It would be genius to say I thought of the parallel between this scene and rhyme before I wrote it, but honestly I’d be lying. That’s in a perfect world.

But this world ain’t perfect. Sit down and watch television with your children for an hour and you’ll see what I mean. But anyway, back to Bishop and Q’s dramatization of ‘What You Worth.’ This scene almost perfectly embodies the duality in man that I attempted to express in this freestyle. They both wanted respect. They both wanted Juice. But at what cost? Cost never matters if you don’t understand your value. Did Blitz know his value? Or how about old-man-Quiles-wit-his-bullshit-gun? Love it or hate it but we all respect violence because the visible results are instantaneous. The Destruction is obvious. But the flip side of the coin is that it takes time to Build, and people simply don’t appreciate appreciation. Read that last sentence twice. Read that last sentence twice…

Bishop was steady running his mouth about how their crew “ain’t shit” because everybody is constantly raising up on them. Raheem and Stillz even chuckled because they saw the truth in that. But Bishop ain’t respect Q’s heart. After all, Q ain’t want no piece of what Blitz literally had poppin at the bar just moments before. And for obvious reasons.

They wanna hear that murda, murda…how the wrong move got made, got dome split. BLAOW!!

But did that make Q a sucka? I mean, when it came down to it, he was the one who laid hands on Bishop first…and he knuckled up for more while Stillz momma’s fine china smashed to the floor. What does that say?

 We all starving, before we eat the clique say grace…

Crew love is real like that. Brothers will bang heads at times, but that’s all a part of being your brother’s keeper. We have a duty to each other, as we are both descendants of something great, and proprietors of something even greater. In order to Build, you must Destroy first. Carter G. Woodson can explain that in a bit more detail if you’d like to take it to the further extent.

DOWNLOAD: I Shine, You Shine: Collection #1 by Hustle Emcee

“I Shine, You Shine: Collection # 1″ is exactly what it sounds like. Not as much a mixtape as it is a playlist of some of official hip hop music from yours truly. Some of this music you may have heard before, some you may have not. Personally, these songs are a testament to different growth periods I’ve gone through as a young African-American man and an emcee. That’s what makes this collection of music a must have for any Hustle Emcee supporter. Thank you ALL…

-OR-

Smartphone users, click a song title to stream through your phone’s browser:

1. Play It Cool

2. Farrakhan Interlude

3. When Time’s Up

4. Aww Baby

5. Exhibit H

6. July 7

7. Peace

8. Reverse Clarity

9. Stereolab

10. Tear It Down

11. What You Worth (Bonus)

12. Brooklyn Bullshit (Bonus)

Daddy-O, pictured crouching in center

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Professional inspiration can come from anywhere, even the unlikeliest of places. This month, I was inspired by a rapper imparting business advice to startups.

Hip-hop historian, music technologist and founder of hip-hop band Stetsasonic, Glenn K. Bolton — also known as Daddy-O — recently spoke about the parallels between budding hip-hop artists and startups during his presentation at Geekend 2011, a techie conference presented by BFG Communications.

Daddy-O’s advice for hopeful rappers and startups were astoundingly similar. As a successful rapper himself, Daddy-O’s own experiences brought truth to his words.

Inspired by his story and wisdom, we’d like to share some of Daddy-O’s thoughts on what early-stage startups — and businesses of all types, really — can learn from hip-hop artists.

After this primer, we also recommend studying up on the Notorious B.I.G’s 10 Crack Commandments, a rap introduction for beginner crack dealers that, oddly, also translates well to the startup world.

1. Put Your Creative People on the Front Lines

“If you do not keep your business people in the back room, patching people up, they’re going to muck it up,” says Daddy-O. “You let them talk, you’re done.”

Daddy-O is a big fan of putting the creative brains of an operation in the spotlight and keeping business people in the background for support.

In the hip-hop world, the creative people are the rappers — the business people include the record labels, the managers and anyone else helping distribute and manage the rappers’ music. Daddy-O explained that many successful rappers started off as independent artists — Master P, Cash Money, P. Diddy, to name a few. “The big checks come, they run to the big checks,” says Daddy-O. “And then ultimately, you see some of them fall off.” When business comes before art, the art suffers.

Startups and small businesses face this same problem if the business side of the operation comes before the product. Startups should focus on developing sound products, just as rappers should focusing on creating the best music that they can. Once the product, whether it be an app or a new LP, is at the top of its game, it shows — and the business will roll in from there.

Daddy-O compared business and art to a war zone — you have your foot soldiers (artists and creatives) out on the front lines, getting things done, and you have M*A*S*H (the business heads) back at the base, making sure everything runs smoothly.

2. Don’t Let Odds Get in the Way

“Passion is the kid in his mama’s house with one Marshall amp and a guitar, and his mother saying that he’s a bum, and he’s still doing it. Passion is those kids in a garage with a piece of software,” says Daddy-O. “If you’re going to be passionate about anything, you better not let odds get in the way. Because you can just strip the word passion out of there.”

Daddy-O explains that nothing should stop your passion, whether you’re a would-be rock star or a hopeful startup entrepreneur. For founding hip-hop artists, such as Daddy-O, who started rapping in 1979, there were a lot of critics of the genre who were calling it a fad or listening in disgust as DJs rubbed records the wrong way. “You think we listened?” Daddy-O asked. “It only made us scratch more. It only made us rap more, because we didn’t really care.”

Everybody’s odds are different, and you may think that attaining your business goal is impossible — if you put your passion behind it, though, you’ll always win. Whether you reach that final goal or just get pretty dang far along the way, you’ll learn something that makes it all worthwhile.

“You’re not going to be sure about most things you do in life. As songwriters facing a high degree of uncertainty, we embrace it. It actually energizes us. It’s the same butterflies that Michael Jackson got every time before he hit the stage. That degree of uncertainty is healthy if you look at it the right way — embrace it, because that’s what makes winning exciting.”

3. Never Stop Practicing

“Businesses fail, because in the beginning you’re always practicing, always using your gift — whether that’s writing code or a new rhyme. But after your program gets picked up or after the record company signs you, you stop.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” says Daddy-O, and he points to inspiration as the driver to keep practicing. Whether you were inspired by someone else’s work or you feel that your talent is a God-given gift, your only option is to stay inspired. Here’s a fun anecdote Daddy-O told:

“You’re in the beginning of a startup — you subscribe to Fast Company,Wired, Inc.; you’re following everything Guy Kawasaki says online; you bought all of Brian Solis’ books; you’re talking back and forth with Chris Brogan all the time, cause he’ll answer anyone; and you feel like you’re getting it. That’s until someone cuts you a check, and all of a sudden you’re out the window. All of a sudden your inspiration becomes your competition, and you’re no longer tweeting. What happened to that blog you were doing every week? What happened? Oh, you’ve got a check now. You don’t wanna fail? You don’t have an option — stay inspired.”

4. Use What You’ve Got

“The golden egg isn’t winning — it’s usage. Usage is enough. That’s all you have to do — use what you’ve got,” says Daddy-O. “That’s what Jay-Z does. He never stopped rhyming. That’s what Sean P. does. He never stopped rhyming. Every engineer I know, every developer I know, every designer I know, that’s all they do — they just use what they’ve got.

“You will continue to be inspired if you keep on doing it. There’s no way to be a break dancer and keep dancing, and not be inspired — because you will evolve if you keep doing it. You aren’t going to keep doing the same four moves every time. You’re going to get tired of the same four moves. If you’re writing code, you’re not going to keep writing the same four lines of code over and over — you’re going to get better.”

In the beginning, rap was about keeping it new — rappers were required to have a new rhyme every time they took the stage. Making rap albums was considered “whack,” explains Daddy-O, because it meant you were recording your routine, nothing was new. As a result, rappers were constantly writing new rhymes. To get better, you’ve got to use your mojo, says Daddy-O.

This lesson has stuck with Daddy-O over the years. His business motto is, “Your evolution is inevitable if you keep doing it.”

Using what you’ve got is just as true for equipment as it is for mojo. “You ask any guitarist, and they don’t want a crappy guitar,” says Daddy-O. “But I guarantee you, Flea plays just as well on a sucky bass as a good bass, because he learned to play on a sucky bass. Use what you’ve got, and it will get you to the next level.” Don’t be jealous of the shiny, new goods that other artists or entrepreneurs are working with — make the best of what you have. Whether that’s talent or equipment, use it until you’ve exhausted it, advises Daddy-O.

5. Find Where You Belong

When you listen to a hip-hop artist, it’s inevitable that he will give a shout-out to his hood — be it Brooklyn, Atlanta or the Bay, a rapper’s home turf is a part of his music.

Marketers would call this concept “knowing your market,” says Daddy-O, but rappers look at it as knowing where they belong in the music world.

For businesses, it is important to understand what cluster of people your product or service is targeting and then communicate and act accordingly.

BONUS: Do Not Handle Legal Work Alone

Along your journey to being a successful businessperson — or rapper — you’ll get the opportunity to do a lot of the work yourself, learning about different aspects of your industry and business. The only thing you should never categorize as a DIY project, says Daddy-O, is legal work. If you’re negotiating a contract, always seek legal advice. But other than that, he says, get your hands dirty.

]]> http://ishineyoushine.net/2011/12/14/article-5-things-your-business-can-learn-from-a-rapper/feed/ 0 http://ishineyoushine.net/2011/09/23/who-are-you-getting-embed-with-soundcloud-vs-bandcamp/ http://ishineyoushine.net/2011/09/23/who-are-you-getting-embed-with-soundcloud-vs-bandcamp/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:49:00 +0000 _hustle http://ishineyoushine.net/?p=1068

(From DMN, posted by Veronica Picciafuoco)

In the golden years of MySpace, if you didn’t have a MySpace page, you simply didn’t exist as an artist. Things have changed, but not the final goal: you still need to effectively position your music so that listeners can find you easily, listen further, and hopefully buy your stuff.

The difference is that now, there are tons of online windows for you to display your work. Yet most of them are not really optimized for music (YouTube, Facebook), difficult and costly to customize, or don’t give you enough control over the material (iTunes, streaming services, etc.)  Maybe the real action should start with the audio embed, with companies designed specifically around music.

[Continue reading...]

If the events of the last 48 hours make you feel some type of way then it’s a good enough start. That’s all it takes. Peace to Big Boi and Killer Mike. God bless us all. We have work to do…

And if you want to see how impassioned these students are, peep the view from the crowd…

Young Guru @ SAE NYC

Young Guru dropped a powerful jewel…“When you have less, you learn to master what you DO have.”

It’s almost back to the days of no rules, let alone an “even playing field.” A simple paradigm shift from “But I still need…” to “What I have is…” can yield some serious results in the process. I speak from experience.

I Shine, You Shine!

Video after the jump…

Video after the jump…

Lava lamps, Happy Days, mood rings, MASH, and Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview weren’t the only things to come out of the ’70s. In addition, copyright law was revised by the U.S. government granting artists and songwriters “termination rights.” This law states that 35 years after 1978 the recordings and songs “owned” by record labels or publishers would revert back to the artist or songwriter regardless of if the artist or songwriter was recouped, un-recouped, etc. In other words, the government said to the labels and publishers,“ 35 years is long enough. Times up, give them back control over their work.”

For those of you counting, 35 years from 1978 is 2013.

This means albums and songs from Cheap Trick, The Kinks, AC/DC, Kraftwerk, Carole King, Peter Gabriel, The Cars, The Buzzcocks, KC & the Sunshine Band, Kenny Rogers, David Bowie, Black Sabbath, Tom Waits, Yes, Sex Pistols, Boston, Ramones, Bryan Ferry, Heart, Uriah Heap, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Brian Eno, Hawkwind, Whitesnake, Queen, Kate Bush, and countless others are eligible to revert back to the artists. Which means that the record labels, in addition to losing control over distribution (think TuneCore) may now lose the rights to the only thing left keeping them alive, the recordings that they make money off of.

And each year that goes by, means another set of albums and songs becoming eligible to revert back to the artist.

As you can imagine, the labels are fighting it. According to the August 15th, 2011 New York Times article, “Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights,” Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America stated,

“We believe the termination right doesn’t apply to most sound recordings.” The RIAA’s position is that the artist never owned the recordings or songs in the first place so how could they revert back to them. They were just employees hired by the label to record their own songs. Therefore, the labels own the recordings forever (or until they enter public domain).

The issue here is over the legal definition of the term “Work For Hire”. If the artists were legally “work for hire” employees, the labels would be right. The RIAA and the labels saw this issue coming. In 1999, to assure their position and not lose rights, they were sneaky little scumbags and literally attempted to quietly slip a midnight amendment into a bill going through Congress called “The Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act”. The bill was about “retransmissions of broadcast signals” (I kid you not). The RIAA had four words added to this bill that would take away the right for artists to own their recordings if they signed a major label deal. These four words would, by default, legally define the artists as “work for hires” and therefore the rights to the recordings could not revert back to them.

To quote the very comprehensive and well written August of 2000, Austin Chronicle article “Work For Hire,” (which you should read!)…

In 1999, “Turns out the amendment was added by a staffer named Mitch Glazer from the office of Subcommittee Chairperson Howard Coble, R.-N.C., Glazer now works for the RIAA, the organization that sought to have those four words included in the first place, and did so with alarming quiet.”

Fortunately, they were caught. The words were noticed and artists, and their lawyers, went to war. The result was that these four little words are no longer part of the bill. Which means that the courts have yet to rule if the labels are right or if the artists are right in regards to the reversion of rights.

So, we approach 2013, and both labels, artists, and entrepreneurs are frantically attempting to either hold on to, get back, or acquire rights. Clearly, the labels are not going to go quiet into that dark night, however, this is yet another crack in the firmament of the traditional label system, and ultimately a win for the artists. Of course, the artists, now more than ever, will need to be able to market and distribute their newly-acquired/re-acquired rights, so that they can enjoy sustainable artistic careers on their own terms. The labels will argue that the artists can’t do this; only the labels could possibly market and distribute their records. That argument gets a little more tenuous with each passing day.

Stay tuned for the mother of legal battles. It’s going to get very interesting as manager and former label head and owner Irving Azoff sides with the interest of his client, The Eagles, and takes on the very industry he helped create.

Mos Def

“Beware of artists, because they mix with all classes of people. Therefore they’re the most dangerous.”

- Queen Victoria, as quoted by Mos Def

We live in an instant society. But art is the antithesis of this. Art needs to marinate. It’s not sold like a Website and it’s not developed by the school system. Great artists are outsiders who go their own way. They challenge convention. And since they’re doing something different the public is not ready for them until they’re fully-realized. When you can’t be criticized for your playing, when you can sing on key, when you’ve got something to say, then you’ve got a chance of hooking up with the public.

- by Bob Lefsetz