One of the podcasts I listen to is called “Call Out Culture.” It is a hip-hop-centric podcast hosted by 4 four friends living in an around the New York State area. All of them are huge, huge fans of hip-hop culture and of rap music and it is one of the places where I get a good amount of my hip-hop education from, some of which I dish out in articles here.
What I like about the podcasts most is that the four friends are all in their early to late 40s and so they have a good perspective of hip-hop with great anecdotes that span almost 4 decades. They live through the take-off of rap music, saw its growth, lived through its golden age and are now seeing what I personally think is its decline. - Argue with your CD collection.
And so they are able to approach a wide amount of topics in a refreshingly deep and all-encompassing manner. They are great to listen to while doing household chores lol
One of the members of the group is called Castro. Castro is actually a rapper- A rapper who never made it big - if one has to say it crudely. He has since resigned from dreaming about the spotlights but has never stopped making and putting out music because rap means something greater to him than being in the brightness of a spotlight.
Castro was once recounting what it was like back in the day to put together a press packs for yourself in order to get someone’s attention at a record label. He described how back then how one would have to have a black glossy photo in it, business cards, name of the group, a one-sheet with your information on it. You would include in it a CD of your songs, and then go from record label to record label and try to meet someone there to listen to your songs.
He added that you could do all this and still not even get a response from the record label. He said that today, things have changed radically and are way more attainable; and that thanks to the internet, and to the ease of having technical at cheaper prices, you have faaar greater chances of making music and getting discovered than it was the case in 1997. And so for that reason as a musician, you have almost zero excuses to make.
He then said something which marked. He said that today, sometimes,
“Rappers get in their own way.”
I found that really, really interesting because if we have to go back to his personal anecdote of the press kit, I can personally relate from the point of view of PoiseSocial.
I’ve never been enthused about playing the role of a gatekeeper, but sometimes it is hard not to. Very often we have solicitations in our inbox from up and coming musicians who want to use our platform to promote their music. Some of them write a sentence and drop their link. Others write sentences full of mistakes, showing that they had not given themselves an occasion to read.
One artist just came one day and dropped a link. The said artist had reached out to us previously for some information about paying for promotion. We responded with a long mail explaining detailing what services we offered. I don’t remember the artist responding to that mail. They just came back, dropped the link to their new song and left.
That was the one time I decided to play the role of gatekeeper. Not that the artist absolutely needed my help. Hopefully, they will blow one day. But I found that very unprofessional on their part.
In the words of Castro, these are people who stood in the way of themselves
This is why when Jeffsparrow Eno-Moh reached out to us to solicit information about promoting an artist, it was a breath of fresh air.
He reached out to us in a short email asking for information on promotions on PoiseSocial to which we replied. HE followed up with a second email that gave exhaustive details about an artist he manages; Phil Daisy.
The email contained a short personal biography of Phil Daisy, his musical biography, including his musical influences. The email continued to explain that Phil Daisy released his first 6 track EP in November 2019 and that the project digitally and on USB. He stated where one could find it, and also gave the links to all the platforms where digital copies could be accessed.
Then he gave all the social media handles of Phil Daisy, including a link to a really beautiful and well-done website for his artists. The email including an upload of two of the leading singles on the EP, a link to his first video and a picture from the set. It is that picture that was used for this article.
He also dropped the number to book his artist. If you go to Phil Daisy’s page, you will find ALL this information there as well.
Initially, my plan was to publish the link to the song but after receiving that email I did not do so anymore. I was really impressed by the organisation going on around Phil Daisy. Everything is being done to give him a fighting chance.
The thing is… I shouldn’t have to be informed. This is the bare minimum that every musician has to do. But we are so used to standing in the way of ourselves and being complacent about things that we shoot ourselves in the leg before we even start to learn how to walk.
And going beyond the scope of music, there is a lesson there for all of us. – It’s all in the little details.
The attention you pay to little details definitely sets you apart from everybody else. Pixar was so good at putting these at the core of their brand that for the longest time, this little studio made cartoons that were far better than what giants like Disney studios were doing. They are so good that even when Disney bought them over in 2006 at $7.4 billion, Disney let them continue working independently and let them continue using their brand name. It is now called Disney-Pixar Studios. Disney knew better than to corrupt the thing that made them stand out.
A friend of mine who works in human resources tells me the wildest stories about job applications he receives. Just yesterday he told me how someone sent a motivation letter they used to apply for a job in a telephone company to a positing for a firm working in financial services. The name of the phone company was mentioned in the letter five times!
We are constantly standing in the way of ourselves. We need to do better. It’s all in the little details, and until we get a grasp of this, the Phil Daisys of this world will get ahead, while the rest will be accusing some fairly-distant uncle in the village.
Take this time now to listen to Phil Daisy’s music from his first EP “Rise Above Circumstance.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UI6TXJ5syc&feature=youtu.be
- Wandji Wilfred.