One night last year, Barzey set a goal for himself. He was in the Lackawanna County jail in Pennsylvania, serving time on a 1996 drug charge. With help from above, he vowed to land a recording contract within his first year on the outside. “I gotta get this money,” he says, somberly, “or else I’m going to be on the street again, and I don’t play with the streets like that.” There is an edge in his voice, but not of desperation. This month or next, a little more than a year since his release, DeShawn Barzey expects to sign a contract worth upwards of half a million dollars.
Hip-hop, originally scraped together on stolen spray paint and borrowed electricity, has become urban America’s Silicon Valley, generating instant fortunes for young performers and entrepreneurs just out of school–sometimes the school of hard knocks. In 1998, rap acts sold more than 81 million albums, the best year in the history of the music. Every week, it seems, a new rapper vaults from obscurity to the top of the charts.
Barzey and his handlers, two twentysomething friends from Howard University, are trying to create the next overnight success. Like professional sports, rap is an alluring long shot, a dream that can sometimes blind. “Every kid is a dope rapper, according to him and his friends,” says Chris Schwartz, CEO of RuffHouse Records, home to Lauryn Hill and the Fugees. But Barzey is betting on success. “I think I got the drugs to have fiends checking.”
In his manager’s sport utility vehicle, Barzey offers a staccato sketch of his life so far. “I have an older brother who got killed in ‘92, shot to death. Father dead, brother dead, uncles dead, close family members on drugs, no one to turn to. I was on the run for two years. I did several prison bids. I got stabbed, almost fatally. I lost many friends. I left guys that captured my heart, that’s in jail forever, never going to come home. Now I got a chance to represent, show the world that I can change, they can change, too.”
Robert Cummins, 29, who calls himself Don Pooh, is a hip-hop manager and–like most–an aspiring entrepreneur, now negotiating to launch his own boutique label. He first met Barzey last year, and was impressed with his flow, or delivery. Quirkily energetic, Barzey flipped manic word associations. “My name is Sunkiss/Hos love the way I tongue-kiss,” begins one rapid-fire rhyme. Even more, Cummins was taken by the rapper’s cartoon charisma. He eases the vehicle into traffic. “I really felt [Sunkiss] was the next artist to blow,” or become a star, he says. It is my third meeting with the two men, and Barzey’s spirits have yo-yo’d noticeably. Two weeks previously, he had auditioned for the top executives at Elektra Entertainment. With no backing music or demo tapes, he just spit, or rapped. He took off his shirt. He jumped up on a table. “He blew us away because he was so animated,” says Merlin Bobb, senior VP of A&R. “He has a great sense of humor, but he’s also saying something.” The label immediately offered a substantial deal. Since then, Barzey has surged with elation and anxiety, alternately spiraling in exultation or dread. Today, he says, he wishes he could be invisible. “I’m scared of fame, afraid of drama that can occur because I’m famous. It’s scary to walk into a place and have 10 [guys] look at you, and you don’t know what they want with you. Do they like you? Do they want to hurt you? Or do they have some beef from a long time ago?”
We are headed toward the South Bronx, to 1060 Sherman Avenue, a squat brick building that looms monumentally in Barzey’s life. Though he was raised in Harlem, he spent most of his youth here, and he crackles with nervous anticipation. “When I left this block, I always felt, I ain’t never coming back until I’m paid, until I’m doing something. Right now, I’m here for a cause. I’m about to put this place on the map. All the tears, blood, sweat we dripped off our bodies is going to be represented off my rap move.”
The building holds a place in Bronx lore. Larry Davis, the drug dealer who achieved notoriety after wounding six cops in a 1986 shoot-out, then beating the charge, lived upstairs. “This building was on ‘America’s Most Wanted’,” says Leon Bishop, 26, a childhood friend of Barzey’s, now trying to move his family out. Growing up, he says, he and Barzey used to play kick the can, steal the bacon. Though they didn’t attend school (Barzey dropped out before high school, but later earned a GED), they sneaked in for the free lunches. “It was nothing but hip-hop when we were growing up,” says Bishop. “Crack selling and hip-hop, nothing but. Bitches, hip-hop and survival.” Barzey leads an excited tour of the grounds. This was second base, he gushes; this was where he learned to break-dance, where he threw up his first graffiti mural. He abruptly shifts tone. This was where he and his brother sold crack, from the age of about 12. The name Sunkiss came from a brand of dope they sold. On a bit of dirty sidewalk in front, Barzey looks down. “This was where my brother was killed,” shot by a rival dealer.
Mark Pitts, 28, the other figure shaping Sunkiss’s career, has a saying about rappers. Most of them, he says with a shrug, “have their own movie that they’ve been through. I’m not saying all rappers have bad backgrounds, but it’s been heard before.” Pitts and Cummins first met at Howard University, where they also befriended fellow student Puffy Combs. After college, Pitts eventually managed the Notorious B.I.G., the biggest act on Puffy’s label, Bad Boy. Cummins worked for Pitts’s management company before striking out on his own. Cummins is the laconic half of the pair, chewing absently on a plastic straw. When he likes something, he says he’s feeling it. “I’m feeling Harlem more than the Bronx,” he says, before a photo shoot. Pitts is more angular and brusque. “I’m a savage,” he says, only half in jest. When he likes something, he says he isn’t mad at it. “I’m not mad at the Sylvia situation,” he says, at the prospect of signing with Elektra boss Sylvia Rhone.
In 1997, Cummins met a young Brooklyn rapper named Shyne, whose style eerily recalled the late Notorious B.I.G. “I just saw something in him, I saw a star,” he recalls. He signed Shyne to an arrangement known as a production deal: Cummins would act as an intermediary, contracting with a major label to finance, manufacture and distribute the recordings he delivered, and paying Shyne from his take. Pitts signed on as manager. With Kenny Meiselas, a high-powered lawyer who represents Puff Daddy, they went looking for a deal.
Just five years ago, says Meiselas, rappers signed to labels for advances as low as $50,000. “If you did better than $175,000, you were doing very well.” But of late, fees have doubled. “Because hip-hop artists are so multimedia, they’re tapped into that young audience, whether it be through commercials or selling sportswear,” says Elektra’s Bobb. Major labels, which once eschewed rap, “feel having this type of artist is an asset.” As several companies got interested in Shyne, the bidding got heady. “After Puff,” says Pitts, “they got dirty.” Shyne ultimately signed with Bad Boy for a deal reported at $900,000 and a furnished Manhattan condo. With Sunkiss, the same team hopes to repeat the magic. “Shyne’s deal changed the industry,” says Pitts, who signed Sunkiss to a production deal. “Now a lot of people say, ‘I want a Shyne deal’.”
With a big advance, Sunkiss can court name producers, who command up to six figures per song. Their cachet, in turn, should attract radio programmers, a boost for an unknown. Yet success is far from guaranteed. Unlike rock bands, hip-hop acts don’t build their audiences on the live circuit. Instead, they try to create a buzz through cameos on albums by established stars, then through the underground mix tapes peddled by influential deejays. The window for blowing up is brief. “If you just consider yourself a street prophet with great rhymes,” says Schwartz of RuffHouse, “those guys are a dime a dozen. You have to have identity, image, what we used to call a shtik.”
Barzey is undaunted. Already, he cut a cameo for the multiplatinum Big Punisher. He lowers the car’s tinted window to chat up a young woman. “You probably seen me in my silver Benz,” he lies, not without some charm. The woman does not give him her number, but writes down her address, which he promptly tosses out. Never mind. Someday, he says, “when I see people dancing to my s–t, enjoying it, it’ll make all this worthwhile.” He closes the window, and Don Pooh pulls out, rolling high under the warm Harlem sun.
