If you go to my myspace right now you will see a picture with me and Sway taken at the Texas Holy Hip Hop Awards and I was asked about it and thought I would share the story here.
Sway presented an award and was saying since all his friend sit around and talk about is Hip Hop Dead he said that he feels that Christian Rap / Holy Hip Hop is the missing element in Hip Hop. Not sure on his faith. After the show I caught up with him and talked to him for a while about Holy Hip Hop being the next it music and he wants to do a MTV new piece on the Holy Hip Hop Awards. I asked him about his views of the current state of the industry. I was sharing with him that with all this talk about Hip Hop is Dead, Jesus is the only I know that can bring things back from the dead and that Holy Hip Hop has the clean lyrics and albums that people are looking for now with all this noise about not using certain words in the industry. We already got that. You don't have to edit us. It was a cool convo. I know Sketch and Tre-9 talked to him as well. We planted some seeds. We will see what God does. What yall think?
You can check out the picture at
www.myspace.com/justparadoxWe gave him Tre9 - The Farmer album which is above par and will be in stores soon. You can check out some samples on our mixtape. I talked to him about CrossMovement, Grits, Kj52, a little bit. He mentioned T Bone but mostly I wanted to get his thoughts on things as an industry insider to some extent with MTV and the Radio show.
Another thing Sway said that got my attention was, he said we shouldn't market to mainstream. He said we should do what makes us unique and focus on what works, the lyrics and content and not try to go mainstream. We shouldn't go to the mainstream but let them come to us once we've established ourselves and not let them dictate to us but us dictate to them.
We shouldn't try to go mainstream, we should try and build our Christian Market to were in the gospel market we can sell 150,000 a cd consistently and more.
Sway said build your gospel fan base so if the secular doesn't support you, you still have the strong Christian market support. Not the advice I thought he would give but it was unique.
I agree with him. We should try to be excellent at what we do and secure our fan base before we try to get the mainstream attention.
