Most Known Unknown: Why Harvard's Hip-Hop Needs to Sell Out

Mos Def said that hip-hop is “the sovereign state of the have-nots.” Take a look around the Yard—there isn’t too much that undergrads can’t have. So, by the Mighty Mos’ standards, Harvard hip-hop is dead in the cradle, right?

Not so fast. It’s not necessarily a lack of good material that prevents Harvard students from making it in the rap game. Indeed, two white boys from radio station WHRB understood hip-hop culture so well that they managed to create the longest-running and arguably most influential magazine about the genre and its artists. And in the past five years, two rap crews with Harvard undergraduates have rubbed elbows with the mainstream’s biggest stars, verging on national fame.

But while the magazine exploded beyond Harvard’s gates, none of the groups made it big. The problem might have less to do with Harvard than it does with Boston, as a whole. Intellectual MCs and DJs sell out the coffee houses, while gritty rhymes about violence and street life fall flat; artistic purity is coveted, making money is secondary.

Today, industry insiders say that the time may be ripe for a new generation of Harvard hip-hoppers to snag national fame. But history shows that they might need to stop worrying and love the sell-out.

THE SECRET HISTORY

Cublunk thinks Harvard already revolutionized hip-hop once. And Cublunk is not the type of guy who gives out free praise to a place like Harvard.

He’s what you might call “street.” Indeed, the 36-year-old Boston MC is so dedicated to his on-stage persona that he doesn’t give out his real name to reporters. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, he toured under another moniker—A-Train—with now-all-but-forgotten Boston greats like Edo G and The Almighty RSO. Today, he runs a website for local hip-hop artists, and acts as a historian and elder statesman for Boston rap.

“The only person who ever cared about both sides and did something about it was a Harvard kid,” says Cublunk, in an interview.

The “kid” he’s talking about is David M. Mays ’89, creator of “The Source” magazine. The two “sides” to which Cublunk refers are the underground hip-hop scene—the world of MCs with wordy lyrics and cult followings—and the street-hop scene—the grit-obsessed world that dominates mainstream rap.

“He respected and understood the underground and the street, and he did more for hip-hop than anybody,” Cublunk says of Mays.

In its two decades of existence, “The Source” shaped the modern face of the genre. Before “The Source,” professional hip-hop criticism was nonexistent; only a handful of records (such as those of Public Enemy and Run-DMC) were seriously analyzed and treated as both art and entertainment, but even then were usually reviewed by critics specializing in rock or R&B.

“The Source” focused on hip-hop in all its aspects, from DJing to fashion choices. Its “Unsigned Hype” column profiled up-and-coming artists who had yet to land a record deal. The Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, DMX, Common, and 50 Cent are just a few artists whose careers were established through the feature.

Mays and his friend, Jon M. Shecter ’90, hosted a hip-hop show on WHRB during their years at Harvard (a show that was cancelled, but brought back this semester—see story below), and in 1988, they began putting out a newsletter to accompany it—under the title of “Street Beat.” The name was changed, Shecter was fired, and the rest is history.

Last month, Mays was fired by the magazine’s board of directors over contract disputes, and couldn’t be reached for comment, but his creation still sells millions of copies, rivaled only by “XXL” for the title of most influential rap magazine.

Mays is the exception. Harvard has yet to produce anyone else of comparable weight in the mainstream rap world, much less any famous MCs or DJs. But the music world is changing, and people in the know say the future looks good for Harvard artists armed with little more than mics, laptops, and strong work ethics.

THE NEW INDUSTRY

“The culture of hip-hop is a few levels flakier than other types of music,” says Larry Legend, a New York-based hip-hop producer and engineer who has mixed and made beats for mainstream stars like Nas and Jadakiss, as well as underground heroes C-Rayz Walz and DJ Logic.

“It’s my belief that those who stand out and prosper are those who transcend hip-hop’s often typical flakiness and irresponsibility,” he says. “They come into the studio, they do the shit—quickly and easily and well.”

Legend is talking about a rap world where the scales are tipping towards the self-made artist. More and more, big-name labels have been desperate to sign MCs with already-established, self-produced bodies of work. Take, for example, 50 Cent—his tracks were making waves on homemade “mixtape” CD-Rs for years before he got a major-label deal.

“If you have an artist who’s committed a hundred percent to making music, a guy who’s ready to quit his job and pursue it all the way, no matter what kind of music it is, it’s gonna be good, and it’s gonna be successful,” says Jesse Ferguson, label manager for Definitive Jux Records, one of the most successful labels for artists who shoot for music outside of the mainstream.

If the climate really is changing toward self-motivated artists, even white boys with Ivy League educations can make it.

Case in point: Paul Barman, a graduate of Brown University, has recently become a quirky hip-hop icon as the protégé of legendary De La Soul DJ Prince Paul. And he did it in much the way that Ferguson and Legend have described—self-recording his three EPs and an LP and developing a cult fanbase.

So the stage, to a certain extent, might be set. Then why haven’t any recent Harvard hip-hoppers made it big—even on a smaller, independent-label scale?

THE NEAR MISSES

Once upon a time, there were two hip-hop crews at Harvard, and they had the world at their fingertips: The Witness Protection Program and Tha League.

The WPP, as it was known, consisted of eight Harvard, Berklee, and Northeastern students—two MCs and a six-piece live band. Alan J. Wilkis ’04, former guitarist for the band, characterized their sound as “Bob Dylan meets Dr. Dre.”

Tha League’s Dominique C. Deleon ’04, Nicholas H. Barnes ’04, Brandon M. Terry ’05 and Kwame Owusu-Kesse ’06 met each other at an audition to open for major-label star Fabolous at Boston’s Orpheum in Deleon’s sophomore year.

Success came quick for both groups. The WPP caught attention at local venues, and within months were opening for big-name acts, such as Blackalicious and Jurassic 5. “We met with labels, had lawyers, different producers,” says Wilkis.

Tha League blew up, too. Start-up campus record label Veritas Records put their track on a compilation CD. Then, the Facebook advertised a League music video to all users. They started getting calls from Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records.

But then, both groups gave it all up.

“We were putting a lot of pressure on trying to get signed,” Wilkis recalls of WPP. “But we stopped paying attention to how to play a show. [We were] thinking ‘This guy is gonna be there, that guy might show up,’” he says.

“Buildups, letdowns – everybody was ready to move on,” Wilkis asserts. “We did it for three years. It made my college life so much better. But it had to end.” The group disbanded.

Tha League’s reasoning was nearly identical: “We weren’t necessarily trying to follow that route,” Deleon says. “We wanted to go our own route. We got interest faster from people that could help us because they saw we were doing our own thing.” The group split after graduation.

It would seem that the Paul Barman school of staying true to one’s artistic whims can only take an artist so far. But the problem isn’t exclusive to the “Harvard bubble.” It might be a city-wide phenomenon.

‘BIG WORDS AND BAD BEATS’

“The problem is, right now, Boston hip-hop is unbalanced,” Cublunk says. “You get all these college kids coming to town, wanting to see what our city is about, and they cram 7L & Esoteric [an underground MC/producer duo] down their throats.”

“Now that’s all good hip-hop, but it’s the same thing as saying, ‘All we have here in Boston is big words and bad beats,’” he says.

Cublunk says that the Boston underground may be pushing the musical envelope, but is alienating Boston from widespread recognition.

He says the city is a bizarre reversal of traditional regional hip-hop politics: the underground artists are dominating the audiences, at the expense of what he calls “the so-called ‘hood rappers’, the kids from the streets, telling their stories.”

“I love underground hip-hop,” he says. “But in Boston, the more mainstream, basic, beat-driven hip-hop is being pushed underground by the underground.”

Cublunk gives an example: a concert at the Middle East featuring Brooklyn hardcore rap legends M.O.P. Instead of presenting their beat-heavy street tales, the hip-hop duo, at the request and advice of the promoters, brought a rock band to the concert in order to appeal to the college crowd. The mixture didn’t work.

Cublunk says that these kinds of compromises happen all the time, and they prevent the college audience from being exposed to other Boston styles. “They need to see the real scene. And the promoters and the underground rappers need to stop being scared about it,” said Cublunk.

THE YOUNG BREED

Today, at least two Harvard-based acts are trying to buck the trends.

You may not recognize the name of Samuel M. Zornow ’08, but his alias is well-known among Harvard party-goers: He goes by the nom de plume of “DJ Shiftee,” and he might be Harvard hip-hop’s best hope.

A native New Yorker, Zornow is an acclaimed battle DJ, having won several national competitions before he even entered college. He’s performed with members of acclaimed DJ group The X-ecutioners, and he’s worked alongside major-label superstars The Roots and Gang Starr. Since coming to Harvard, he’s DJ-ed dozens of area parties and performs with Awkward Landing, a trio of Boston MCs.

But he, like Tha League and WPP before him, believes firmly in the primacy of artistic vision. “If I want to do something substantial for hip-hop, and I see Lil’ Wayne is the one on the pop charts,” he says, “I’m gonna go somewhere else.”

According to Abe R. Kinkopf ’04, any reports of a shift in the industry towards D.I.Y. success are greatly exaggerated.

He’s a co-founder of The Indefinite Article, a group of Harvard grads who rap with live instruments—“a cross between 311 and The Roots,” he says.

They’re set to self-release an album later this month, but the group has yet to catch the attention of a label or get big-venue gigs. As important as self-motivation might be, Kinkopf says it’s still not as important as looking like you came out of the projects.

“It just doesn’t make sense to get into an industry that almost requires that you come from the bottom,” Kinkopf says. “Harvard grads like myself have very little [going for them], other than that they are committed to a career in music.”

Part of Cublunk’s mission is to stress that artists like Kinkopf and Shiftee have everything to gain by giving at least a little bit of the spotlight to alternative styles of hip-hop, even if those styles are more mainstream, more traditional, more “street.”

“It’s not like all college kids only listen to complex, abstract underground hip-hop,” Deleon of Tha League says. “If that were true, N.W.A., Mobb Deep, Public Enemy, and every hip-hop artist that’s ever been played on MTV would not be successful.”

In Cublunk’s equation, Dave Mays made it big because he offered up a Harvard intellect to the existing materials of street hip-hop. Until the rest Harvard comes around to the other side of Boston hip-hop, though, he’ll remain pessimistic: “I’m waiting for some new Harvard kids to come into Boston and say, ‘I want to hear what’s going on here.’”

—Staff writer J. Samuel Abbott can be reached at abbott@fas.harvard.edu.