“The gatekeepers don’t control the gates,” you hear G-Eazy say in that easy twang of his, standing out, even in black and white, against the forlorn wall behind him that only screams GIRLS. “And the powers that be aren’t as powerful.” What a statement, right? A rising emcee, Johnny Cashed out, rocking a black leather jacket with all those zippers, Eazy comes from Hip Hop’s premier second city. Not Houston, not Miami or D.C. I’m talking about Oakland. An entity so singular in the Hip Hop space that it created E-40, the man of a million sounds, the pimp himself, Too $hort, and one of the realest motherfuckers that ever lived in Mac Dre. Their styles have been myriad, just plain different, but distinctly Oaktown. Maybe it’s all the fog sneaking over the bay bridge, but Oakland seems enclosed by some sort of magical spell from the rest of mainstream Hip Hop. Call it the Gondor of Rap: Oakland has no king. Oakland needs no king. So it’s weird, frankly, to have the star of that show right now be G-Eazy. He’s a lanky kid who’s made his bed using a signature cool that’s as easily duplicated as it is terribly executed. In short, he’s a phenomenon. Last year’s album, These Things Happen, debuted at number three on the Billboard 200. No major label backing him. No millions of marketing dollars. Just a stretch of open road winding from venue to venue to festival, America’s failing infrastructure guiding him to merch stands and meet-and-greets one pothole at a time.
Photo by Alex McDonell/ @_AlexMcDonell
Self Made
If you went to any school in these here United States of America that rhetoric was poured into your mind ad-nauseum. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they said. You can do anything you want here if you try, they said. And you believed them. I believed them. My parents, especially, believed them. Born to Jamaican parents who came here with dreams in their pockets, the gatekeepers were still in place back then. You had to get an education, and you have to go hard at it. You get the best grades, go to the best college, and wow everyone with your sparkling, taut intellect. Do you want to be a star? You have to go through a prominent DJ or a manager with connections. That’s just to get you to the label. Now, the game is wide open, and emcees like G-Eazy know it. “You don’t need mainstream media outlets, the big TV looks, or the magazine covers,” he tells Julian Mitchell of Forbes. “Print isn’t what it was 10 years ago, and TV ratings aren’t what they were 10 years ago, and social media certainly isn’t what it was 10 years ago – the power is shifting.” But, what does that even mean? It means what matters most is figuring out a way to make money off this thing, off your inner world, all on your own. In a previous interview with DX, Eazy had this to say about the merch game, “Merch is like selling drugs.” And on its importance he went ahead and broke it down, “My merch game sucked for a long time. And to be fair, I don’t think the music was there yet. I don’t think the following was there, but as far as everything goes, the merch is a really big money maker for artists right now. Obviously, we all know that the music doesn’t sell like it used to, and the labels aren’t putting up the kind of money, so what does an independent artist do? How do you monetize that popularity as an artist? And a t-shirt is something that you can always sell. It’s like selling the consumers a way of buying into the brand of supporting the artist they believe in. But it’s also about trying to make something cool, not just slapping a name on something.” He’s right. Staring into a setting sun over Golden Gate Park for SF’s Outside Lands festival, I saw swathes of people wobble drunkenly over to Eazy’s set, and when the music blared out in between the pines the crowd cheered as though they were not just being entertained, they were being understood.
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The Wild Wild Internet & You
And that’s what this is all about. Individual brands are the new gatekeepers. Your personality, your style and your emotional life are the Internet’s hottest commodity. That’s right, you’re selling feels now, and the stakes is high. T Magazine, in a brilliant piece penned by Michael Rock, pretty much said just that. “There has long been an ideological divide between the utilitarian and the emotional, between rational design and the decorative arts, but the balance of power is shifting: In the battle between the head and the gut, the gut’s now cleaning up,” spun Rock. “The empathy economy is booming. Facts are out, feelings are in. This is attributed, at least in part, to a kind of brand mania that asserts that everything from your razor blade to your public library to the I.R.S. needs to have a relatable personality. Everyone is in the business of brand management…” I’ll just go ahead right now and say it’s because the Internet.
Everything is a visual commodity, and everything must be carefully pruned to meet the all seeing eye of the other person’s remarkably sprawling tastes. We’re bombarded by so many images now, we’ve seen most of everything. Can our minds even keep up? Who knows. Relatability is the new creativity, and the stars are made out of those who connect on a deeply personal level with their audience. And not just outer struggles, which is what made 90s Hip Hop so actively aspirational, but individual thoughts and feelings. Think Drake being thought of as not only an amazing artist but by some as a kindred spirit travelling the same feely road. Think Eazy carefully pouring his tiniest agonies and most meaningful triumphs over muted, haunting chords. They are colorful wisps of an emotion barely felt but somehow globally understood. This is what you call a brand, and this is, I suppose, what we’ve all been waiting for. Turning feelings from subjective, personal events into global, universal ones was the inevitability of the web. Acceptance, that barely there yet all-encompassing human emotion is at the epicenter of our artistic worlds. Ask Drake how that’s working out for him. Ask all the emcees who come through with rappity-rap how that’s working out for them. “It’s actually shifting to a build it and they will come, for the first time,” says Eazy to Forbes. “You see the death of the superstar, and you see the birth of all these self-made stars.” So here we are watching all these self-made stars twinkle in emotionally curated colors. Or, in Eazy’s case, a black and white that speaks volumes.
Andre Grant is an NYC native turned L.A. transplant that has contributed to a few different properties on the web and is now the Features Editor for HipHopDX. He’s also trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Follow him on Twitter @drejones.
