If you ask me, this guy- along with his oRIGINAL “discover-er” Kenny Burns, are the WHOLE reason that we know of this kid… This interview is old (shouts to HipHopGame) but its STILL relevant and powerful..
================================================================================
You manage Wale, who has an album coming out in September through Mark Ronson’s Allido Records and Interscope. Is everything working out for Wale the way you pictured it happening when you started managing him three years ago?
Everything worked exactly how I sort of imagined it to work because, you know, so often in life you have the best laid plans that don’t exactly pan out and it’s just one of those things. So often in life you get sidetracked by life itself and to actually go and do something, to have a clear idea of where you want to bring it and then to have pretty much everything connect and fall in line the way that you imagined it to, it’s just really, it’s kind of a beautiful thing and if you can sort of model your life and everything that comes after that, to me it seems like you can have a pretty happy life.
When you and Wale were starting out together, what’s the most effective thing you guys did to make people take you seriously?
I think trying to elevate him against the rest of the pack. This was three years ago so we’re not even talking about Kid Cudi or Drake. I’m talking about the people that were popping when I first started managing Wale, like Huey and Jibbs and that sort of stream of artists who I like and Unk and that kind of stuff. I like those kind of people but when Wale came out, he was doing something so completely different that it was hard for people to wrap their head around it because he started out really as a regional artist and then we kind of took it away from there and kind of tried to bring an international angle to it and his association with Mark Ronson definitely helped. I think it helped that we were doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing at the time helped us gain some attention and him being in D.C. and me being in L.A., I had a completely different perspective on everything that he was doing and I could tell him if he did this, that would happen. People in D.C. might not appreciate the magnitude of it right of the bat but it would benefit him long term. If you listen to what was popping back then, you don’t even remember some of those people now and look at Wale. He’s being anticipated as one of the best new hip-hop artists out and I think his album is a classic. It’s been a steady rise over the past three years. It hasn’t been a meteoric rise and then a fall from grace and to me, that’s a lot better because he definitely has a career ahead of him.
At any point did you feel you made a mistake signing to Mark Ronson’s Allido Records?
Continue reading →
HaZiQ=MCeo :-$ 