Billboard Biz recently published an in-depth article about Strange Music. In the newest issue of Billboard Magazine there is a column entitled “Independent Study.” This column will profile different independent labels. It’s focus is on companies that are defining the Do It Yourself era.
You can read part of this article below. A link to read the full article can be found at the bottom of the page.
Tech N9ne pauses to examine the still-wrapped box of condoms that has just been generously thrown onstage. It’s a sold-out hometown show at the French baroque Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland in Kansas City, Mo., and the crowd is feverish. Minutes earlier, Tech, born Aaron Dontez Yates, confided to the 3,000 fans in attendance that he’s just beaten a pesky cold and, this being the final stretch of a 50-date tour, fully intends to get some “good pussy” tonight. But it won’t be with the help of the proffered contraceptives.
“This ain’t gonna cut it,” he concludes, in the gruff, theatrical baritone of a professional wrestler. Then he offers the box to a hapless cameraman, stage left, and half sings the punch line: “I only use Magnums!”
Tech N9ne’s fans aren’t the usual poster-and-a-T-shirt sort. More than 7,000—that he knows of, at least, through his official website—have tattooed his name, face or logo on their bodies. Many more spend upwards of $11 a head on flasks, baby onesies and G-strings at his frequent and uniformly rowdy concerts. He says he moved to the outskirts of town in order to stay out of the fray during off-tour stretches at home, but recently two 19-year-old girls managed to track him down and bang on his door at 3:30 in the morning.
That kind of behavior, provoked to only a slightly lesser degree by other artists who fly under the banner of Strange Music, the independent label Tech founded with partner Travis O’Guin in 1999, has begun to convince the 41-year-old rapper that he’s transcended the role of an artist and become something more akin to a cult leader—an issue he addresses on his 2011 song “Cult Leader.”
“What we’ve built is so massive that I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop until the world ends or a meteor or asteroid comes and fucks us all up,” says Tech, standing in a corner office at Strange’s 17,500-square-foot main building in Lee’s Summit, Mo. It’s 1:30 in the afternoon the day of the concert, eight hours before showtime. “I’m confined by a responsibility to these people that have my name on them. I’ve got to maintain myself because they believe in me.”
Getting people to believe in him used to be Tech’s greatest struggle. A misfit from childhood (“Too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids”), his music has always come from the vantage of an outsider. In 2002—nine years before he had a No. 4 debut on the Billboard 200 with the 2011 album All 6’s and 7’s, which sold 55,000 in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan—he put out a street single called “The Industry Is Punks,” on which he lamented his inability to fit in at radio.
“I can’t get wit it,” he rhymed, in a booming, rapid-fire flow somewhere between Chuck D and Twista. “Record labels in the industry are sick wit it/PDs that really don’t know a hit for shit/Kick the bitch, if you diss my hit, you might get pistol-whipped.”
You can read the full article by clicking the link below.
Independent Study: Strange Music
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