LEFT WITH SHATTERED MIRRORS AND THE SHARDSĬAT-CALLS ON CAT-WALKS, MAN THESE WOMEN GETTING SOLEMN THEN YOU BREAK WHEN THE FAKE FACADE LEAVES YOU IN THE DARK PLASTIC SMILES AND DENIAL CAN ONLY TAKE YOU SO FAR IT'S MY SOUL IT'S MY SOUL THAT NEEDS SURGERY THE PAINS INSIDE AND NOBODY FREES YOU FROM YOUR BODY THIRD WARD, YOUR FIRST QUESTION - WHAT IS YOUR ASPIRATION IN LIFE?īEYONCÉ: OH…MY ASPIRATION IN LIFE…WOULD BE…TO BE HAPPY.ĪIN'T GOT NO DOCTOR OR PILL THAT CAN TAKE THE PAIN AWAY This article originally appeared on KEITEL: MS. “Are you giving the most important part away for free?” “You have to think about what you value,” he said. BitTorrent is free, but gives the musician info about the listener (email address, etc.) which is sometimes worth more than the money an artist gets from iTunes, which keeps all the audience data for itself. It’s all about finding your niche now.”ĭiscussing monetization tactics with another fledgling founder, Young Guru suggested thinking about the difference between BitTorrent bundles and iTunes. To one young founder, describing the importance of finding an audience, he recommended checking out Grits & Biscuits, a very specific, retro “Dirty South”-themed club night that took off - “Learn your audience. I tried to wait out the crowd, but hopeful entrepreneurs kept coming, so I just hung out with Young Guru while he stood and held court, leaning against a railing in a loose gray sweater and dark jeans. His life changed, though, when his mom, a teacher, brought home an early Apple II. Young Guru said he has always been someone who tinkers and hacks, fixing the family VCR and bikes. “Instagram showed Kodak if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on on the streets, you’re gonna fall.”
The size of the company doesn’t make a difference anymore,” he said. “The story of Instagram and what that represents for me, and what I try to preach to my students - the giant is not the giant anymore. Make what you need using what you’ve got - that’s entrepreneurship.”Įntrepreneurship, he said, can be explained as a way for a less-powerful group to assert itself against hegemony. “When you look at the ethos of hip-hop, when you look at how we took something from nothing - turntables weren’t meant to be instruments, and beat machines weren’t meant to be for sampling,” he said. I’d try to tell people the idea, evangelize the concept, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, hip-hop guy, what do you know about tech?'”īut helping young people realize that hip-hop and entrepreneurship are similar isn’t that hard, said Young Guru. At Facebook? One percent.Īnother speaker at the conference, Devo Springsteen - a music producer for Kanye West turned entrepreneur - said he confronted enormous stigma when he started in tech: “I had no background in technology, and it was held against me. At Google, only one percent of the employees working in technical roles are black. The New York conference and Young Guru’s talk come at an interesting moment: The number of black people working at Silicon Valley tech companies is manifestly dismal, as evidenced by the numbers released by many companies over the past months. He is also getting into startups, serving as an adviser for a project called EarSketch, whose mission is “computational music remixing” to drive interest in computing and engineering. He has popularized the hashtag #eraoftheengineer, and he joined the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music last year. He said that the technological sophistication of it should not be underestimated - and that young people who idolize this skill set should see parallels between sound mixing and other kinds of engineering. As a sound engineer, his role is to mix and manipulate the music to give it its beat, tone and timbre. His credits include the most prominent hip-hop artists of the last decade: Rihanna, Ludacris, Ghostface Killah, along with Jay and Bey. Young Guru, 40, is one of the most famous sound engineers working today.
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I stayed for three hours, and people were still lining up, asking him about how to find an audience for their party-promoting app, and his recommendations for monetizing a beat-sharing service. They wanted app advice.Īnd one by one, 10 minutes by 10 minutes, Young Guru, originally named Gimel Androus Keaton, stayed and doled it out.
The crowd of fans thrust their cellphones toward him. It was Young Guru, famous in the hip-hop world for his work as a sound engineer on music by Beyonce and Jay Z. At the end of last Friday’s Tech808 conference for entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds, a crowd of about 40 people formed around one lanky speaker.