Drake: From teen TV star to rap royalty
The Canadian hip-hop artist (‘Best I Ever Had’) has built a huge following with a gift for melodies, powerful allies and savvy management.
By any modern measure of musical popularity -- YouTube views, radio airplay,
ring-tone ubiquity -- the single "Best I Ever Had" by Toronto rapper Drake is
not only a hit, it's arguably 2009's "Song of the Summer." Since debuting on
iTunes last month, the hip-hop lust track has sold 600,000 digital downloads and
topped three separate pop charts. Even if you can't summon to mind its rap-sung
vocals or brassy syncopated beat, you've probably heard "Best I Ever Had"
blaring out of a convertible somewhere.
Less than a year ago, Drake was basically a zero in the music world, unsigned and virtually unknown as a rhyme-sayer. But thanks to some out-of-the-box branding efforts by several of the best-connected marketing executives in the urban world and the institutional backing of his mentor, rap superstar Lil Wayne, Drake landed two songs in the Top 10 this month -- "Best I Ever Had" as a solo artist and "Every Girl" as part of the rap group Young Money. He had already amassed a devoted fan base before he'd even landed a record deal.
Every Song of Summer has a saga behind it. And Drake's breakthrough arrives as a happy accident built on plenty of high-level networking, a label bidding war and an astonishing degree of cooperation among rap world big shots. Chief among them, Drake's career overseers: the heads of the New York management firm Hip Hop Since 1978 and Cortez Bryant, Lil Wayne's longtime manager.
"They have given me one of the greatest situations in hip-hop," Drake, 22, said of his team.
Under the unusually lucrative agreement he struck with Aspire/Young Money/Cash Money Records distributed through Universal, Drake received a $2-million advance. He retains the publishing rights to his songs and cedes only around 25% of his music sales revenues to the label as a "distribution fee," his managers said. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of new artists sign financially restrictive "360 deals" that sap their touring and merchandise income and offer much more restrictive profit-sharing.
A dissection of how the rapper was able to drive such a hard bargain underscores an evolution in the music industry. At a time when CD sales have declined by 15% over last summer's numbers and major labels remain more fixated on scoring hit singles than sustaining artist rosters, managers such as those working with Drake have stepped into the void to become king-makers in urban music.
"The record company doesn't have any ownership of Drake," Bryant said. "The label does not have participation on profits. They don't have ownership of his masters. We control his entire career. Those deals don't happen anymore."
Michael Jackson tribute musical 'Thriller Live' to hit the road
Michael Jackson concert promoter AEG could still see a financial gain
Local concert promoter AEG spent well over $20 million in preparation for Michael Jackson's 50-date run at the O2 Arena in London. The promoter sold about $85 million in tickets for Jackson's comeback stand. With numbers like that, it'd be easy to speculate that the pop star's sudden passing would put the company in dire financial straits.
Director, producer of comeback concerts foresee a Michael Jackson tribute
Though plans have yet to be confirmed, Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips envision a splashy celebration of the pop star's life with family friends and others in the mix.
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Blink-182: In love, and spitting bile
It might have been just another rote evening of late night TV talk show programming. But a funny thing happened at a taping of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in Hollywood on Tuesday. Blink-182 showed up to play a couple of songs -- an effort to drum up attention for the multi-platinum-selling pop-punk trio's North American stadium tour, which kicks off July 24 in Las Vegas.
And suddenly, a full-blown rock concert broke out.
In just their fourth public performance after a five-year "hiatus" as a group, guitarist-singer Tom DeLonge, bassist-singer Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker performed energetic run-throughs of two of Blink's biggest Warped Tour hits, "What's My Age Again?" and "Dammit" for Kimmel's cameras. Then, glancing at each other from across the stage with barely contained class clown glee, they decided they were having too much fun to leave.
You'd never have guessed that only a year ago the band mates hadn't recaptured that lovin' feeling toward each other, and a detente -- let alone a Blink-182 reunion -- seemed hopelessly out of reach. (An upcoming story in The Times will shed more light on what brought them back together.)
"I love you. Travis," Hoppus drawled into the mike between songs, prompting DeLonge to elucidate for the crowd: "It's a physical thing."
"And I love you, Tom DeLonge," Hoppus continued, just before the trio launched into their single "Down."
With Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and wife Ashlee Simpson looking on from backstage, and flanked by a gaggle of the group's preteen children sitting on an overstuffed sofa, Blink performed eight songs (not including an off-the-cuff improv cover of the Beastie Boys' "High Plains Drifter") over the course of an hour. Among them: "Feeling This," "Dumpweed," "Reckless Abandon" and "Josie (Everything's Gonna Be Fine)."
"We haven't performed some of these songs in seven years," DeLonge said. "Expect us to screw them up!"
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Deep pockets behind Michael Jackson
This is a longer version of a story that will appear in The Times' Sunday (May 31) edition.
Others have tried to revive the onetime pop star's performing career. Tom Barrack is convinced he's the 'caretaker' to do it.
Tom Barrack, a Westside financier who made billions buying and selling distressed properties, flew to Las Vegas in March 2008 to check out a troubled asset. But his target was not a struggling hotel chair or failed bank.
It was Michael Jackson. The world's bestselling male pop artist was hunkered down with his three children in a dumpy housing compound in an older section of town. At 49, he was awash in nearly $400 million of debt and so frail that he greeted visitors in a wheelchair. The rich international friends who offered Jackson refuge after his 2005 acquittal on molestation charges had fallen away. His Santa Barbara ranch, Neverland, was about to be sold at public auction.
In Jackson, Barrack saw the sort of undervalued asset his private equity firm, Colony Capital, had succeeded with in the past. He wrote a check to save the ranch and placed a call to a friend, the conservative business magnate Philip Anschutz, whose holdings include the concert production firm AEG Live.
Fifteen months later, Jackson is living in a Bel-Air mansion and rehearsing for a series of 50 sold-out shows in London's O2 Arena. The intervention of two billionaires with more experience in the board room than the recording studio seems on course to accomplish what a parade of others over the last dozen years could not: getting Jackson back on stage.
His backers envision the shows at AEG's O2 as an audition for a career rebirth that could ultimately encompass a three-year world tour, a new album, movies, a Graceland-like museum, musical revues in Las Vegas and Macau, and even a "Thriller" casino. Such a rebound could wipe out Jackson's massive debt.
"You are talking about a guy who could make $500 million a year if he puts his mind to it," Barrack said recently. "There are very few individual artists who are multibillion-dollar businesses. And he is one."
Others have tried to resurrect Jackson's career, but previous attempts have failed, associates say, because of managerial chaos, backbiting within his inner circle and the singer's legendary flakiness.
Even as Jackson's deep-pocketed benefactors assemble an all-star team -- "High School Musical's" Kenny Ortega is directing the London concerts -- there are hints of discord. Last week, two different men identified themselves as the singer's manager and a month before, a respected accountant who had been handling Jackson's books was abruptly fired in a phone call from an assistant.
But his backers downplay the problems. "He is very focused. He is not going to let anybody down. Not himself. Not his fans. Not his family," said Frank DiLeo, his current manager and a friend of three decades.
Jackson needs a comeback to reverse the damage done by years of excessive spending and little work. He has not toured since 1997 or released a new album since 2001, but has continued to live like a megastar.
'Dark Night of the Soul' can be seen but not heard
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse's project hits a contractual snag.
Call it this year's most notable cross-species creative partnership: When Grammy-winning studio whiz Danger Mouse reached out to musical surrealist Sparklehorse about a possible collaboration in 2004, the stated intention was to make music, not art.
But that's not exactly how things panned out.
After roping in 11 indie rock and alt-country star pals on two continents to contribute guest vocals, the duo produced an album's worth of atmospheric soundscapes. Then Danger Mouse, who is one-half of the hip-hop-psych-soul duo Gnarls Barkley, called on idiosyncratic director David Lynch to "visually interpret" the tunes with photos.
Many of Lynch's 53 images are theatrically stage-lit and peopled with costumed extras in intimate, transitional moments. Others capture scenes of suburban torpor, skid row decrepitude and giddy enactments out of some weird hyper-realm.
"The photographs are a representation of what went on in my head when I heard the songs," said Lynch. "It all came from the music."
The fruit of the trio's labor is a multimedia gallery installation titled "Dark Night of the Soul," opening today at Michael Kohn Gallery in L.A. A limited-edition bound book of Lynch's imagery of the same name was released earlier this month. And in a widely Twittered-about ongoing dispute between Danger Mouse's management and his record label, EMI, the music has been embargoed from distribution.
The project began when Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, met the manager for Sparklehorse, a.k.a. Mark Linkous, at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, in 2004. Burton told her how much he admired the reclusive musician's ability to marry "harsh distorted sound and static" with the delicate nature of his voice. Afterward, the manager passed Linkous a CD of Burton's breakthrough recording, the so-called Gray Album, his bootleg mash-up of the Beatles' "White Album" with rap a cappellas from Jay-Z's "The Black Album."
It set the two on a collision course.
"I thought the music was fantastic without knowing anything about who Danger Mouse was. I thought it was a band," Linkous recalled. "[Burton] said he was a fan and wanted to take my music in another direction. And he said, 'Don't be surprised if I'm at your studio next week.' I live in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina. But there he was."
Burton acknowledged that his motives weren't totally unselfish. "Back then, people I wanted to work with were people I wanted to learn from," he said. "Rather than try my best to copy him sound-wise, I wanted to learn to see how he did what he did -- in songwriting and in sound."
The initial result was four songs on Sparklehorse's favorably reviewed 2006 album, "Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain." But the two exacting musician-producers -- both known for demanding final say behind the studio control console -- felt a kind of musical kinship.
Near the end of recording, Linkous, 42, and Burton, 31, hatched the idea to record their own album but clashed on what animal hybrid to name their outfit after. "I always liked Sparkle Mouse. He liked Dangerhorse," Burton said.
When most of the tracks were done, the two solicited help from friends from across the musical spectrum to provide vocals: Julian Casablancas of the Strokes; Iggy Pop; James Mercer, singer-guitarist for the Shins; Nina Persson of the Cardigans; Suzanne Vega; Grandaddy chief songwriter Jason Lytle; Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips; Black Francis, formerly of the Pixies; singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt; and Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals.
