Any Given Tuesday

Props to Drake for dropping an amazing subliminal baseball reference with "Back to Back" though. Toronto stomped a hole in Philly in 1993, taking back-to-back titles.

It's kind a shame the greatest beef and diss track run in hip hop right now is between Meek and Drake.

Oh, wait, Meek is still quiet. Heads these days might not get their "Ether" or "Second Round K.O." and might be stuck with Drake just running all over Meek.

Was doing some digging for old articles and interviews I wrote/recorded for a still-functional regional magazine, and I notice that this is the ONLY piece this particular site hasn't deleted, and it shows as "Published by Anonymous":

Sure, it's five years ago but, come on magazine guys. Leave me my credit. Anyway, the track has Saleem​, Topix, ezejackson​ and Wendel​ Patrick (I think this even made the print mag, if I'm to believe the tags) ... I'm going to blame some of the weak language on the editor. I know what a cypher is, you don't need to call it "something resembling a rap battle." Your readers can look up "cypher."

http://www.whatsupmag.com/2010/11/10/9422/wendel-patrick-unleashes-new-release

Kinda stinks when you're trying to put together a portfolio. I assumed things would stay on the internet for posterity (that's what everyone says..."IT'S ON THE INTERNET...FOREVERRRRR") and my magazine work and my podcasts have disappeared into the ether.

If anyone has any of my old Any Given Tuesday podcasts or magazine work, help your boy out. Ashamed to admit I deleted the media thinking it would be 'in the cloud.'

As I embark on a project that I am hopeful will develop into something, I share this working draft of the foreword of my current brainchild, “Journeymen Rappers”, a concept for a tome that explores the life, the trials and tribulations, of artists in Baltimore working to get by while also working to share their own vision, their art, with anyone they can reach.

“As someone whose first memories of hip hop are from Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" and "911 Is A Joke" videos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my introduction to hip hop was to a sound that was not only immediately resonant but that spoke out like the protest songs of the previous generation - albeit with more a boom bap than a twang.

NWA scared the daylights out of everybody when Straight Outta Compton showed up on MTV. Here were these insanely cool rappers coming up and saying what they thought, damn the consequences, and they were getting paid in the process. Where Run DMC were more concerned with their track suits and their Adidas, these guys were speaking about their life and a struggle that some knew all too well. More than that, people were listening. People were afraid. There really was a Fear of A Black Planet. There really was a Parental Advisory in communities everywhere, as the media showed piles of cassettes and CDs being ran over by steamrollers. Ironically, these demonstrations were made against the artists that were protesting through their art the very people protesting them. My young mind saw the tug-of-war there, a failing status quo fighting to preserve this wholesome vision that never happened.

In a world that saw Rodney King in the Golden Age of Hip Hop, that still sees Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddy Gray when hip hop is past its golden age and in the dominant role of topping every popular music chart, that still sees discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, gender, and more, hip hop - while it isn't free of its own misogyny and homophobia - is a place where we can condemn the oppressor and have a good time doing it.

Hip hop isn't all protest music, it's an art form, it's a space to enjoy yourself and show off a little bit (OK, a lot, if you believe everything you see in videos today) and also enjoy some healthy competition. The artists will hone their bars until they know who can body who on a track. The fans will argue about who bodied who on a track. Some fans only care about the beat and whether it makes them nod their head or shake their tail. Others are focused more on the rhymes themselves and a particular subset are so obsessed with the technique and lyricism they could listen to a capella freestyles, verses and battles without any concern for the music that a rap is usually lain over. As Snoop Dogg said, after he split from Dre and before he dropped the “-y Dogg”, "Beats? So that's what makes me now? Man, I don't give a **** about no beats!"

The goal of this project is to focus on the people that make up hip hop. Specifically, the people that make up hip hop in my current and likely permanent home of Baltimore, Maryland. There is no way that one person can cover every voice that has something to contribute, so there will be people overlooked. In this book, the focus is not on the major artists. The focus is on the people that experience hip hop in a pure form, as a means of communicating and of being in the world. Subjects include rappers/emcees, producers/composers, and the people surrounding them. If the creators are the nucleus of the hip hop cells that make up the larger organism, their friends, families and fans make up the other cellular components. Moreover, there are other people who make hip hop happen anywhere you go. Venues have to exist that support the art form, writers and photographers have to expose talent, and most importantly people have to go to shows and buy the music and help support artists who want to make a living.

From the folks over at theverge comes the (expired) contract between Sony Music and spotify. Note that in the first section there is a Confidentiality Agreement, which it appears has been breached. This agreement suggests that artists are missing out on money that the labels have negotiated strongly to receive. Key points:

1) Spotify can keep up to 15% of revenue from ad sales. Interestingly, Spotify also has to give Sony ad space (a “credit for advertising inventory”) of $2.5 to $3.5 million each year at heavily discounted rates. Sony can do what it wants with that space - promote its own artists or even sell it to third parties at any price Sony can demand. Sony also gets even more free ad space to promote its own artists on.

2) The crazy formula by which calculations are made for what the label (not the artist) will get paid per stream is in Section 10 of Exhibit A, the “Term Sheet”. Here is evidence that paid subscriptions mean more money to the label, but that doesn’t translate to artists being paid. The clause provides that for Spotify’s free tier - the “usage-based minimum”, Spotify pays $0.00225 up to $0.0025 per stream (a discounted, agreed upon, contract rate) and, for the “per subscriber minimum” - the premium tier, the calculation is based on Sony’s label usage percentage (their share of spins on Spotify), then by the number of premium users on the service, then by $6.00 

3) Spotify pays $25 million to Sony Music in advance for the 24-month deal, with an option for another twelve months. Spotify recoups the advance if earnings (paid subscribers, ad sales) exceed the advance amount in each contract year.

4) As The Verge points out, the contract does not specify what Sony does with the advance money. Typically advances are kept by the labels with no consideration paid to the artist.

The key here is that Spotify might not be the devil in this debate about streaming music services and paying artists fairly. Spotify claims it is paying out 80% of its revenues to “rights holders”, the labels. Numbers can be crunched and one can figure that Sony is pulling in millions from Spotify alone. 

Aloe Blacc penned a piece for Wired (http://www.wired.com/2014/11/aloe-blacc-pay-songwriters/) in 2014 indicating how he received less than $4,000, albeit from Pandora, for co-writing a huge hit, Avicii’s “Wake Me Up”. It should be mentioned that radio-type streaming pays less than on-demand streaming services to rights holders.