BREAKING: NAS & Mystikal on Strange Music SOON?
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Tech N9ne: inspirational rapper
A rapper who has made it big with nothing but hard work? Surely a fairytale. Tech N9ne reveals his battle plan
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* Angus Batey 140
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o Angus Batey
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 22.50 GMT
o Article history
Tech N9ne
The biggest-selling rapper you've never heard of … Tech N9ne
He's the biggest-selling independent rapper in the US, and in 2008, Kanye West and Jay-Z were the only hip-hop artists to make more money from touring. He has shifted more than a million albums and co-owns a record label that may well be the most successful music business of its day. Yet you've almost certainly never heard of Tech N9ne – and that, you sense, is quite exciting to him.
"My quest has always been to get my story to the rest o' the people," the 37-year-old Aaron Yates explains, gently stroking his beard. "The first show we did in San Diego, seven people came. We performed like it was 7,000 people, so when we came back, word of mouth meant we played to 100 people. The next time, it was 500 – now we sell out the [1,000-capacity] House of Blues there. It's wonderful to see it grow like that – and that's what we're gonna have to do in Europe. We haven't done a seven in a long time, but I could still do a seven. And I will do a seven. Even if it's two people in the audience when we go over there, fuck it."
Downstairs, in the Kansas City offices of Tech's Strange Music label, there's a wipe-clean map of the United States tacked to the wall. In chinagraph pencil markings, the rapper's last US tour is plotted in military detail, taking in remote cities in Montana, Idaho, Nebraska – the kinds of places most artists never visit. Away from the tour itinerary, other cities are circled: places Tech has never been, but where the Strange Music mail-order team have noticed clusters of shirt-buying fans; or where he's already established, but hasn't played for a while. The battle plan includes sorties to no fewer than three Alaskan cities, but Hawaii is a problem: the islands' main promoter is worried that rabid Tech N9ne fans will cause a riot should he ever play a show there.
It's like a glimpse into a parallel universe, where hard work has trumped the hype machine. But it's all very real. Growing under the media radar, selling DVDs rather than having videos plastered all over MTV, playing 200 gigs a year and taking his bizarre music and hyperactive stage show to parts of the country his contemporaries don't bother with, Tech and co have built a multi-million-dollar business that is geographically, financially and philosophically set apart from the rest of the music industry.
But that industry is finally starting to take notice. It helps, of course, that Tech N9ne makes music with the potential to reach a huge audience. His sound mixes gritty, sometimes rock-based beats with gothic keyboards and atmospheres, and his often confessional lyrics appeal strongly to emo and metal fans. His rap moniker is a reference to his ability – a corruption of Technique Number Nine – rather than the Tec-9 handgun of gangsta rap lore, and he shares with some of his midwestern peers a flair for high-speed, machine-gun-syllable rapping. "For me, I think, it's musical overload," he reasons. "Got so much to say, such little time."
The story he wants to tell is complex, urgent and multifaceted: a tale of how a ghetto kid from the middle of the US grew up wrestling with his demons. Show Me a God, the opening track of his seventh album, K.O.D., finds him struggling to reconcile his mother's faith with her history of debilitating illness. Elsewhere, he compares the compulsive infidelity that wrecked his marriage to a form of mental illness. And throughout the album – the title stands for King of Darkness – he plays with the belief, sincerely held among certain sections of his fan base, that his and his label's success results from him having sold his soul to the devil.
But even with such a vivid story, the odds were always going to be stacked against Tech N9ne. The "flyover states" from which he hails are largely irrelevant in the coastal-dominated rap music business. So in the mid-1990s, Tech headed to Los Angeles, scoring a deal with Warner Brothers. He got a track on the soundtrack to Gang Related, Tupac Shakur's final film, and secured a slot on an influential LA hip-hop radio show where he would trade verses with Jay-Z one week, Eminem the next, surprising the stars with his feats of verbal dexterity.
"I was the only dude writin' raps backwards," he grins, before reciting a line that sounds like: "Cuff yoy ffih slivved eh-ra taw yoy pee-shrow," but with the slips, slides and elisions you'd expect to hear if you listened while slowly rewinding a tape of someone rapping. "The line before it was 'Maybe get up in a club and shoot it up and make a panic at the dis-co'," he explains, drawing out the final word and changing its normal sound. "Then the next line is 'Fuck you if devils are what you worship,' but I said it backwards. I used to do it all the time, but it's so hard. I gotta know what I'm gonna say, and it's hard to make it rhyme with the words you said before. 'Worship' backwards is 'Pees-ro,' so I had to put 'dees-co' into that style to rhyme it. So now you know why people would say I'm a devil-worshipper!" He cackles. "But it's not devilry – it's dyslexia: least, that's the nearest thing to it."
Nevertheless, his career failed to reach lift-off. Returning, disillusioned, to Kansas City, he met Travis O'Guin, owner of a furniture repair company. O'Guin didn't know anything about the music business, but was convinced of Tech's innate good nature and offered to help. His first move was to secure Tech's release from his record deal, the next to extricate the rapper from a string of ad-hoc contracts with various managers. It proved a drawn-out process, but by the turn of the century, the pair had set up Strange Music and released the album Anghelic.
Strange's new home in the Kansas City suburbs features plush, wood-panelled offices, an in-house video-editing facility and a warehouse. Outside there is parking for the fleet of sleeper-buses Strange now owns, and a dedicated recording studio and rehearsal space is being built.
"We don't have a Def Jam Midwest, or a Sony Midwest, or an EMI Midwest," Tech says. "That's why we had to build this ourselves. It used to be just people from Kansas City on the label, but we reached out to Prozac, from Saginaw, Michigan, and we've just signed [Bay Area rapper] Brotha Lynch Hung. I would love to have Mystikal on Strange Music, when he gets outta jail. And there's been talk of Nas probably comin' – I think he's about to be done with his deal out there [in New York] and lookin' for somewhere else to go."
The notion of one of hip-hop's leading figures signing to an indie label based in the middle of nowhere might seem odd, but it's hard to imagine a better move for him. As the record industry crisis deepens, Strange is making money the old-fashioned way, building careers and selling music. What was once the disadvantage of its location now works in its favour: Kansas City is equidistant from LA and New York. And when the studio is finished – O'Guin estimates next year – they will own all the principal tools of production.
"It's a beautiful thing that's happening right now, man," says Tech, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction. "When you're in your own world, you don't know what's outside your world, so you can do whatever you want. Now when I step outside my world, I wake up and I'm sittin' next to KRS-ONE and Damian Marley and Raekwon at the Rock the Bells launch party, and it's like, 'How the fuck did I get here?' And I think I got here from what's inside – just bein' myself, and doin' it in a style a lot o' people couldn't do. And just workin'."
A rapper who has made it big with nothing but hard work? Surely a fairytale. Tech N9ne reveals his battle plan
* Buzz up!
* Digg it
* Angus Batey 140
*
o Angus Batey
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 22.50 GMT
o Article history
Tech N9ne
The biggest-selling rapper you've never heard of … Tech N9ne
He's the biggest-selling independent rapper in the US, and in 2008, Kanye West and Jay-Z were the only hip-hop artists to make more money from touring. He has shifted more than a million albums and co-owns a record label that may well be the most successful music business of its day. Yet you've almost certainly never heard of Tech N9ne – and that, you sense, is quite exciting to him.
"My quest has always been to get my story to the rest o' the people," the 37-year-old Aaron Yates explains, gently stroking his beard. "The first show we did in San Diego, seven people came. We performed like it was 7,000 people, so when we came back, word of mouth meant we played to 100 people. The next time, it was 500 – now we sell out the [1,000-capacity] House of Blues there. It's wonderful to see it grow like that – and that's what we're gonna have to do in Europe. We haven't done a seven in a long time, but I could still do a seven. And I will do a seven. Even if it's two people in the audience when we go over there, fuck it."
Downstairs, in the Kansas City offices of Tech's Strange Music label, there's a wipe-clean map of the United States tacked to the wall. In chinagraph pencil markings, the rapper's last US tour is plotted in military detail, taking in remote cities in Montana, Idaho, Nebraska – the kinds of places most artists never visit. Away from the tour itinerary, other cities are circled: places Tech has never been, but where the Strange Music mail-order team have noticed clusters of shirt-buying fans; or where he's already established, but hasn't played for a while. The battle plan includes sorties to no fewer than three Alaskan cities, but Hawaii is a problem: the islands' main promoter is worried that rabid Tech N9ne fans will cause a riot should he ever play a show there.
It's like a glimpse into a parallel universe, where hard work has trumped the hype machine. But it's all very real. Growing under the media radar, selling DVDs rather than having videos plastered all over MTV, playing 200 gigs a year and taking his bizarre music and hyperactive stage show to parts of the country his contemporaries don't bother with, Tech and co have built a multi-million-dollar business that is geographically, financially and philosophically set apart from the rest of the music industry.
But that industry is finally starting to take notice. It helps, of course, that Tech N9ne makes music with the potential to reach a huge audience. His sound mixes gritty, sometimes rock-based beats with gothic keyboards and atmospheres, and his often confessional lyrics appeal strongly to emo and metal fans. His rap moniker is a reference to his ability – a corruption of Technique Number Nine – rather than the Tec-9 handgun of gangsta rap lore, and he shares with some of his midwestern peers a flair for high-speed, machine-gun-syllable rapping. "For me, I think, it's musical overload," he reasons. "Got so much to say, such little time."
The story he wants to tell is complex, urgent and multifaceted: a tale of how a ghetto kid from the middle of the US grew up wrestling with his demons. Show Me a God, the opening track of his seventh album, K.O.D., finds him struggling to reconcile his mother's faith with her history of debilitating illness. Elsewhere, he compares the compulsive infidelity that wrecked his marriage to a form of mental illness. And throughout the album – the title stands for King of Darkness – he plays with the belief, sincerely held among certain sections of his fan base, that his and his label's success results from him having sold his soul to the devil.
But even with such a vivid story, the odds were always going to be stacked against Tech N9ne. The "flyover states" from which he hails are largely irrelevant in the coastal-dominated rap music business. So in the mid-1990s, Tech headed to Los Angeles, scoring a deal with Warner Brothers. He got a track on the soundtrack to Gang Related, Tupac Shakur's final film, and secured a slot on an influential LA hip-hop radio show where he would trade verses with Jay-Z one week, Eminem the next, surprising the stars with his feats of verbal dexterity.
"I was the only dude writin' raps backwards," he grins, before reciting a line that sounds like: "Cuff yoy ffih slivved eh-ra taw yoy pee-shrow," but with the slips, slides and elisions you'd expect to hear if you listened while slowly rewinding a tape of someone rapping. "The line before it was 'Maybe get up in a club and shoot it up and make a panic at the dis-co'," he explains, drawing out the final word and changing its normal sound. "Then the next line is 'Fuck you if devils are what you worship,' but I said it backwards. I used to do it all the time, but it's so hard. I gotta know what I'm gonna say, and it's hard to make it rhyme with the words you said before. 'Worship' backwards is 'Pees-ro,' so I had to put 'dees-co' into that style to rhyme it. So now you know why people would say I'm a devil-worshipper!" He cackles. "But it's not devilry – it's dyslexia: least, that's the nearest thing to it."
Nevertheless, his career failed to reach lift-off. Returning, disillusioned, to Kansas City, he met Travis O'Guin, owner of a furniture repair company. O'Guin didn't know anything about the music business, but was convinced of Tech's innate good nature and offered to help. His first move was to secure Tech's release from his record deal, the next to extricate the rapper from a string of ad-hoc contracts with various managers. It proved a drawn-out process, but by the turn of the century, the pair had set up Strange Music and released the album Anghelic.
Strange's new home in the Kansas City suburbs features plush, wood-panelled offices, an in-house video-editing facility and a warehouse. Outside there is parking for the fleet of sleeper-buses Strange now owns, and a dedicated recording studio and rehearsal space is being built.
"We don't have a Def Jam Midwest, or a Sony Midwest, or an EMI Midwest," Tech says. "That's why we had to build this ourselves. It used to be just people from Kansas City on the label, but we reached out to Prozac, from Saginaw, Michigan, and we've just signed [Bay Area rapper] Brotha Lynch Hung. I would love to have Mystikal on Strange Music, when he gets outta jail. And there's been talk of Nas probably comin' – I think he's about to be done with his deal out there [in New York] and lookin' for somewhere else to go."
The notion of one of hip-hop's leading figures signing to an indie label based in the middle of nowhere might seem odd, but it's hard to imagine a better move for him. As the record industry crisis deepens, Strange is making money the old-fashioned way, building careers and selling music. What was once the disadvantage of its location now works in its favour: Kansas City is equidistant from LA and New York. And when the studio is finished – O'Guin estimates next year – they will own all the principal tools of production.
"It's a beautiful thing that's happening right now, man," says Tech, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction. "When you're in your own world, you don't know what's outside your world, so you can do whatever you want. Now when I step outside my world, I wake up and I'm sittin' next to KRS-ONE and Damian Marley and Raekwon at the Rock the Bells launch party, and it's like, 'How the fuck did I get here?' And I think I got here from what's inside – just bein' myself, and doin' it in a style a lot o' people couldn't do. And just workin'."
Tech been a fan of dude for a minute though. Back in the day that was always to dream collab was Tech with Mystikal. The problem will be who would want to fuck with him....but going to jail and getting your shit together works wonders on a reputation.
Mike Vic can still play ball...and other professional athletes get away with MURDER and still hit the field lol....
Im not a fan of what Mystikal did by any means but I dont hate him. Pain makes for Good music as well.
As far as him getting singed I doubt it but the thought is interesting.
I could see Nas going to KOTCH before SM. but I guess well see about that as well.
Mike Vic can still play ball...and other professional athletes get away with MURDER and still hit the field lol....
Im not a fan of what Mystikal did by any means but I dont hate him. Pain makes for Good music as well.
As far as him getting singed I doubt it but the thought is interesting.
I could see Nas going to KOTCH before SM. but I guess well see about that as well.
Yeah and I've been a Tech fan for a minute too. But if I found out that he raped a bitch with all of his friends and then tried to SUE her, I'd tell Tech to fuck off too. There'd be someone out there with an ebay account that gets a nicely stuffed box full of Tech shit for cheap.
I don't invite rapists into my circle of friends. I dunno about you guys.
I don't invite rapists into my circle of friends. I dunno about you guys.
Yeah there was a time when Mystikal was one of my favorite rappers. Years ago I would have loved to here a Mystikal/Tech/KLC song. Mystikal has a style and sound all his own. I was more a fan of his No Limit shit than his Jive.
As far as everyone calling him a rapist and that shit. I would wonder how many of you feel the same way about 2pac?
As far as everyone calling him a rapist and that shit. I would wonder how many of you feel the same way about 2pac?
I was never a huge fan of Tupac either. And either way, I was too young to give a fuck what he was up to then so I don't really know much about that. Was dude actually convicted of that crime? I remember hearing some shit about it on Welcome to Death Row.
WTF is up with Mystikal anyway? All the guy does is yell into a mic and when he's not doing that he's mumbling. If you want someone to do that, at least sign Gordy.
WTF is up with Mystikal anyway? All the guy does is yell into a mic and when he's not doing that he's mumbling. If you want someone to do that, at least sign Gordy.
2pac was convicted of sexual assult and was out on bail pending appeal of his conviction at the time of his death.
Mystikals style is a love it or hate it thing. I know most of my friends never wanted to here it becasue they couldn't understand what he was saying. Back in 98 I liked rowdy rap and Mystikal had a unique style. He was never the best rapper but he does have skill.
Mystikals style is a love it or hate it thing. I know most of my friends never wanted to here it becasue they couldn't understand what he was saying. Back in 98 I liked rowdy rap and Mystikal had a unique style. He was never the best rapper but he does have skill.
I think he said this to The Professor during their interview on the same day this article dropped.
I would think that NAS can go wherever he wants, and jumping on the label would be more like a project than a career.
I can't see this happening with either artist, but Mystikal being the more likely of the two.
I would think that NAS can go wherever he wants, and jumping on the label would be more like a project than a career.
I can't see this happening with either artist, but Mystikal being the more likely of the two.
