Photo credit: Dorothy Hong
Though Talib Kweli has carried a reputation as one of the underground’s most respected rappers since his 1998 debut with Mos Def as Black Star, he’s never been opposed to reaching a wider audience. He’s nodded to popular tastes on albums like 2007’s Eardrum and 2013’s Prisoner of Conscious, two albums with crossover ambitions, but lately he’s been going the independent route, self-releasing his decidedly uncommercial second album of 2013, Gravitas. “I work way harder for way less, but I have way more control,” he says. “It’s so much more worth it to be independent.” In a few weeks, Kweli plans to put out a free album called Fuck The Money to tide fans over until his next retail release, Radio Silence, but first he chatted with the Shepherd Express ahead of his Turner Hall Ballroom show on Thursday, July 9.
It seems like there have been times in your career where you’ve made a push for radio play, and times when you’ve backed away. Where do you feel like you fall now?
Well, you know, the way radio works is that anytime you hear a song on the radio, someone injected tens of thousands of dollars into it. Somebody has injected at least $50,000 into it; no songs blow up organically. So, yeah, I’ve had moments in my career where I’ve had records that I felt could compete with what’s on the radio. You shouldn’t try to put a song on the radio unless you feel like it has a chance to compete. So from “Get By” to “Hot Thing” to “Never Been in Love Before” to “Come Here,” we spent money on those records, and those are the songs that people knew. But a lot of times people think they know those songs because of some organic process. It’s because those are only the records that were marketed the most.
Is that always how radio works, though? I look at some of the hits that come out of Atlanta, and a lot of those are just mixtape tracks from young, unsigned artists.
Mixtape tracks work their way up, but once something leaves the strip club of Atlanta—you know you can always hear a song in a strip club in Atlanta—but once it leaves the strip club and lands on a playlist from a program director you hear midday on a Clear Channel station, at that point it’s something a promoter brought in. You could name some records, and I could tell you how it bubbled underground. Maybe it did 100,000 in YouTube views first. Or maybe it broke in one city, where DJs in one city were playing it, but when it becomes national, like a radio hit, somebody has put in at least $50,000—at least. It’s impossible to do business without it.
How is that money being spent?
They’re handing that money over to an indie radio programmer, who at their own discretion, with little to no oversight, figures out ways to spend that money to guarantee certain spins. It’s a very murky, shady thing, and it’s why you only hear the same four or five records in the mix on the radio, because if you’re one of the top promoters, you’re going to get played on the radio.
Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where you feel like you can just forget about radio altogether?
Yeah, I reached that point three years ago.
What happened?
I put out Prisoner of Conscious. Well, I started working on Prisoner of Conscious. I did send a single to radio from that album, the single with Miguel, “Come Here,” but the reason I did it is Miguel was such a dynamic artist, he’d been getting so much radio play at the time, that it was just a slam dunk. There was no way stations weren’t going to play a Miguel record. And that single got as much play as I paid for. Not any more or any less.
Where you happy with how the song performed?
I was. Miguel’s a great artist, we made a beautiful video, a hand-animated video for it that’s really gorgeous.
Miguel’s a great artist, but he did a similar track with Wale that performed much better than “Come Here,” even though it’s a much worse track.
Wale is a radio artist. I’m not. Miguel was featured in Wale’s video; he’s not featured in my video. And Wale’s team probably spent way more. They probably spent four or five times what I spent. So it was those three things combined. And I should say that I do like that record with Wale. I mean, I think mine was better, you know what I’m saying, but I hope that Wale thinks his record is better, too. That’s how rappers work. So I do like that record. But Wale had a string of radio hits before he did that record, so it made it an easier sell for that radio. I could have competed with that record if I had spent more money. I spent money just to put it on, to see what the response would be. But once I did that, I was learning so much about the business. After I spent that money, I was like, “You know what? I’d rather spend the money making a new album.” So the money that I could have used to promote the single I used to make Gravitas.
Will that be your model going forward, spending more money on the music itself and less on promotion?
Who knows? I have Radio Silence coming up. I might come up with a record on Radio Silence that I feel might compete on the radio, and I’d pay for that. But I know what it is. I’m fully aware, so my expectations are managed.
Talib Kweli headlines the Turner Hall Ballroom on Thursday, July 9 at 9 p.m. with openers Space Invadaz, K Valentine and TRUE Skool DJs.
