Exclusive: Chamillionaire gives up some serious game about the “smoke and mirrors” of the music business and details his own recent lessons learned in regards to industry rule #4080.
The average rapper is always late for interviews. Always.
But Chamillionaire is not your average rapper.
Cham called five minutes before his scheduled telephone interview with HipHopDX was to begin. Clearly, the saying “bout my business” is an understatement when it comes to one of Hip Hop’s consummate grinders.
Unfortunately, even with his above average work ethic one of the pillars of the Houston Hip Hop scene found himself over the last few years staring face-to-face with the same indifferent industry types that don’t care whether you succeed with hard work or just dumb luck. And so once Koopa’s sophomore solo effort, 2007’s Ultimate Victory, failed to match the nearly double-platinum success of his breakthrough debut, 2005’s The Sound of Revenge, and there were no more Grammy Awards and millions of dollars being made in ringtone sales like Cham netted for his now ubiquitous sing-a-long song about police harassment, “Ridin’,” his label, Universal Records, went into stereotypical panic mode. The rapid-fire rhymer and hypnotic hook crafter was subsequently pushed to make increasingly more Pop fare (ala his Tom Petty-sampling single “Good Morning” in 2009) and even at one point had the pen pulled from his own hand, finding himself in a room with the same electric-guitar playing mountain climbers GZA bemoaned 20 years ago attempting to write a song for one of Hip Hop’s most impressive songwriters.
[kkytv id=”CtwJvgPJ9xw”]
And so, tired of the tactics of his desperate-for-a-hit recording home, Chamillionaire chucked the deuce to the major-label system and is now out to show the entire industry what revenge really sounds like by proving that projects like his just-released Ammunition EP can be sold directly from artist to fan without the interference of stubbornly single-driven record companies.
During his must-read discussion with DX for any aspiring artist, Cham elaborated on his “test” to see just how far an artist can go without a label (or even iTunes and Amazon). The “Tech Conference Tourist,” as he bills himself on his Twitter page, additionally revealed what “the biggest lie ever told” to artists by record company staffers actually is, and what lies artists themselves tell to fool you the consumer.
Source: Hip Hop DX
