Rich Mintzer - The Story of So So Def Recordings

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com

Many kids are not interested in following in their parents footsteps. But when Jermaine Dupri Mauldin was growing up in the 1970s, being in his dads business was all he ever wanted to do. Thats because his dad was in the music business. So, while other kids were playing, Jermaine was working hard to break into the music industry. He tried to learn everything he could about music. He listened to several musical styles. He liked rhythm and blues (R&B), funk, rap, and hip-hop the most.

The hard work paid off. At the age of ten, Jermaine got to dance on stage with a music legend, Diana Ross. By the time he was 12, he was a dancer on tour with one of the first rap supergroups, Run-D.M.C. By age 15, he had produced his first album. By age 21 he was running his own record . By age 25, he was a millionaire.

LISTENING TO DIFFERENT MUSICAL STYLES

When Jermaine was young, he told people that he wanted to be like Berry Gordy. Berry Gordy had started Motown Records in Detroit in 1959. Motown was the first record label owned by an African American. It was also the first to feature many African American singers. Berry Gordy helped to launch the careers of some of the most famous musicians of all time. Motowns artists included Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, and the Jackson Five. It helped introduce such music styles as R&B, soul, and funk into popular music.

The city of Detroit became known for the music made by Motown artists. This type of music became known as the Motown Sound. Jermaine wanted to discover his own special sound in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. When Jermaine was growing up, the most popular musical styles in Atlanta had included jazz, country, R&B, and rock. But by the early 1980s, a new sound started to become popular: rap.

Rap, or street poetry, was born out of a cultural movement that started on the streets of New York City during the early 1970s. Rapping was just one element of the developing artistic culture. Other elements included different types of dancing, including break dancing; certain types of urban dress; and graffiti. The culture eventually became known as hip-hop.

Jermaine has said that he wants to be like Berry Gordy, who founded Motown Records in 1960. Motown became one of the most influential record labels in pop music history.

FAST FACT

Shout-outs are popular in all types of hip-hop. This is where the performers mention the cities and areas they come from. In Atlanta, rappers will sometimes shout out ATL for the city. Southern rappers also do shout-outs for neighborhoods and even housing developments within their home cities.

Although rap music started in New York, it soon spread to other cities around the country, including Atlanta. There, young people began listening to the new sound. The songs of rappers from New York and other cities on the East Coast had a distinct sound. Rappers from Los Angeles and cities on the West Coast sounded different. They often used funk and soul songs as backgrounds for their raps.

Eventually, some young performers in Atlanta and other Southern cities started making their own hip-hop tapes. Soon their music was being played in local clubs. Their songs sounded a little different than East Coast and West Coast hip-hop music. People in the South had their own slang words and expressions that were unlike those used in other regions. They helped give the music its own style.

Jermaine was always paying attention to popular sounds. He heard the local hip-hop music and liked it. This was the beginning of Southern hip-hop.

EAST, WEST, AND SOUTH

By the early 1990s, Southern hip-hop was beginning to get a lot of attention. Atlanta clubs were featuring the music of many talented performers. These included OutKast, Ludacris, the Goodie Mob, and the Ying Yang Twins. Their songs were being played on radio stations and on MTV.

Meanwhile, the popularity of Southern hip-hop was growing in other places. In Houston, Texas, the Geto Boys became very popular. The group included a rapper named Scarface. He left the group and become a successful rap star on his own. At the same time, a rap group known as Three 6 Mafia from Memphis, Tennessee, was also becoming well-known. This group created a hip-hop style called crunk. It had a very heavy drum beat for dancing.

CRUNK

Crunk emerged as a hip-hop style in the early 1990s. Songs in the crunk style use synthesizers and drum machines. As a result they are good for dancing. Crunk hip-hop lyrics feature catchy phrases so that dancers in the clubs can chant along.

The group Three 6 Mafia and rapper Lil Jon, from Atlanta, were among the first to make crunk popular. The song Get Low, by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz, with the Ying Yang Twins, was one of the first big crunk chart hits in 2003. It peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Christopher Ludacris Bridges is an influential Southern rapper. Jermaine Dupri produced a song on Ludacriss first album, and the rapper would later collaborate with Dupri on the 2001 song Welcome to Atlanta.

Another Southern rap star was Percy Master P. Miller. He built his own southern legacy in New Orleans with gangsta rap. Master P. would go on to create his own label, No Limit Records. He looked for talented young performers to record music for his label. Soon No Limit Records was turning out ten or more albums a year from these young performers.

Southern hip-hop was very energetic. Its songs often had a fast beatsometimes 140 to 180 beats per minute. Sometimes, Southern hip-hop songs were called party tunes. This was because they were written with a heavy bass sound. They were meant for dancing.

The Instead Southern hip-hop songs had lyrics about nightlife, parties, fashion trends, and fancy cars. The songs often described the stylish lifestyle of the Southern hip-hop performers and producers. Another style that became popular in the south was called Dirty Southern Rap. This style included lyrics about race relations and African-American life in the south.

The East and West coast rappers were not happy about the growing popularity of southern hip-hop. In 1996 the group OutKast attended an awards show in New York City to accept an award from a hip-hop magazine, The Source. When Big Boi and Dre [of OutKast] got out there at those Source Awards, everybody was like, boooo, boooo, boooo, Big Gipp, a member of the Goodie Mob who was at the event, later recalled.

SO SO DEF RECORDINGS MUSICAL STYLE

Jermaine Dupri decided that his label, So So Def Recordings, would feature the Southern hip-hop sound. But it would also include other musical styles of music. Southern hip-hop producers, like Dupri, looked for ways to stand out. They knew it was hard to compete with the New York and Los Angeles hip-hop stars and their producers.

Dupri had learned a lot about music, mostly on his own. This gave him an advantage. He was able to incorporate R&B, jazz, and pop music when working with different performers. As a result, there was not just one style coming from the So So Def Recordings label. The music Dupri made would be . It would range from the quieter R&B style of Silk Tymes Leather to the faster upbeat sound of young rapper Lil Bow Wow, and even some crunk from a hip-hop performer known as Bone Crusher.

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com

sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com