Money in the Making
Houston rappers couldn’t beat the system, so they created their own. Now the H-town rap scene is the hottest in the country.
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With his dark hair swept back and wearing an Italian shirt with a starched high collar, the 35-year-old Brauch looks more like a dapper Mafia gangster than a channeler of gangsta rap dreams. Over the past six years, Brauch has done more than 10,000 graphics like these, enough to make Pen and Pixel very profitable and extremely crucial in breaking a local rap act. The company began in Aaron and Shawn Brauch’s apartment with $1,000 seed money and eventually grew far beyond its original graphic-arts purpose. Doug King designed a mastering facility in the back and Teri Janis, an apartment complex manager, signed on as the office jack-of-all-trades; she became an eventual business consultant for hip-hop entrepreneurs. She remembers: “They’d walk in with a DAT tape, some cash, and say, ‘I want to put this record out.’” She would tell them, “Get yourself incorporated, make sure you’ve got your bar code, make sure you’ve got contracts in line.” Janis encouraged prospective clients to put business plans together. “If they weren’t willing to do the work, there was no point in doing it, because they weren’t going to go anywhere.” Janis has since left Pen and Pixel to work at Suave House.
Back at the computer screen, Brauch finishes the cover for Kunta Loc’s Dead Soldier album. “He’s got lightning coming out of his ears. Don’t ask. I just follow orders sometimes.” He pulls out a sketch of his latest, most outrageous creation, a convertible Rolls-Royce with a swimming pool in the back. “It’s either money or violence. It’s basically about power. Power and respect.”
Takin’ It to the Streets
ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON, THE entire H-town hip-hop universe appears to be passing through the hangar-size home of Southwest Wholesale in an industrial area in northwest Houston. The building is big enough to house a 747, or in this case, more than 100,000 CD, cassette, and vinyl titles. Richard Johnson, a former defensive back with the Houston Oilers, stops in to pick up a check for product sold by Klondike Kat and Pharoah, two acts on his BeatBox Records label. The Madd Hatta himself, the natty afternoon drive-time deejay on the Box, drops by to get a check for sales from his CD, The pH Factor, which includes features by Willie D, Lil’ Keke, the late Fat Pat, C-Note of the Botany Boys, and D of the Trinity Garden Cartel.
Over by one table, Jeff Spargo sorts out new titles fresh from the pressing plant, affixing each piece with a price sticker for eventual sale at one of his eight Soundwaves stores. The South Main location moves more hip-hop music than any retail outlet in the city. “Hip-hop is everything now,” observes Spargo. “It may have started out a ghetto thing, but it has spilled over into the middle class. It’s in all types of music—acid jazz, zydeco, Rage Against the Machine. Pop music has always been a reßection of society. It’s youth culture, like it or not. Kids are smart, and they remember when someone’s trying to sell them something that isn’t real.”
Standing by Spargo’s side is Robert Guillerman, Southwest’s vice president and one of the two founders who started the company in 1976 as a subdistributor, or one-stop, to link independent and major labels with retail outlets. No small part of the company’s success has been Guillerman’s willingness to show prospective clients the ropes, giving them a packet that outlines such essentials as bar codes, packaging, and label iden-tification. Though Southwest moves all kinds of product, including country, rock, gospel, and tejano, the rappers and rap labels have shown themselves to be smarter than the rest. “The rap guys have a better sense of how to market than the other genres do,” says Guillerman. “They’re willing to pour their profits back into promotion. They really are trying to do it themselves. There’s a movement to not get ahead of yourself and sign with a big label. They’ve figured out the economics. If they’re going to sell twenty thousand units, a major label is not going to be happy with that. But if they do it themselves, well, twenty thousand units can be $150,000 in their pocket.”
Destiny’s Father
ACROSS TOWN IN A BARBECUE JOINT ON SOUTHWEST FREEWAY, Mathew Knowles is testifying how rap changed his life. As the manager of Destiny’s Child, an R&B singing group comprised of two 16- and two 17-year-old girls (including his daughter, lead singer Beyoncé), the 46-year-old Knowles has nurtured his group for eight years. In 1997 he got them a contract with Columbia Records and a coveted slot on the Men in Black soundtrack. But he wanted their first album to be a success, and he knew that one way to guarantee that was by reaching out to the hip-hop audience. So Knowles got rapper Wyclef Jean, from the popular group the Fugees, and Atlanta hip-hop producer Jermaine Dupri to each produce some tracks.
When Dupri inserted a sample by Mas-ter P into one song, Knowles went a step further and solicited the man himself. Knowles was wary when he met Master P at the rapper’s Sugar Land home. “I was worried this guy was a gangsta,” he says. “Is he going to be disrespectful to the girls?” His fears were unfounded. “His place was laid out real classy, and the guy was a real Southern gentleman.” Even better, Master P agreed to do a feature in exchange for a feature by the girls on the second album by P’s brother, Silkk the Shocker. The self-titled debut by Destiny’s Child, released in February of this year, is weeks away from going gold (sales in excess of 500,000), says Knowles. The group’s first single, “No, No, No,” has gone platinum (selling more than 1 million units). Silkk the Shocker’s album went platinum too.
“I admire guys like Master P,” Knowles says. “I think they’re the new breed in the hip-hop game, real business heads. I think the first generation maybe were more on the gangsta side, concerning backgrounds. I think the new breed are artists first, but also businessmen.” Knowles sees a new wave as the lines get blurred between hip-hop and modern R&B, the two dominant styles of black American music. “That’s why it’s important to have a Wyclef, a Jermaine Dupri, or a Master P on the album. They’ve got their marketplace who’ll buy everything they sell because they’re fans of Master P and fans of hip-hop. Not only that, in today’s market, it legitimizes you. If I was an R&B artist, I’d feel like it’s an insult not to have a hip-hop artist on my record. How can you be young and ignore that? Young people are the ones who buy records. If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong industry. I don’t care what I like, what you like, what the label likes. I care what kids like.”
Knowles attributes Houston rap’s success to good economics: “You can do a rap album easily for $20,000. You can get a damn good rap producer in Houston for $2,000. You can’t get a mainline producer for an R&B project for less than $50,000. Hip-hop and rap, you can just do your region and make a profit. James Prince can make a decision on a single for one of his artists today, and it’ll be on the street next week. A major label, it’d take a month just to make the decision and another month or two before it’s in the stores.” He cites featuring—so illustrative of the spirit of cooperation among Down South rappers—as a particularly smart career move. “Everybody realizes they win. You’ve got your market, and I’ve got mine. We bring those together, we both win. In corporate America, that’s called a merger.”
The kids are all right, says Knowles. “I haven’t experienced any negatives. I know a lot of rappers. They’re all good people. They all have different backgrounds. I remember reading about a kid who shot a trooper on the freeway, saying he was listening to a rap song and that that made him do it. Well, people embezzle millions of dollars because they saw someone embezzle it on TV, and I don’t see anyone saying television should be banned. People take the five percent of rap that is negative and focus on that.”
There’s a track by Houston’s Def Squad on a new rap sampler, Street Life, that has just been issued by SMG (Solar Music Group). It’s a “consciousness” rap titled “When the Brothers From the South Wake Up.”
In H-town, they already have.
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