rapalot records interview

7/27/2019 RapALot Records Interview

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'It Was Like Flies To Honey':25 Years Of Rap-A-Lot

Recordsby ANDREW NOZFebruary 10, 2012

There might not be another strain of music more perpetually

misunderstood than gangsta rap was in its golden age.

Though most commonly associated with its superficial

negativity — comically absurd slasher film violence (oftendirected at women) and vulgarity played for laughs that

became more problematic as the music was embraced by

the American mainstream and left the musicians vulnerable

to rhetoric from parental groups and conservative outsiders

— the first wave of street-minded hip-hop was also brimming

with a more constructive energy.

Its greatest artists took deeply emotional looks at the criminalcultures and ghettos of America while explicitly indicting the

systems that created them. For a brief moment, as both a

vehicle for a revolutionary message and a source of

economic independence, it felt like a legitimate threat to the

status quo.

Perhaps no other label embodied this conscious rebel spirit

better than Rap-A-Lot Records. Borne in 1987 out of founder

J. Prince's used car lot as a way to keep his little brother off

the street, the label quickly grew into a pillar of the Houston

hip-hop community. Prince was the entrepreneur at the heart

of the enterprise, assembling its flagship act, the Geto Boys,



guys that was not going to school and I told them if they

would go to school I'd support them in rap.

What had you been doing for work prior to that?

Prior to that I had a car lot. I was selling cars. There's a

street called Shepard St. in Houston, Texas, that's full of car

lots and that was my thing at the time. I knew all these

different people — the guys that was in the street and all the

athletes, so I was able to have an edge on your average car

salesman. That was my foundation.

You were selling used cars?

Used cars. But it was exotic used cars that some of my

associates had that they would let me get on consignment.

So it was really easy for me to get one [from one] of my

football guys or one of my other friends and slap me a five or

ten thousand dollar profit on a vehicle.

What do you think it was about your personality that

drove you to build those relationships?

Well I grew up where poverty was a serious burden on my

family and that had a major part in my mind developing. I

wanted to break that poverty curse that existed. Even as a

kid I was somewhat abnormal for my age when it came totrying to have a dollar. I was seven or eight years old and a

lot of [other kids] were thinking about playing but I was

thinking about how to get a dollar, whether it was through

cutting yards or whatever it may have been.



How did you guys end up forming the Geto Boys?

I fell in love with the name first. That was a name that I came

up with because I felt like there were ghettos all over the

world and I thought that it was a name that I could replenish

over and over again if I wanted to. From there I had to figure

out the members. I had to keep trying things over and over

again until I got the chemistry that I wanted to have.

Eventually it consisted of Scarface, Willie D and Bushwick

[Bill] — three guys that didn't know one another but had astrong passion for rapping and was willing to follow my

vision.

Yeah those first few records, back when they still had

the "H" in their name, were more on the Run-D.M.C. tip.

Oh yeah, well of course. The members was different. In thebeginning stages I let the other guys write with their own

visions because I didn't have the time [to give them input]. I

was in another business trying to make money. But

eventually I had invested so much money into the group I

came to a stage where I said, "This is my last piece of

money and I'mma do this my way." That became a problemwith the [original members] because they felt like my lyrics,

the subject matter that I wanted them to write about was too

deep.



So I got rid of all of them and got people that was willing to

make my lyrics that I was writing rhyme. I wasn't a rapper so

I couldn't make raps rhyme or nothing but I had subjects and

different events that I was way more familiar with than the

rappers were.

What do you think pushed you into that darker and more

explicit territory?

I think it had a lot to do with 5th Ward, our hood. We were

only holding a mirror up to things that we had lived through in

our surroundings, which are the same [things] that exist in

ghettos around the world. So it was easy for people to

embrace our subject matter.

How did your brother feel about getting shuffled out of

the group?

I don't think my brother liked it. A lot of my family members

didn't like it. But they didn't understand that you had to

separate personal things from business. A lot of them didn't

understand it until I bought them houses and cars later ... I

was a genius then. But during the storm it was hard to

embrace me replacing [my brother with] Scarface.

How do you jump into making records in those days?

Where did you find the knowledge necessary to get

them out there?



Through trial and error I was able to figure out things rather

quickly. When you're from the hood, when you're from a

situation where sharks swim around you every 24-hours,

then it's almost a part of your character to figure out how to

survive. This was something that I was used to. Even though

it was corporate America the principles of survival were the

same.

Were there any existing record labels that you looked at

as a blueprint?

Well I was inspired by the thing that Russell Simmons and

Def Jam was doing but I didn't have any insight from a

business perspective to how they was doing it. Being from

the South I was totally isolated from getting wisdom from

those guys. Matter of fact, some [people in the industry] that

I'd seek wisdom from gave me the wrong information to try to

get rid of me.

But once again, [being from] where I'm from, I understood. It

was almost like a turf situation, to give you an analogy from a

street perspective. In the streets where I'm from they play

the turf game, [people] want to control certain blocks. It wasthe same principle where the music game was concerned.

So I understood the game a lot of the New Yorkers and East

Coast guys was playing right away. They even had a lot of

their DJs and their people in Houston, Texas, that was



controlling the airwaves. They had their s—- together.

So I had to figure out a way to circumvent them monopolizing

the South the way they was doing. So we figured that out

and a lot of times it wasn't always pretty but the results were

fruitful and that's the reason the South is so dominant today.

It's because of the trails that we blazed way back then.

When you say it wasn't pretty what are some examples

of that?

People don't just volunteer and smile and give you a hug and

say, "Come and take my place." Sometimes you have to get

creative and make different things happen to let one know

that [you're] for real. And that's about as clear as I can get on

that.

What other challenges did you face as an indie?

It was a challenge selling the records and then collecting on

the records. We had to figure out how to collect our money

[from distributors]. Which, you know, some exciting events

took place because some of these guys would sell your

records and then hire the police to stop you from collecting.

[Laughs] So we had to figure out how to maneuver around

those events and get paid. So I was glad to graduate from

that independent world.



When did you make that step towards the majors?

Well my first move was with Rick Rubin, that was my first

deal I cut because of the respect I had for him being one of

the creators of Def Jam. At the time Rick Rubin was with

Geffen Records so I had done some homework on David

Geffen and they had a real powerful machine at the time. So

I did a deal with Rick [for The Geto Boys ]. After doing that

deal David Geffen heard our stuff and, you know, he reallyexercised his racism when he heard our music. I say that

because he had heavy metal artists that had the same lyrical

content, if not worse than what we were doing.

[Ed. note: This is not a new charge by Prince. Both he and

Geffen have spoken about the 1990 controversy before .

When reached for comment, Geffen said this: "The lyrics of

that record describes cutting off a woman's breasts and f—-

ing the dead body. etc, etc etc. I suggest that NPR listen to

the record and decide for themselves. I refused to release

any record with lyrics that glamorize violence against

women." ]

But, long story short, Rick Rubin was able to get dropped

from his deal because of [Geffen] not wanting to distribute

the Geto Boys. He went on to do a real lucrative deal with

Warner Brothers. That album that I gave Rick Rubin, it was



the same album [Grip It! On Another Level, later reissued as

The Geto Boys ] that I had already sold a million units on

[independently] and I put four new songs on that same

album and then did another half a million under the Warner

Brothers situation. But I had signed the deal because I

wanted that David Geffen machine behind the group, so after

that I had to convince Rick Rubin to give me my freedom.

And I went on and did a deal with Priority.

How did the Priority situation come to be?

Once I had established that I could sell records, all of the

record labels that had turned me down prior was trying to get

at me. But what was attractive about Priority was that they

were an established independent with a major distribution

deal but then they actually had people in there that knew

how to work the records properly at retail. They had an edge

on a lot of the record labels. So I hurried up and embraced

that deal and sold a bunch of records.

I created and blazed a trail that everybody came in and

followed. I started releasing a crazy amount of records a

year. Prior to that that was foreign land to a lot of the labels,they didn't feel like one should be releasing that many

albums like that. I was letting them go left and right and

that's the formula that all my good friends from Master P to

Cash Money to Tony Draper, all of these guys followed and



successfully was doing.

How were you going about finding the talent to sustain

that pace?

Back then it was coming at me left and right. S—-, wherever

we would stop I was getting hundreds and thousands of

[demos]. We was hot so I guess we attracted a lot of talent. It

was like flies coming to honey.

Are there any records from that era that you thought

were underrated?

One that jumps out at me immediately was the Odd Squad.

The Odd Squad was a group before their time. But there had

been quite a few of them. Matter of fact, basically everything

we released was slept on to a certain extent because wedidn't have the muscle that a lot of the majors had to get the

maximum amount of sales.

What do you think about the recent changes in the

music industry? Do you think there's still opportunity

for someone to build an indie empire on the level that

you did?

Well ... no not really. A few years ago I used to say that there

was a conspiracy taking place to kill off and destroy all future



black entrepreneurs, to [prevent them from doing] the same

thing that myself and Cash Money and all of them did. And I

was right. When I was making that statement people were

looking at me like I was crazy and now it's reality.

Not only are the record labels not giving out those type of

deals anymore the whole structure of being able to get that

kind of money [is gone]. S—- look at 360 [deals], which is the

deal that the majors like to give out now, where they're

involved in every aspect. I remember when I started up withthat 360 format and they told me I was wrong. They was like,

"There's no way you're supposed to manage and [run the

label]." And now they're trying to survive with that same

contract.

How is Rap-A-Lot adapting to the current marketplace?

I mean ... I'll tell you man ... this whole game right now is a

game that I'm not that excited about anymore because of the

new structure and all these different ways of being able to

get music without paying. It kind of kills my spirit from an

entrepreneurial perspective.

At what point did that disenchantment set in?

When that Internet became so dominant where it enabled

rapalot records interview

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