Ballin’ on a shoestring

Money and hip hop will always go together, even in places where only the latter exists. Coming straight outta Brownsville, Brooklyn – the second biggest project housing unit in the US – El Tysheikh talks about making it in the rap game even if you can’t do the math. 

Vice: So Sheikh, what’s your story?
El Tysheikh: Me and my boys, we were the first artists signed to Rawkus. We was called The Rose Family. Look, I just had so many opportunities and the door just closed. It was so close so many times …

We went all over the country, I’m talking like ’97. That’s when hip hop mattered. I helped spend a lot of money, I’m not saying I didn’t. My cousin, Master Foul, he never wanted to come home. He was just a party animal. He could’ve been the next dude. We was around every rapper in the game. We were in Atlanta before Ludacris got signed, and he blew up. Lot of people we saw on the come up. I just watched shit blow up. One time there was a $175,000 upfront and we bought equipment. Shit was still in the boxes, and the studio went up in flames. Still in the boxes. Everybody’s dream ended there..

Is success measured in money?
People just looking at it for the money aspects. Back in the days we used to listen to hip hop just for the music. Now you got just regular people and they anticipating the person’s record sales more than the music, “Oh he gonna go platinum out the gate.”   

What got you into rap in the first place?
Like, rap was the graduation stage for me because I started out with the breakdancing and went to the graffiti. Now it’s like fast food hip hop. People don’t want it at dinner. They like, “Give me my french fries and my chicken wings, and let me get that to go.” As opposed to back in the day, everything was home-grown. How I got into hip hop? I’m an old school dude, you know. I’m old school.

So what about money and hip hop?
When you ain’t really got it [money] and you listening to somebody who’s saying they got it, that becomes appealing. These people wanna put up the image. It’s the image they are portraying to the people, but half of the time, these people, they ain’t got $100,000 in they bank account. The car is rented, the jewels is rented, the club was rented, the house was rented. So they doing a video in something they ain’t going home to. So really, they lying to the people who ain’t got it. It’s a façade.   

Is being a sell out now as bad as it used to be?
That’s a hard question. It’s a thin line between a sell out. Is 50 Cent a sell out because he took something that happened to him and made money off of it? All he did was tell a story over and over. Did that make him a good person or a bad person? It sold records.

If somebody had done the same thing 15 years ago, do you think they would have had as much respect in the streets?
Nah, you would have been an idiot. Because back in the day when you got shot, you just got shot.

Where did you used to get money from?
I’m from the hood, first off – not saying that everybody got to be hood. But the neighborhood I’m from in Brooklyn, NY, you do what you gotta do at a certain point in your life. From 18 to 25. You ain’t got no real skills, no real job skills, so you got to do whatever is offered at that age group that you in. I participated in pharmaceutical distribution. So that was a lucrative way to get money then. Everybody and their mother was doing crack. My mom did crack, my aunt did crack. It was a very lucrative business, you know. I wasn’t gonna sell to my aunt, but I would sell to somebody else’s aunt. It’s a fucked up way of thinking but that’s the way it was. From ’86 to ’96 to ’06 times have changed. Ain’t people smoking crack no more, so people have to change their hustles. Now, all of those drug addicts had babies, and those babies grew up and it’s crazy. That’s all the crazy kids running around here and shooting. ‘Cause their moms and pops had no direction. 

So everybody who’s out there buying music right now are children of crackheads and they’re crazy? That’s gonna affect the music industry…
To a degree it has. Because if they are seventies babies then they’re about 30 to 35 right now. I’d say those kids are on the safe side. But all the babies from the Reagan era, from the 80s to ’85, ’86, that was New York’s worst time. But at the same time as you had people getting high, it brought about this hip hop thing. So within all the chaos came good. But you still got those kids who are talking about what their parents were going through and those kids is the victims [of crack]. So you got that kind of music. Everybody in here didn’t have a good trip.

So what made you get back into it?
The love, the love. Hip hop to me is like a bad relationship with a girl. For real. With a hot girl … You like her, then you have an argument, stop messing with her, know what I mean? You fell in love with her when you was younger, she show up, show you a good time and then she diss you. It’s like a bad relationship, you know. I’m on my second marriage right now. 

What does it cost to put something decent together?
The mixtape market is saturated, so just do the music you wanna do, the music you like, and then other people will feel the same way and that’s a good thing. If you have to force something down somebody’s throat, then you buying a fan. 

How much does a fan cost?
A fan costs, right now for an indie person, he got to win them over. But for a person with a record deal? $500,000 will get you a good amount of friends, fans. I’d say that’s a gold album. $500,000 dollars will get you gold friends.

How much have you spent on your career so far do you think?
Ah, since it’s like a relationship you can’t really give an estimate, you know, you buy nice things. Some may be gifts, some birthday presents. Hip hop, it’s like you spend money here, you spend money there. It’s like, “Aight, we need to go get this studio done so let me go buy an MPC, that’s what we need to make these beats.” Or “Oh, we need a mic, I know where to go get it at for $100.” It’s so easy now to go do hip hop as opposed to 5-10 years ago. 

Did you ever get to the point where you had to sell everything you had to make music?
I went through that stage, but I didn’t go through the stage where I sold everything. I mean, I sold crack to get studio time. I did a lot for hip hop to be able to say, “Let me go put these songs down.”

So what happened? You had a plan, you had the money, and you put everything into your man Master Foul to front the project. And then what?
You learn from experience, and I’ll say this: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I learned the hard way. Because you can’t put one person as the leader, because if that leader goes down, then in the public eye, they say, “Where was those other dudes?” Everybody got to be on one level. We gave everything to one dude, and we said “You gonna hold the door open and we gonna come through.” But he slipped his foot out, and when he stopped caring, everything else went down the drain. Now I know what not to do. Giving an ignorant person a million bucks is like giving someone a loaded gun. They are gonna do something stupid. 

I think it’s like what they say nowadays, “People don’t make love songs anymore, they make fuck songs.” You’re not even selling rhymes anymore, you’re selling a beat. I mean, it’s great business for producers though, you could put any idiot on any track now.
Yeah, it’s like the producers is the rappers and they can’t even rap. The Scott Storches, the Dres, they charge $50,000, $60,000, or $100,000, they half somebody’s budget for one beat. It’s coming to a time where people are waking up and they’re saying “Oh, I’m not buying into that no more.” And it’s not about the conscious rapper or the save-the-earth type dude, it’s just a dude who got a story to tell who just ain’t been heard. 

Talk me through a day in Brownsville.
A day in the life of El Tysheikh: Well I’m a barber first. That is my second trade, that was my fall back trade, and I’ve been doing that to pay the bills. The music helped me out business-wise. I turned my kitchen into a barbershop, about to open a shop soon. It’s just like everyday struggles, out there on the grind with the CDs. So for me now if I sell it at a dollar I’m still making a profit, because I’m getting the CD for 20 cents, so a dollar to me is a fan. I’m not buying a fan, I’m saying “Yo, look. My music is dope, just give me a dollar for it. $5, $3, whatever you got.” Then when I get the return back like, “Yo son, that CD was the dopest CD I have and I only paid a dollar for it,” I got more enjoyment out of the dollar as opposed to me putting in a million dollars and forcing it down somebody’s throat.

Was it a conscious decision to sell pharmaceuticals to support your music, or did it just happen?
Back then it wasn’t about selling drugs to pay for the music, it was just about what you can afford at that time. Some people went over the top and said “I’m going to be a big drug dealer and then I’m a turn into a rapper.” Or now it’s like the rappers wanna be drug dealers. And ain’t sold no drugs. 

What was your first hip hop purchase?
My man was a DJ and his turntables broke. I helped him buy one of the Gemini joints. I had a couple of dollars so I was like, “I’ll help you buy one.” And you know the parties, the dollar parties every Friday? That’s when I was into the dancing thing so it wasn’t really about buying into hip hop. It was just like, I got a couple of dollars, my man needs this so we can have a good time on Friday, so let me help him get the DJ equipment. We gonna have the girls there. This was the dollar party era, pay a dollar to get in, grind on the wall and all that. It was crazy then. 

And now you selling mixtapes for a dollar so it all comes full circle.
Easy.

What made you stop hustling, something better come along?
Nah, you just can’t keep throwing rocks at the precinct and expect nobody to come out. I seen people go down for years. It’s like you get a wake up call. Some peoples’ wake up call is 10 years, some peoples’ wake up call is a day in jail. Some peoples’ wake up call is watching somebody else go through it, so I saw a lot of people go jail for a real long time, so I just quit. I found other ways of hustling. ‘Cause that’s what a hustler do if you an original hustler. If you can sell crack and drugs, then you can sell anything. You can be a rapper and be a sponsor for an ad. Haven’t done that before though.

What should a young independent rapper do to get started?
Buy you a CD burner, get you one of your friends that do graphics, put together some artwork, and just get out there. Put the music together. Find somebody with an inexpensive studio, try to get your joint mastered, mixed, and put it out there. Everybody trying to say they trying to make a hit record, but a hit record makes itself. Put the music out there, if people like it, they’ll buy it. Equipment is cheaper, promotion is cheaper, you don’t have to pay somebody $1,000 to put your website together, you can just do it yourself. I’d say the most to get started is like $3,000. People finance their own. You can have a 9 to 5 and still support your dreams.

A lot of people complain that the internet killed hip hop, killed the music industry.
All these corporate heads have been making money for so long, and now these grassroots artists can say “Yo, look, got my CD for $2.” $2 for them is a come up, but if people read the fine print and the contracts, you getting like 14 cents off a dollar, that’s the biggest record deal you can get, and now you can say “Oh, just give me a dollar, two dollars.” Now if you got a million fans, you got some bread. There’s artists that’s doing well, they making money from the internet. It didn’t kill hip hop. It broadened it. It made it so people in Japan and Ethopia could get your music.

What are you up to now?
Right now I’m a re-issue a mixtape that I had out ’03, it’s a classic joint. I’m working on another mixtape at the moment. I got an album finished. Man, I just say people, just listen to good hip hop. It’s out there and it ain’t going to cost you $10.99, it’s going to cost you $4.99 or $5.99, but it will be worth it.

MOOKIE