Welcome to FuckALabel.com: Day One.
We started this blog to focus attention on today's - and tomorrow's - crop of non-mainstream rappers. 'Frat rappers', for some; 'most dope' music artists, for others. The kids you see on the title page of this blog, and the ones you'll see in blog posts in the future - the ones who dream of a career in the music business - and who are basically making it happen without an ounce of help from the music business.
They don't fit the standard criteria for today's commercially successful rapper. Fuck labels.
And most agree that the shit you hear on the radio today is laughable by real rap standards. So, in the absence of a record deal with a major label they're putting their shit out there on DatPiff.com, gaining thousands upon thousands of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and finding success, dolo.
Again... fuck labels.
"Steve Jobs is personally responsible
for killing the music business."
When Jon Bon Jovi sputtered his gibberish to the Sunday Times magazine recently, the quote which made headlines the next day - the one you see above - was actually taken out of context. Jon, who's album Slippery When Wet actually debuted a whole lifetime ago, was talking about the act of listening to music - of driving to the record store, buying an album on vinyl, riding home caressing it in eager anticipation, listening to track after sucky track, and wondering why the fuck you spent $10 on an album when the only song you wound up liking was the one being overplayed on the radio anyway?
I think we all miss those days...
Bon Jovi's misunderstood rant seems to forget the fact that the MP3 player was not invented by Apple and the MP3 was becoming quite popular before mainstream music artists could even figure out how to make a penny off of them in the first place.
In 1986, when we were Living on a Prayer, Jon Bon Jovi - and anyone else lucky enough to "make it" in the music business - were living large. The profits were split between record companies, artists, and radio - and, later, video - with money made touring, selling merch... you get the idea.
But the number of artists were limited. They call it "Top 40" for a reason. And there is a reason that college bars still pack 'em in on "eighties night"... the music was laughable, comical.
A Little History...
Rap got its start "underground" - at first, record companies wanted nothing to do with it. If you heard it in its first decade you were probably in NYC or Philadelphia, and you were most likely listening to it being played on a stage. Record companies were timid, at first, testing out pop-style songs with a little hip hop inserted into the style. When that worked, early 1980s, hip hop began being recorded, marketed, and sold.
A few years later, 1986, 6 In The Mornin' by Ice-T was released. It's gone on to be considered the first 'gangsta rap' single. The buzz that N.W.A. created was musical magic shouts of "Fuck Tha Police" getting a letter from the F.B.I. director, and Tipper Gore beginning her campaign to require warning labels on albums.
(Machine Gun Kelly)
We all know where that went; gangsta rap became the hottest selling musical style - record companies couldn't keep albums on the shelf they were selling so quickly. West coast rap overtook east coast for a time, and Afrocentric themes (the words of music historians, not my own) were what was selling.
Straight Outta Compton...
Hip hop's 'golden age' is considered to be late 1980s and the 1990s. During the 90s hip hop was huge, and records were selling. You couldn't walk through a tenement in the 'hood without seeing wall-size posters of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur on the walls of every girl, and most of the dudes...
A lot of other good music was being produced at that time, too - and a lot of one-hit wonders came out in the 1990s - anyone been to a Paperboy concert lately? - showing that the recording industry was willing to take a chance on artists for a time.
One artist who thought the industry wouldn't take a chance on him was none other than Eminem. He was well-known on the Detroit hip-hop scene when he cut his first record for a local label. It sold less than 1,000 copies. Em's talked in many interviews about the fear that he felt at the time, that his lack of sales meant he was a failure - and that he'd be a cook in a restaurant forever.
A year later Dr. Dre - gangsta rap pioneer and marketing genius Dr. Dre - found an Em demo on the garage floor of an Interscope Records honcho. He listened to it, then flew out to watch Em perform in the 'rap olympics' - and signed him on the spot. "Hi, my name is..." became a cultural phenomenon - and eight year-old boys listening to CDs on their Walkmans began to dream. The year was 1999.
Rolling Stone Magazine calls 1999 the year the 'golden age' ended for hip hop. It wasn't that a white MC had finally made it in the world of rap that killed it; it was Shawn Fucking Fanning and his invention, Napster. Young people, who have always made up the bulk of rap and hip hop record buyers, started giving Tower Records the finger that same year. Why buy music when you can get it for free, right? There was panic in the industry. Threats of lawsuits. And actual lawsuits.
Napster killed the music business.
But it started the trend toward what we're so appreciative for today: it put the control in the hands of the consumer. The recording industry, which had controlled every fucking note we'd heard since records were invented, would never be the same.
Eighties Babies?
The year was 1999, and a generation was listening to The Marshall Mathers LP for the first time.
I've read hundreds of poorly-written bios on MySpace, and I can't tell you how many aspiring rappers first began to dream about making it big while they were listening to that album.
February 23, 1999 was a day that changed the face of hip hop - although it would take the rise of social media, and the dreams of some of Em's youngest fans, to take the next step.
Asher Paul Roth was 13.
Christian Webster was 10 1/2.
Colson Baker was 9.
Malcolm McCormick had just turned 7. (WTF? We'll assume he heard it later).
Never mind that Eminem was closer to Compton than he was Connecticut - a white MC had made it - and, not only made it, really, but changed it.
The game.
Rap music's next crop of MCs would spend the next decade or so honing their freestyling skills in their jammies, jotting rhymes in their homework folders, and battling on the bus.
Not much would change in the music industry. At first...
Music Today...
Fast forward to 2005.
MySpace.com came out, and before annoying fucking bulletin spam ruined the site, it would become a place where amateur musicians and professional recording artists could post their music, write their blogs, and bring their music to the masses - without need for the media, or the record company execs.
The next year, bam! YouTube is blowing up. YouTube got its start as a place for people to post schoolyard fights and ghostride-the-whip vids, competing with other sites nobody remembers now, but its users would take to creating dope-ass content, leaving it leading the user-generated video niche by the end of 2006. Anyone remember any of the other video sites that year? Who cares...
A year or two later, MySpace is dying and Facebook is picking up steam. Facebook isn't "musician-friendly," people are complaining, but those who don't have execs to do most of the work for them - including the names above and, if you're an aspiring rapper, probably you - they were beginning to realize that, with a combination of MySpace/YouTube/Facebook a lot could be done.
A year or two ago, Twitter. Today Mac Miller - nine years old when Em came out with his first album - has more than 200,000 Twitter followers. That's nearly three times as many as XXL.
Fuck A Label...
We started this blog as a forum to feature some of the rappers who are "making it" in the music business today without any help from the music business.
Asher Roth. Sam Adams. Chris Webby. Mac Miller, Machine Gun Kelly. And so many others.
The goal for any musician, of course, is to "make it" in the industry. "Making it" means finding commercial success, and real success - the kind that changes your lifestyle - doesn't happen without a record label.
(Yet.)
But we're nearing the day when a combination of social networking, marketing, and online music sales will enable recording artists who choose not to sign to a major record label to still sell - and sell big.
Chris Webby crashed DatPiff when his fans, some 40,000 strong, all signed on to download Best in the Burbs at the appointed hour. And his fanbase has surged since then.
Webby has said that his next album will be on iTunes - with or without a label - and if the comments from his fans are any indication, they can't wait to throw some money at him.
So FUCK a LABEL.
Take it to mean that we abhor the labels that the recording industry has long expected its commercially successful rap artists to stick to themselves - or to mean fuck those same labels themselves.
We don't care.
Even if every one of the rap artists listed above gets signed by a major label and have their records crowding the shelves of Tower Records next week, you can't take away the fact that they built their buzz, and their fan base, from the ground up (thanks, Mac Miller); you'll simply have the first group of commercially successful hip hop artists who originated from the fans, instead of to them.
And if that happens, I've seen enough MySpace bios to know that there are a few hundred suburban kids currently battling themselves in the mirror, just ready to take their place.
FuckALabel.com is for the rappers above, and for those coming up, too.
Enjoy, and contact us at mail@sharxmedia.com with feedback, or if you want to help.
COPYRIGHT 2011 FUCKALABEL.COM
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