned a limited-edition series of Stones Throw–themed sneakers. WTF?

Label general manager Eothen Alapatt tries, with charming awkwardness, to explain the unknowable chemistry behind the label’s momentum: “It’s not like we’re trying to eschew commercial music just because we’re indie. It’s just that we feel that there’s something that’s on the fringe of the commercial that’s ultimately timeless, and if you find a way to put that out now, then we’re putting out music that 20 years from now will be like the music that we’re championing personally, all of us, from 20 years ago.”

The kids are listening, in short, because the Stones Throw crew retains its standing as arbiters of taste by remaining fanatics for good music. Says Wolf, “It’s funny how many requests I get from people who say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do A&R;for your label,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m the A&R;.’ ”

Only he’s not a bastard, nor a formerly starry-eyed cynic. He’s more an artist than any normal A&R;guy. Take the case of his new roster addition Aloe Blacc, whose album Shine Through was recently released to critical laud. When Wolf invited Blacc to assemble his best tracks for an album, he essentially told Blacc not to deliver the goods till he felt it was ready to be heard. That’s an attitude the songwriter/producer savors, and sees as the real identifying characteristic of Stones Throw. “I’m glad that I got to put this album out on Stones Throw — I can’t think of any label that has the kind of legacy and attention that Stones Throw has that would also give you that kind of freedom,” says Blacc. “If I had signed with a major label, they’d want me to sing one type of music, and try to market a specific genre. But my goal is different: I want to create music that is diverse, and sits with people almost as if they’re putting their media player on shuffle.”

Doing only what you feel like doing is a very fine thing, an admirable thing, a righteous thing. Getting people to listen to it is another story. Getting paid for it is another story still. Hundreds of record labels have specialized in the various strands of historical black American music, and a thousand more have dished out hip-hop mash-ups that pay ostensible tribute to that black American legacy. But when a label does what this label does, and then that label ends up selling a lot of records — well, what do you call this aesthetic? What’s its true source? Why does it work on us, and what does it mean that it does? And what’s the capital of South Dakota?

We know this: The story of Stones Throw is kind of like one of those romance novels with the pastel castles on the covers that you gaze at in line at Ralphs. It spans generations, and ends up in Hollywood. And its origins are considerably earlier than 1996.

“I started in 1979, ’cause that’s when I really knew that that was my life,” Wolf, 37, explains, adjusting the rake on his brown felt porkpie. “In the mid-’80s, I started making music with rappers, with a drum machine that someone lent me, and a 4-track. By about 1990, I kind of had the confidence to take it to the stage.”

Wolf was a nice, middle-class, disco- and electro-loving white boy with an untraumatic family life in deepest San Jose, which is “not really the epicenter of music,” he admits. “I really didn’t know anybody who’d put a record out or anything like that — I guess the Doobie Brothers were originally from San Jose. But I didn’t know that at the time.”

Could be he was better off not knowing. No matter; in 1990, he put out a record by a group called Lyric Prophecy, pressed 500 copies, got it to the radio stations and into the local record store. “And that’s really all we knew,” he says. “We didn’t know about distribution or how to get it outside our area.”

But from that start, pretty much every rapper in San Jose came out of the woodwork to collaborate with Peanut Butter Wolf, including a kid aptly named MC Charizma. Theirs was to be a short but beautiful — and pivotal — friendship.

“Charizma lived down the street from me,” Wolf recalls fondly. “A friend of mine brought him over to my house. He was 16 at the time, and I noticed in him — the lyrics were there and everything else, but there was something besides that. I think it was more the attitude.

“He always had that attitude like he was number one, he was gonna show everybody.

“Working with him, I really started getting more of that confidence. I was really shy in high school; I was introverted and I didn’t have that many friends, whereas he was kind of the opposite. So we signed with a major label, and then Charizma started getting into trouble and stuff, and eventually he was killed.”

After Charizma passed, Wolf didn’t exactly know what he was going to do. So he started producing tracks for a bunch of other labels, and began scheming about one day having his own.

Back then, in the early ’90s, hip-hop was primarily an indie-label thing. “You had groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, they were on majors,” says Wolf, “or the stuff that Def Jam built, it wasn’t indie, but it was still like an alternative major.” But by the mid-’90s, as the majors came creeping into the hip-hop game, something shifted. “I noticed in the mid-’90s, the majors were no longer putting out the kind of hip-hop that I liked. Everything kind of changed,” he says. “I think after [album sales-tracking system] SoundScan came out, everything became more calculated. It became a numbers game.”

The landscape wasn’t all bleak, though: “Wu Tang Clan came out, and they were an exception to the rule,” Wolf recalls. “They were on a major and they went platinum, and they made music for music’s sake — they weren’t really making catchy singles or anything like that. You know, they were raw beats, raw lyrics. That’s a group that I always look up to, to this day.”

And so, in pursuit of his dream of a life surrounded by music, in the midst of a wildly morphing environment, Peanut Butter Wolf just plain did it all.

“When I was in college, I deejayed for the radio station, did hip-hop specialty programs, started writing the hip-hop columns for various magazines and worked at a record store. I did all these things ’cause I wanted to make money doing music; I didn’t want to make money doing something else.”

Around 1996, Wolf was working in San Mateo, at a house-music record distributor, and persuaded his boss to let him establish a hip-hop division. There was a huge unmet demand for underground hip-hop at the time: “This record by Dr. Octagon [rapper Kool Keith and DJ-producer Dan the Automator] had just come out, and they had no distribution; I was selling them to Europe and all over the world,” Wolf says. “And like [Bay Area DJ] Q-Bert, all of his records — all of these people had talent, but they didn’t have an outlet, and they suddenly had one.”

This experience complemented the broad palette of skills he’d developed over the years. “It really worked, it really helped me when I decided to start my own label, ’cause I kind of felt like I could see where everyone else was coming from. I understood what it was like to be an artist or a radio DJ or something.”

That year, Wolf decided that he was ready to start his own label. He called it Stones Throw Records, and initially only intended to put out the late Charizma’s record. It was basically just him, doing the label at night, working at the distributor during the day.

Wolf struggled mightily to get Stones Throw off the ground. His stuff was selling, but in limited numbers, and it was such a hustle getting the word out. More importantly, the quietly intense Wolf — one often notices a faraway look in his eyes — realized he needed a plan, and some help. He also figured he needed to do a geographic, so he took his business to the show-biz capital of the world — Los Angeles.

Jeff Jank, an unassuming indie-punk-type dude, was working in a library when he got the call from Wolf. The two had been mates since high school, and they’d been in bands together, but it was the self-taught Jank’s visual gifts that had impressed Wolf. The idea Wolf presented to him was simple: Distinctively high-quality, visually striking album covers would further define Stones Throw’s aesthetic in the public eye. Janks came through, creating a stunning series of covers tailored for the vibe of each artist on Wolf’s growing roster — often ingeniously referencing the vintage jazz, soul, funk and psychedelic album art that both he and Wolf had grown up with.

Around the same time, Wolf brought on a young recent college grad named Eothen (pronounced Ethan) Alapatt, who had run the radio station at his school, Vanderbilt University, and had asked Wolf to DJ shows a couple of times. “While I was out there, I just saw how determined Eothen was about everything,” Wolf says. “He had a lot of that fire that I think the label needed. I just said, ‘Create your own job.’ And he basically did it.”

The super-upbeat Alapatt is a very tall, darkly handsome fella whose Indian father and East European–American mother were a couple of ex-hippies with musical ambitions of their own. Growing up in the New Haven, Connecticut, area, Alapatt came to obsess on old-school hip-hop and ’60s-’70s funk and soul, and when Stones Throw phoned, he brought that fixation to the mix. “Being very close to New York, that’s really how I fell in love with hip-hop,” he says. “I would often go there and buy records, and found a lot of record stores that were selling vinyl to DJs. There was quite a deep network of these stores in the early ’90s, before the Internet, that were bringing up these really cool independent records.”

Alapatt could see how different Stones Throw was from its peers. “I thought the consistency was something that other hip-hop labels seriously lacked — I mean, they would put out one or two great records, and then they would put out a bunch of weak records. And this was at a time [mid-’90s] when an independent hip-hop record of relatively mediocre worth could ship 15,000 copies. Wolf was a guy who would wait and put out a record only when he had one that really struck him as good enough.”

Wolf and Alapatt — who now acts as the label’s general manager — hatched one of Stones Throw’s biggest early successes on the road trip out West to the label’s new headquarters in L.A.

“I was working on a reissue package for a distributor that was based in Boston,” Alapatt explains, “and at that time I knew very little about the business. I told Wolf, ‘Look, you need to meet these funk musicians who I’ve been tracking down, and I need to broker these reissues for this box set of 45s I’m gonna put together.’ And he said, ‘Well, let me take a look at that contract.’ And he was like, ‘Man, this is a really bad contract. I wouldn’t suggest giving this to anybody who you respect. Why don’t we do something?’ ”

That project became the Funky 16 Corners compilation, on the label’s Now Again imprint, which would be the best-selling deep-funk compilation of its time. “And these guys, the musicians whose music we reissued,” says Alapatt, “it paid over and over again.”

Peanut Butter Wolf, was first inspired by deceased friend Charizma: ‘’I was really introverted in high school, and he was number one. He was gonna show everybody.’’

The thing is, and as bullshit as it might sound, a concern with integrity was the glue that bound the label’s Big Four creative team from the start: Wolf, Alapatt, Jank and their star artist, Madlib. The integrity touched on both the quality of the music they’d put out and the way in which their artists would be treated. In fact, you get a real sense from all of these guys that they’d rather work at Sav-on if they couldn’t do the right thing by both the music and the people who created it.

Time passes, and Stones Throw struggles, scores, slumps, then rises again. Numerous solo albums by Madlib, the label’s sonic Einstein (or “the Sun Ra of hip-hop,” as labelmate Georgia Anne Muldrow calls him), are released — as well as many well-respected funk compilations such as Alapatt’s L.A. Carnival project. All of these boost Stones Throw’s critical cred if not quite its bank. Then — not out of nowhere — in 2004 the label released the brain-wiping 2004 Madvillain album, Madvillainy (featuring Madlib in collaboration with blunted former KMD rapper MF Doom). At last, something like success on a wider scale was in sight.

“Madvillain really turned things around for us,” says Alapatt. “All of a sudden, things just changed drastically; the phone started ringing when it hadn’t been ringing; we were getting contacts and opportunities that we’d never been given before.”

Meanwhile, Peanut Butter Wolf had renewed his friendship with revered Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla, who’d famously crafted tracks with A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul and his own excellent Slum Village. J Dilla’s eventual move to L.A. resulted in his pairing with Madlib as Jaylib, and their 2003 Stones Throw release, Champion Sound, turned critical heads with a lotta fabulous beats, Bollywood-drenched samples and some pretty dubious vocalizing. (The two soundworld kingpins had decided to rap on a lark.) Back in instrumentalist mode, J Dilla followed up his Jaylib foray with the creation of his brutely gorgeous 2006 solo Donuts album, which has become a relatively massive seller for the label. (Dilla lost his battle with lupus in February 2006.)

Stones Throw rolls on, in fact seems now to be flying quite high. Through its personalized, creative-control-guaranteed distribution deal with Caroline (a division of EMI/Capitol), it has managed to get its product out worldwide. Of course, its catalog has become a favored source of hip cachet for high-profile corporate and film and television creative consultants.

The impetus behind all of this freakily miscellaneous outpouring, meanwhile, remains the core belief in simply following one’s intuitions. Paying heed to the history of African-American music while reinventing what hip-hop may mean to us in the future. But for all that, this music rarely strikes one as self-consciously avant-garde; the point, if there is one, seems far simpler: Retro or futuro, we’ll do it any effin’ way we em-effin’ feel.

On that score, young Aloe Blacc perfectly represents the accessibly modern jumble of styles that define the Stones Throw way of life. His new Shine Through is a whole different kettle o’ fish again, with the singer–multi-instrumentalist offering a soulful, lyrical approach to both party-down and high-conscious raps — and singing. It’s all set to music whose source of heat is in essence hip-hop, but which has mutated with odd strains of jazz and funk and rock psychedelia, and most notably salsa-fied realms that tip a hat to his Panamanian heritage.

But let’s give a woman the last word on the subject of the ever-elusive key to the Stones Throw sound. One of the label’s recent signings is Georgia Anne Muldrow, formerly with L.A./N.Y. production team Sa Ra Creative Partners and Detroit’s Platinum Pied Pipers. She’s a Nina Simone–ish poet–rapper–singer– keyboardist–recording engineer of extraordinarily fresh and unusual gifts who shakes the foundations of poetic song/classic soul/R&B;convention on her exhilarating Olesi: Fragments of an Earth disc.

“I love doing it all,” Muldrow says, laughing. “I like to write. I’ve always been surrounded by beautiful poets in my life. But I don’t know what kind of stuff I do; I just do like what has to come out of me, you know? I don’t necessarily disagree with nobody else’s views, everybody who’s doing hip-hop, that’s great; everybody who’s doing jazz, that’s great. I’d just rather have something relevant to some kind of revolution of my own.” Sounds like an attitude she shares with her labelmates at Stones Throw.

“Everybody’s trying to find the perfect groove,” says Muldrow. “Everybody’s got to find that perfect beat, with their big mouth to the ’phone. I think the message is everybody’s a rebel, you know, and I love that. Stones Throw is Rebel Central. And there’s beautiful things that come with that.”

Ghostwriters

2009-08-31T09:42:33-05:00

Source:
http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/hiphops_ghostwriters.php

Adam Conner-Simons

Music consumers readily accept that the singer of a catchy pop song may not have written it. But they may not know that this practice extends to other seemingly more authentic musical genres like hip-hop, which Chuck D of Public Enemy famously referred to as CNN for black people. “We hold rappers to a different standard than pop singers,” says Chuck Creekmur, co-founder of AllHipHop.com. “With hip-hop we want to have that personal connection. We want them to tell us how they feel.”

With such high expectations for our rap idols to “keep it real,” it makes sense that some try to hide the fact that they aren’t writing their own lyrics. To do so, they can hire ghostwriters to pen their tunes. Ghostwriters are usually rappers themselves who write lyrics for other performers without getting songwriting credit—although they often get paid. Even some of the most respected names in the biz have composed other rappers’ rhymes: Nas co-wrote several tracks off Will Smith’s mega-selling Big Willie Style (including “Just Cruisin’"), the gritty Pharoahe Monch wrote for Diddy’s album Just Press Play, and Jay-Z has written several of Dr. Dre’s raps (including, notably, “Still D.R.E.").

Why would a rapper spend so much of his heart and soul writing lyrics for a top-40 record he’ll never get credit for? “Sometimes, it’s just such a good deal that you can’t turn it away,” says Skillz, a respected hip-hop hired hand whose song “Ghostwriter” includes bleeped-out names of rappers he’s written for. (Lyrics to a live, uncensored version are available online and name-drop Mase, Foxy Brown, and Diddy, among others.) As Skillz points out, if you’re a struggling MC, and Will Smith comes to you with his checkbook, it’s hard to say no.

Ghostwriting is also a good way to collect street cred. While the practice is not widely discussed by the general public, a ghostwriter who has a strong reputation with well-respected producers may be able to secure future, credited projects through those contacts. After writing verses for Diddy ("Shake Ya Tailfeather") and ghostwriting for Smith and Dre, Smitty signed with Clive Davis’s J Records and will soon be releasing a debut album featuring in-demand producers Timbaland and Kanye West. (Diddy, Smith, and Dr. Dre didn’t respond to Gelf’s inquiries for this article).

“Rap moguls are a business, and they need to oversee the product as it comes off the assembly line, as opposed to doing a lot of the grinding themselves."—Hip-hop historian Davey D

Many in the community also view ghostwriting as a further opportunity for artistic expression. “I just found it as another outlet to be creative,” Kel Spencer, who co-wrote such Will Smith hits as “Switch,” says. “I don’t look at it as being undervalued. I’m not ghostwriting to get famous; I’m doing it to attach myself to a project I like.”

Skillz adds, “I like to put myself in a different mindset and step out of the box I’m in.” And like any field of entertainment where image is involved, writing behind the scenes is a far more dependable career path than being in the spotlight. “I’m not gonna be rapping when I’m 40,” Skillz says, “but I can still be writing songs ‘til I’m 80.”

But for many rappers out there, ghostwriting is considered a last resort to turn to only after the MC has failed as a performer—whether it’s due to a lack of charisma, bad luck, or, in the case of former N.W.A. ghostwriter D.O.C., a vocal-cord injury. “A lot of rappers don’t catch a break,” Creekmur says. “They never had the opportunity to make it, and are forced to ghostwrite.”

Some big-shot rappers simply are too invested in other ventures to write their own lyrics. “They are a business, and they need to oversee the product as it comes off the assembly line, as opposed to doing a lot of the grinding themselves,” says Davey D, a hip-hop historian and journalist. By hiring a ghostwriter, a mogul is outsourcing part of his job to someone who he feels can do it better. “Dre recognizes that he isn’t a lyricist,” Creekmur says. With rappers like that, “you hire the best to do what they do.”

Beyond the question of “who’s writing for whom” is the writing process itself, which varies by artist. According to Smitty and Spencer, most of their projects are completely collaborative. “[Will Smith] will record a song and have me pick it apart,” Spencer says, “asking me what it needs for radio.” Of course, statements about mega-moguls working with writers on projects should be taken with a grain of salt. Folks like Dr. Dre and Will Smith want to receive songwriting credit so as to maintain artistic credibility, and their songwriters want to continue to get paid large sums of money to work with such legends. Therefore, it is in the best interest of both parties to say that the process is collaborative, even when it’s not.

The rules of ghostwriting compensation are remarkably inconsistent. Some contracts involve a simple lump sum upfront, while others may also include a cut of record sales. Akil from Jurassic 5, who has never ghostwritten himself but knows people in the industry who have, says that the compensation need not be spelled out in contract, nor money-based at all. “It may be benefits, material objects, or just being down with somebody,” he says. Even elite ghostwriters cap out at $60,000 to $70,000 for a song—a pretty penny, but a mere fraction of what many songs make in profits.

But bitching about your terms of service as a ghostwriter is not a good idea. “Most artists are not going to want to make it known that they didn’t write [their lyrics],” Spencer says. Breaking this trust can have disastrous consequences; in 1998, Dr. Dre and Eminem severed their ties with Royce da 5’9’’ after Royce’s manager revealed that he had ghostwritten a few of Dre’s songs for 2001.

Royce’s ghostwriting also bring to light another ethical question: Should rappers hire writers for songs that are inherently personal to the artist? Royce wrote the bulk of Dr. Dre’s “The Message,” which dealt with the murder of Dre’s brother, and Sauce Money wrote much of “I’ll Be Missing You,” a tribute to Puff Daddy’s late friend Notorious B.I.G. (That song, incidentally, sold over three million copies; Sauce Money received $1,000 for his efforts.) The rappers interviewed do not seem particularly troubled by these events. “Diddy was a part of ["I’ll Be Missing You"], but of course he’ll bring in top-notch writers to make it perfect,” Smitty says. Jurassic 5’s Akil says that the ends usually justify the means: “If you deliver it, and the point comes across, and I feel that emotion, then the job was done.”

Women and Hip Hop

2009-08-30T12:13:13-05:00

Source:
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/features/id.1397/title.underground-report-eternia-mazzi

DX: You’re a Canadian woman in a male-dominated mainly US industry. How does each influence your opportunities, your drive and your marketing vision?
Eternia: I’ll be real with you - there is no marketing vision; definitely no pre-meditated image. What you see is me: Silk Kaya and Eternia are one and the same. But I can definitely tell you those factors affect opportunities. I mean cats will come right out in label meetings, record pool meetings, whatever and say, “I don’t feel female rappers,” even before they hear anything. If that’s not influencing opportunities, I don’t know what is. But I don’t mind the close-mindedness; it just makes it all the more fun when I tear their minds wide open.

DX: Speaking of women in Hip Hop – why is there an obvious lack?
Eternia: Man! I was just listening to Shade 45 for the first time in my life. So the cat on the air was playing old Lil Kim and Eve [click to read] records, screaming “R.I.P. to female emcees! Where you at?” I was at a loss for words; disgusted mostly. I understand that commercial radio deejays may not know about unsigned or indie female emcees, but to assume because you haven’t been serviced a record that they don’t exist pure self-centered ignorance. Why don’t you do your homework before you yell on air? If they were real broadcast radio journalists, they’d be fired for inaccurate misinformation. Then I typed “female emcee” into Google. The first page that came up had a playlist with over 25 dope female rappers. Is it that hard to do your homework? Cats that ask “where are all the female emcees?” are real ignorant to me. Especially industry cats like promoters, deejays, A&R;who are obviously not doing their jobs.

The answer to your question - people don’t see us. Or invest. Or take a risk. Or support. Or put us out. We are here - and I don’t mean just me. Look up Invincible, look up Tiye Phoenix, look up Isis, look up Jean Grae [click to read] – you already know. Look up Psalm One, look up Masia One, look up The Anomalies…

Case Study: Soulja Boy

2009-08-30T12:52:48-05:00

Source:
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/features/id.1259/title.soulja-boy-haterz-everywhere/p.all

Three years ago this month a Batesville, Mississippi teenager, with nothing more than a demo version of production software Fruity Loops and a SoundClick page, began grindin’ towards what has become one of the most impressive new artist success stories in the history of Hip Hop.

For the past 18 months that entrepreneurial-minded young man, Soulja Boy, has been ridin’ high off the heat generated from “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” his #1 summer ’07 smash. Hate it or love it, the catchy (or grating and repetitive to some) dance tutorial became the biggest body rockin’ “movement” since the Kid ‘N Play kick step 20 years ago, which helped SB garner a platinum plaque for major-label debut, Souljaboytellem.com.

The now 18-year-old superstar is preparing for the December 16th release of his second Collipark Music/Interscope Records backed effort, iSouljaboytellem, and attempting to pull off one of the most difficult moves for any new artist with a hit record: releasing a follow-up that can match the commercial success of his first release to help him avoid the dreaded sophomore jinx and actually start building something resembling a reputable career.

However, it has become increasingly clear that many fans and artists alike are working overtime to ensure that doesn’t happen and Soulja Boy goes down in music infamy as another “one-hit wonder.” HipHopDX recently spoke to SB about all the hate that’s been directed at him from listeners who believe his minimalist production and chant-heavy rhyme style is the death of more polished and lyrically adept Hip Hop, journalists who Soulja Boy believes are purposefully trying to trip him up to make statements that will irreputably damage his career, and even elder-statesman artists who insist on registering grievances about the activities of this new generation of the culture, choosing to be bitter rather than do better than their newfound competition. Those who seem to have forgotten that actions always speak louder than words. Those who seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are rapidly becoming the grumpy old man (or woman) who serves to only alienate, and squanders any chance he or she could have at reaching the youth and showing and proving what classic Hip Hop music sounds like. Those, who if not careful are going to be deserving of words similar to those a then 25-year-old Tupac Shakur aimed at his largely older detractors: “All you old rappers tryin’ to advance/It’s all over now, take it like a man.”

HipHopDX: Let’s just get right to the question everybody in Hip Hop is asking right about now: Why’d you give a “shout out to the slave masters” [click to read]?
Soulja Boy: Basically this how the whole story went down…I was at BET in Atlanta. I was filming the last episode of Rap City. And the dude Toure walked up to me and he said, “Hey man, can I get you for an interview?” And I was like, “Hell nah, man, get out my face.” Because, I seen an interview that he did before with Bow Wow [click to read] and Omarion, and basically like he…I didn’t really take him serious as no real interviewer because I seen the interview that he did with them. And I seen an interview that he did with R Kelly, and basically he was just like trying to make a fool out of them. So [when he asked me for an interview] I was like, “Dude, I’m straight. Watch out. Go on. Go away.” And then after that my management team came to me and they was like, “Man, you gotta do the interview. That’d be good promotion for the album.” So I was like, “Alright, I’ll do it.” So as soon as I did the interview, the first question he asked me a dumb-ass question. He said, “How do I wanna die?” And I was like, “Aww man, see I said I didn’t wanna do [the interview] in the first place.” I was like, “What the hell kinda question is that, dawg?” And then the second question, he asked me…By this point I’m joking back and forth with him. ‘Cause like, I think I’m a funny dude. So I’m joking back and forth with the dude. Then the comment that I made, he really just took it and blew it out of context. I was being sarcastic. But I was being funny at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it came back and bit me in the ass. ‘Cause he took what I said and just blew it up and sent it to everybody. And it was just everywhere. And I was just like, “Damn.” Well I messed up, ‘cause I told myself I wasn’t gonna do the interview with dude in the first place. ‘Cause I already knew what he was out for. He wasn’t out for no real interview. He was out for me to say something stupid so he can hurt me with [it]. And that’s what he did. So you know, it is what it is. Man, fuck Toure.

DX: Like you said, it’s blown all out there now. Do you think haters are just using this quote as an opening to try and take Soulja Boy down?
Soulja Boy: Exactly, man. That’s what they been waiting for. And I steered so clear away from that for so long. And I just knew, when I seen dude I was like, “Man.” I had a bad feeling just looking at dude. It is what it is though. I messed up. I told myself, I said, “If I ever see dude I ain’t gon’ never do no interview with him.” ‘Cause I seen what he did to Bow Wow. And he got me. It is what it is. Fuck him.

DX: You seem to not really give a shit about what most people think about you. So how do you deal with the hate so it doesn’t make you just wanna give up and quit?
Soulja Boy: Man, I got too much money to give up, dog. Hell nah.

DX: [Laughs]
Soulja Boy: Dog, in six months I done made over seven figures. Like if I stop rappin’ right now, man, I’d be straight for the rest of my life. But, I don’t wanna take that approach. I wanna continue to do what I wanna do, period. I wanna come out with a video game. I wanna come out with a cartoon. I wanna be in movies. I wanna keep droppin’ albums. I wanna make music for people who like my music. I wanna go on tour. I wanna put my homeboys on and put them on the map and let them rap and do they thang. So I can’t let negative comments and haters stop me from all of this just because somebody say “Soulja Boy wack. And I don’t like his music. And he lame.” You think I’m gonna stop getting to the money because of that? Man, that’s the [most] retarded shit I ever heard in my life. Never! Never would I stop because of that…It gotta be something a hundred times more, way more, important than a hater [dissin’ me]. Like if they [eventually] say, “Soulja Boy stopped his career and his legacy because of some haters,” that’d be the dumbest stuff I ever heard, man.

DX: You did seem to let the Ice-T diss [click to read] get to you a little bit though. Why’d you even respond to him? Why not just brush it off?
Soulja Boy: Because he was doing more than hatin’. He told me “eat a dick.” That ain’t hatin’, that’s personal right there. Now you can say Soulja Boy’s music is wack. You can say I suck. You can say this all day. But once you get to saying like eat a dick or something like that, that’s some other words right there. That ain’t hatin’. That’s on some other stuff. So I had to address that.

DX: Did you ever like get a chance to chop it up with him direct to try to like…?
Soulja Boy: Nah, I ain’t never talk to him. They tried to set up a phone conversation, [but] I ain’t wanna talk to him. I ain’t got nothing to say to him.

DX: How’d it feel when Kanye West came to Soulja Boy’s defense during all that?
Soulja Boy: Aww I mean, ya know, shout out to Kanye. That was just another person holding me down. And basically, it is what it is, man. Like, I don’t even know why I gotta have Kanye West to come and back me. I don’t even know why I’m being in the media like that in the first place.

DX: Just out of curiosity, how do most artists act around you? Do they talk shit to your face?
Soulja Boy: Hell nah! [Laughs] Aww, I can’t believe you asked me that. Nah man, I ain’t never had…I mean, I done seen on like Hip Hop blogsites where people hate [on me]. But never ever, ever, ever has anybody ever said something to my face. And I don’t even know what’ll happen when that day come, if that day comes. But it ain’t never happened yet though.

DX: Now we talked about the hate, but explain to those who don’t understand why more than a million fans love Soulja Boy.
Soulja Boy: Because man, it’s people out there who love Soulja Boy with a passion, believe it or not. As much as the haters hate Soulja Boy, it’s a fan out there that loves me a hundred times more than you hate me. That ain’t hard to believe, because you can go to YouTube and type in Soulja Boy and see all my fans. But what has a lot of popularity, and what has a lot of fame, comes with hate and negative comments, period. You can’t name nothing that’s popular, or nothing that’s in the public eye, that doesn’t have negative comments [aimed at it]. Look at Barack Obama. Look how many haters he got, and he’s the President of the United States right now. Look at John McCain. He got haters too. Anything that has popularity has hate, period. It ain’t nothing that you can name [that don’t].

DX: I read where you said you’re not really worried about gaining respect as an emcee from people who don’t like you anyway [click to read]. So what motivates you when you’re making music – just to have fun, or…what’s the motivation?
Soulja Boy: The fans. Every Sunday I do a concert with over 30,000 people…I’m on the Battle of the Bands Tour. I do a [show] every Sunday. I do a different football stadium that has over 30,000 people at every show. Once I go to my concert, and it’s 30,000 people in the crowd and they singing my songs word-for-word, and all of them out there supporting me, and all of ‘em out there getting the album, requesting my songs on the radio, I mean, that’s all I need. You gotta actually see the world through my eyes, or you gotta walk a day in my shoes, and then maybe you’ll get more of an understanding of why I do what I do. But basically man, I just do it for me, and I do it for the people who love me, period.

DX: So what’s the direction of the new album: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, or are you doing something different this time out?
Soulja Boy: I did a dance song, I did “Bird Walk,” [so] I did a dance song like “Crank That.” I got songs on there as far as like…I got a song on the album called “Easy,” and basically it’s just saying how I make the rap game look so easy and all these rappers struggling to sell records. And then like I’m the most hated dude in the game but I’m selling more records than everybody who hate me. Everybody saying I ain’t got no lyrics, and I’m spittin’ bubblegum rhymes, but I’m selling more albums than your favorite crack-spittin’ emcee. So basically, it’s just like me [bluntly saying] I’m making the game look so easy [while] you trying so hard. And I’m not trying at all and I’m doing 20 times better than you…But this album man, I stepped up my production from the last album. I worked with a lot of different producers, from Drumma Boy [click to read], to Beethoven, to Polow Da Don…myself, my homeboy Arab. I got a lot of different features, from my mentor Gucci Mane [click to read], my homeboy Yo Gotti, Shawty Lo, T.I. [click to read], Sean Kingston, Bow Wow. I got a lot of different artists featured on the album. But basically man, I just made good music, that’s all. For the people who love me, they gon’ really, really, really love this album. And for the haters, they might even like it too.

DX: You confident “Bird Walk” [click to view] is gonna be as big as “Crank That”?
Soulja Boy: Nah, I don’t think “Bird Walk” gonna be bigger than “Crank That” at all. I think “Crank That” really is an untopable record. It was the number one song in the world, so no, of course “Bird Walk” ain’t gon’ top “Crank That.” I know that. But I know that I can create enough good music and sell enough records that I’ll be happy with myself. And I know that this album is capable of going platinum again with no problem.

DX: And that’s a statement in 2008.
Soulja Boy: Yep.

DX: I see your album is droppin’ the same day as ya boy Bow Wow’s. You wanna make a prediction on who gets the most sales that week between you, Bow, 50 Cent, and Plies?
Soulja Boy: I think I’ma get Bow Wow. I think I’ma get Plies [click to read]. I don’t know about 50 Cent [click to read] though. I think that might be a tough one right there to predict, I don’t know.

DX: Now I mentioned Bow Wow, and you were behind the boards for his hit “Marco Polo.” You talked about your production, are you planning on doing more production for artists outside of yourself and your own crew?
Soulja Boy: Yeah man, right now I’m working on Chingy’s album. I’m working on Twista’s [click to read] album. I got a song that I did for Chingy that should be releasing pretty soon called “Turn It Up,” a real crazy record. That’s gonna be another hit coming from behind Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. So you know, I’m working just with a lot of different artists basically. I think it’s gonna be a lot more Soulja Boy-produced hit records coming out. And it’s gonna have the game scratching they head. But I don’t really wanna just get on no Lil Wayne [click to read] type stuff and just get on everybody records. I just wanna make enough hits to make a statement [like], “You see that. Come get one.”

DX: Did I read correct that you’re about to have a TV show?
Soulja Boy: I got a cartoon coming out. I was gonna do a TV show at first, but it was too time consuming for my schedule to finish up my album and to do touring and all these different things that I wanna do. I got a cartoon coming out though called Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. It’ll be coming out at the end of this month. And you can go to my website, Souljaboytellem.com, to get more information on it. But it’s gon’ be funny as hell though.

DX: And finally, I just wanna get your thoughts on Barack Obama winning the Presidential election.
Soulja Boy: I YouTubed when I went and voted. You can go to YouTube and type in “Soulja Boy votes” [to see that]. It was just a historical moment, because it was my first time voting and my first time voting the person who I voted for won and [he] was a black President. I think that in 2008 we are living in the future, man. With everything that I’m seeing that’s going on I think that now it’s actually turning into that new beginning for real.

Advice on Live Shows.

2009-08-30T12:14:09-05:00

Source:
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/features/id.1397/title.underground-report-eternia-mazzi/p.2

DX: While on the live show topic, yours are potent with energy. Grammy Award-winner, Maya Azuceana joined you on stage earlier this month. How do you prepare for live performances, and where do you want to take the audience?

Eternia: I think I’ve been mentored well by a few people when it comes to my live shows. Collizhun of Nefarius taught me a lot about being high energy and animated on stage. Freestyle of the Arsonists taught me the value of a highly organized and rehearsed set. It was Wordsworth that told me I didn’t need no hype man unless that hype man is just as good - if not better - than me. It was Apathy [click to read] that taught me to annunciate my words, so that now everything I say comes from the diaphragm and slices through the crowd. It was One.Be.Lo who taught me how to nurture connections with fans before and after the show and never underestimate what role someone can play in your career in the future. I’ve learned from a lot of people. The most important thing for me on show day is to be in a happy and relaxed headspace. My emotional state is really fragile on show day, ‘cause I’m preparing to give a room full of people myself - in a very vulnerable way. I just want my audience to walk away feeling like they connected with Silk Kaya in a very personal way. Goose bumps…I want elevated heart beats and lots of goose bumps.

Case Study: El-P and Def Jux

2008-02-22T19:52:40-05:00

http://media.www.34st.com/media/storage/paper1076/news/2002/10/18/34thStreet/Music.Subterranean.Sounds-2191473.shtml

El-P Interview.

For the owner of Def Jux, rapper and entrepreneur El-P, gaining financial control of his art was the main impetus for starting his label. “I don’t like having to explain my idea or vision,” says El-P, who parted ways with his former label Rawkus several years ago. “It’s okay to be mainstream, but you gotta work to get there and you gotta bring the music… A company without somebody’s soul is just a company,” says the New York native and former member of Company Flow.
At Def Jux, where the aim is to let the artists have freer reign, going on tour is a family affair. “The only reason they are even on my label is because they’re my friends,” says El-P. The Def Jux tour, which will go through 24 cities in a little over a month, also features West Philly resident RJD2 and stage master Mr. Lif. Even with a hectic travel schedule, El-P looks forward to recording in the future. “I’ve got some fire under my ass now,” El-P said. “I’m not waiting five years between albums anymore.”

...

Being involved in the business side of the art, Slug feels has made him “a smarter artist and a slicker business man.” Despite his modesty, Slug has a ridiculous work ethic even when off-tour, sometimes spending 12-hour days in the studio. But he doesn’t have any long term vision for his company or himself: “I take everything as it comes in terms of my ‘musical ‘career’… I’ve never been one of those guys who has a five year plan… I’ve already achieved the goals I’ve set out to achieve. Everything else is salad dressing.”

Patrick Hanlon on “Primal Branding” - some gems for sure

2009-08-27T13:11:34-05:00

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2008/11/patrick-hanlon.html

Patrick Hanlon is the founder and CEO of Thinktopia and author of Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future which was recently featured as as one of the ten books to read for a “crash course” in marketing/branding in Britain’s Drum magazine. He is an idea engineer who’s company is dedicated to building communities around brands. In his book he talks about how the brands we care about have belief systems and that it is when you have a well-structured belief system and a leader that you have created a tribe.

Primal Branding asserts that brands that we care about are belief systems, embedded with seven pieces of primal code (the creation story; the creed; the icons; the rituals; the pagans, or nonbelievers; the sacred words; and the leader) that work together to make them believable. This attracts people who share your beliefs, which becomes community. Those communities can surround product, services, personalities, movement, even cities and towns.

Q: What other pieces were under consideration at the time? Have other pieces branched off or been added since then?

Hanlon: I was working in my garden in Connecticut, imagining that great brands like Nike, Lego, Apple, and others all had something else going for them other than advertising. As a matter of fact, brands like Google and Starbucks didn’t even advertise (at that time). Yet it was obvious that everyone felt something very visceral about those brands. Just as they do about the Grateful Dead, R.E.M., U2, Phish, John Mayer, and even lesser-known artists like The Bird And The Bee, Hound Dog Taylor, Iron & Wine, The Bad Plus, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and more. They’re fanatics. Fans.

At the time, I didn’t know how to put all of that together, except that if you believe in something, it probably has some sort of statement about what it is: a creed. There’s also probably a story about how it came to be. There are icons that reveal who or what they are. And rituals that dictate how believers come together, or how you use a product. There are words that believers use to identify themselves (ignorance of those words also identifies those who do not believe). There are also nonbelievers: people who prefer the Beatles to the Stones, prefer Tony Bennett to hip hop, etc. And often there is an acknowledged leader. That makes seven. I didn’t set out to come up with seven, but things usually seem to come in threes, fives, sevens, nines, twelves, 21, fifty and 100. It’s like divine proportion or something.

Q: In your work as CEO of Thinktopia, what music industry examples are you often brought back to in order to explain the current environment of the business world?

Hanlon: That is not an easy question, because most people in business look at the entertainment industry - even with all its billions - as sort of an anomaly. It looks like so much fun, it can’t be real business. And of course just the opposite is true. The music and film industries are brutal. I often hold up Madonna as an example because, love her or hate her, she has reinvented her brand every 18 to 32 months since Material Girl. In real world terms, this would be like coming up with the Mini Cooper, then creating the iPod, then Starbucks, then Halo, then the Google phone. Then then then. She’s an amazing marketer. Puff Daddy and Prince tried to do the same, with less success.

Q: In workshops called Primal Digs, you work together with companies to help them engineer and reverse engineer their brands and company culture. If you were brought into any of The Big Four major labels, where would you begin with your shovel?

Hanlon: The prequel to all of our work inside companies is that we immerse ourselves in their business. We gather up all the reports and factoids and landscape and meld that with macro and micro trends and then we mush it all together. That is where we begin, which partially answers your question. During the Primal Dig we deconstruct the brand during the first day, then reconstruct it the second day and all the days that follow.

What we would suggest is that the Big 4 better understand the intangibles that drive brands. That way, they might be better able to knowingly help drive successes rather than imitating what others do. The other thing is understanding what drives internal cultures: this helps define success at many companies. People work all night and weekends trying to come up with the next next thing, whether it’s a computer game, great design, or hit song, because they are driven by a higher ideal. They want to be great. That is an infusion that can be designed into a management company. It can be managed.

Q. Professor Mike Wesch states in An anthropological introduction to YouTube that, “There is this cultural inversion going on where we are becoming increasingly individual, but many of us still have this strong value and desire for community, we become increasingly independent while longing for stronger relationships, and we see increasing commercialization all around us, therefore we seek authenticity.”

What is it about this cultural inversion that reinforces the notion that within tribal communities there is a great need for well-structured belief systems and leaders?

Hanlon: I would put it out there that paradoxically there is a community of people wanting to be individuals. We all experience a quest for soul. In fact, while society tells us to fit in, we reward those who stand out. The recent quest for authenticity, I think, is fallout from two areas: 1) companies like Enron who are not who they say they are, and 2) people (on the Internet and in the public arena) who also turn out not to be who they say they are. Bands who are not who they say they are are doomed, e.g. Milli Vanilli. To add to that, it is when you have a well-structured belief system and a leader that you have created a tribe.

Q: On an artist level, what elements of the creation story are ingrained into our perception of what it means to be a rock star?

Hanlon: Powerful brands have a narrative. They tell a story. The creation is the start of that story, so it is incredibly important. You can’t have a story without it. All the time, we hear about new bands and before the DJ throws the track on the air, they says things like, “These guys come out of Seattle...these guys met in high school…this woman was backup singer for Don Henley.” I’ve just started the brand narrative for Nirvana, U2 and Sheryl Crow. But that’s not the most important part of what we’re talking about. The real juice is when all seven pieces of what we call primal code are working together.

A few years ago, I spoke about Primal Branding at a conference in Madison. Afterwards, I stayed for the lunch (I don’t always stay for the lunch) and happened to sit next to a woman who had the name of the company she worked for printed on her name tag. The company was ABKCO. What’s that? I asked. “Allen B. Klein Company,” she replied.* I took a sharp breath. “I liked what you talked about,” she went on to say. “You’re right, it’s not just about talent. Lots of people have talent. But who are the bands you remember? KISS. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Why? They have an image. Literally. They have an image that sticks in your mind. That’s why they last.”

Q: The Advertising and Music Industry share many pieces of primal code which have endured since their early beginnings, what makes those images so powerful that they capture our imaginations still today?

Patrick Hanlon: The primal code extends beyond business or industry and connects with something that is fundamentally human. We all want to believe in something. We all want to believe in something that is larger than ourselves. That could mean connecting to a product (Starbucks), a subculture (skateboarding), a subculture product (Volcom), a political movement (Obama) an ideology (the Green movement) and more.

As I mentioned earlier, when you create a belief system using the seven pieces of primal code, it turns people’s heads. They connect. Of the thousands of things bubbling out in the culture trying to attract our attention, those things imbedded with the seven pieces of primal code attract and connect. Global warming. Bird flu. Locavores. Try it, your world will never look the same.

Q: Within the Hypebot community, there is a vast array of personalities who inhabit the messy environment of the music industry. Are there any lessons learned or valuable insights that stuck with you over the years you’d like to share?

Hanlon: What we call Primal Branding is really a rallying cry against doing anything by rote. Yes, we have a “system” which could become rote in its own way—but at its core, we are about gaining a deep-skin understanding of how we respond as individuals and as a society to certain inputs in our lives. The primal code is really a constellation of parts that—when put together—seem to satisfy us in intangible yet very important ways. So many people try to create their own success by imitating the success of others. They got a hit song by playing a three-chord progression, so I better learn that progression too. They got a hit by using a drum machine and samples, so I will too. That’s just mimicry and imitation. Sure, some people will make hits. But the big changes—the ones that knock us off our feet, are when someone creates a sound that’s totally fresh, new—something that electrifies.

Q: There seems to be a very special and intimate connection that exists between artists and their followers that don’t seem to exist on a brand or product level. How or why is that?

Hanlon: Sure, screaming fans at Shea Stadium. Sound is one of our senses wired to special places in our brain. Certain songs connect us back to places and times that is very sensorial. Smell is another sense that connects to times and places. The smell of diesel fumes (don’t ask why) takes me back to Europe. There’s probably a whole teenage hormonal thing, too, because music is tied to youth culture. Successful music groups really fire on all cylinders.

There’s that stage where people really love the music. (In our terms the music would be iconic: a music hook is an icon.) And then suddenly there’s this crush of popular appeal—that’s when some fans whine that the group has suddenly gone pop or mainstream. But that’s really the period when the other pieces of primal code become filled in. If you’re in the band, that’s when you hit success—at least at (hopefully) the popular or financial level. Music is extremely visceral, because it is tied into so many other emotions and time frames.

But to say that this is not true for other products is just not the case. Certainly, we don’t have people smashed against fence wire waiting for the new Starbucks drink. But people have traveled long distances to purchase certain automobiles, beer and blue jeans, the same way people follow John Mayer, Justin Timberlake and Nas. A few weeks ago I was in Soho in New York City, and there were people lined up around the block waiting to buy iPhones. A few blocks away, they were standing in another line waiting for concert tickets. Fans are fanatics. Try to take away a 15-year-old’s iPod. You’ll lose your hand.

Q: The Leader plays a pivotal role in making their Primal Brand come alive for their followers. What are some great examples of leaders you’ve seen in the music industry?

Hanlon: Barry Gordy at Motown, Clarence Avant at Motown, The Fifth Beatle, Bono, Michael Stipe,John Lennon, David Geffen.

John King on “Tribal Leadership” for musicians, labels, brands

2009-08-27T04:14:48-05:00

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/01/tribal-leadersh.html

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” was used on Hypebot by Bruce as a reality check for Music 2.0. Black Stone Cherry adds onto those famous words of wisdom in their song ‘You’ by saying, “It takes an army to march a mile.” We’ve been talking on the blog quite a bit about followings and I’m sure like myself, many readers were left with the daunting question, “How do I lead a Tribe?”

To help us better understand this question, I reached out to John King, co-author of Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.

In Tribal Leadership, you identify five tribal stages (Despairing Hostility; Apathetic Victim; Lone Warrior; Tribal Pride; and Innocent Wonderment) that exist in thriving organizations. Companies can avoid hiring people from the lower stages, but clearly, artists cannot pick their fans.

Bylin: How do you think the stages you identified reflect tribalism in a fan base?

King: Stage 2 shows up as a mood of ‘not being understood’…

the classic teen lament of martyrdom and the dreaded inevitability of betrayal. Stage 3 is a heroic posture, a ‘me against the world’ attitude of overcoming and ‘making it’. Stage 4 is a more collaborative, ‘we can do anything together’ point of view. There’s a lot to say about each stage, but that starts the conversation off.

Bylin: The book concludes that Tribes exist in all organizations at different stages, but the difference is in the culture of the community. Here on Hypebot we have questioned the difference between the followings of pop artists like Rihanna and jam band followings like Dave Matthews. Dave obviously has a strong following, but its unclear what stage of tribe Rihanna has.

What factors do you think come into play when trying to evaluate in what stage your music tribe is primarily thriving in?

King: It will be a matter of observation of two main elements that will reflect that. First, we listen to how they talk amongst themselves, and how they identify and express their relationship to other groups that follow similar bands in the niche. The delta to that is probably fairly close to the truth. Other than that, we always look at how they congregate, how they ‘clump up’ in their relationships. Do they tend to be ‘loners’, are they grouped in little gangs with a recognizable strong personality, do they collaborate, or does it always turn into some form of a competition? It is not unlike geeks when they flame each other. None of this behavior is particularly predictable, it has to be observed. My guess is that the great mass fall in Stages 2, 3, and 4, with the greatest preponderance at three, looking like a normal Gaussian bell curve distribution.

Artists at on their very best days seem to lead a stage four tribe, this band is great and this band is not, but the ideal place to peak is stage five. During big events like an album release, the bonds formed between a stage four and a stage five could be the difference between fans telling their friends about the release and calling radio stations to demand the playing of the single.

Bylin: What leverage points and actions could an artist utilize to encourage stage five behavior from their fan base?

King: This is an awesome question and the heart of the matter if the band is truly interested in creating a breakout experience for themselves, and, by extension, their fans. One thing they must always be dong is preserving the faithful, while constantly accumulating new fans from other cultural point of view. A Stage 5 experience is the holy grail of breaking a new act, or, releasing new product. The old saying that they need a ‘crossover hit’ is exactly right. They need to go away and come back as morphed into something that preserves the old fan base, while attracting new followers. This usually means a complete revivication and maturation of all of their musical and artistic ideas to drive them to boldly come back as something unexpected and unpredictable, and of higher quality.

Part 2: Building A Tribe

Bylin: Throughout the music industry when we look for true examples of tribes, we often come up with examples like The Grateful Dead and The Kiss Army. Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, is a leader and his followers (also known as The Church of Bruce), operate as a true tribe.

What principles of Tribal Leadership do you think these types of artists may have unknowingly embraced that led them to be successful?

King: They all cast a very wide net. The themes and ideas that they were working with were universal, and yet...could be mapped onto the individual fan. The were ‘identifiable’, and created hooks that imprinted the consciousness of the listener in a peculiar way that was both fresh, and somehow familiar in the same moment. The hook is what captures the tribe.

Bylin: Patrick Hanlon and I had a great interview about the importance of belief systems in a community or tribe. He asserts in Primal Branding that brands that we care about are belief systems, embedded with seven pieces of primal code (the creation story; the creed; the icons; the rituals; the pagans, or nonbelievers; the sacred words; and the leader) that work together to make them believable.

How do you believe well-structured belief system plays into attracting the following you sought out and how does it help to take your fan base to the next stage?

King: Ultimately, each person is a set of values want to be expressed. The band , the way they live, they way they perform is an heroic personification of the common values and aspirations of the fan. As they do it poetically and rhythmically – that is amazing. After all, all there is, is what you see and what you hear.

If an artist wants to rally the passion of a tribe, they need to make music for a movement. Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Rage Against The Machine, Bob Dylan, and Will.I.Am all made music for a movement. They told stories about who they were and the future they were trying to build.

Bylin: Why is it that when you find values that cut across a group of people that you can take an entire tribe to this zone full of appreciation and emotion?

King: Good one – your answer is in the question. Because the values that are driving the band are so apparent, and do cut across various cultures and stages of culture. This is the very definition of leadership, and music is a powerful way to capture a mind, a heart, a soul, in the interest of a movement. It’s not an accident that Barack Obama is referred to as a ‘Rock Star’ – the values, the energy, the rhythm of his campaign connected people to their values and their dreams and noble cause, and they rallied to the cause. It is exactly the same with a band, except the band has the power of music as a transport mechanism for the values being transferred to the fan.