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Hip-hop, Tejas - Latinos take on rap music and make it their own
"Me, I want what's coming to me."
"What's coming to you?"
"The world, Chico, and everything in it." -- Tony Montana in Scarface
Proving that reality is a battle Charles Chavez fights every day. In a three-room office suite in a Sharpstown high-rise, the head of Latium Entertainment sits behind his desk, working the phones. A few feet away, his wife taps at a computer keyboard, and in the next room his brother and another assistant are hard at work. The walls are lined with photos of Charles Chavez with a gang sign-throwing Ice Cube, Charles Chavez with a smirking Clive Davis, Charles Chavez with stars and bigwigs all over the place. Through the windows, there's a panoramic view of downtown about ten miles distant, and the Southwest Freeway -- the proverbial two-way street to Mexico and back -- looks close enough to touch even though it's about a hundred feet below.
"I don't want to target Hispanics, I want to take Hispanics mainstream," he says.
And he's doing it. It was from this office that Chavez and his company helped launch Baby Bash and Frankie J. from scufflers on the Texas and California scenes to national names, presences near the very top of the Billboard charts and on to The Sharon Osbourne Show and to an upcoming Cleveland gig with Mr. White-Bread himself, Clay Aiken. A 30-day planner on the wall tells the tale of Bash's then-ongoing 30-city, 45-day tour, which took him from coast to coast and into Chicago.
"We're not turning our back on our people, we just want to grow so the next Frankie J. can come out," he says of the Mexican-American R&B crooner he represents. "We had problems with Frankie J. when he came out. He peaked at No. 4 on TRL, but then the record stores put his record in the Latin section. And he wasn't singing Latin music. If John Mayer was Irish, they wouldn't put him in the Irish section. That's something we're trying to overcome today. It's just marketing -- Frankie came from the Kumbia Kings, so it was just assumed that he was Latin even though he had a Top Ten pop record in the country."
Five years ago, when the Chavezes started up a record label, they gave it the name Latium Records. Latium was a contraction of "Latins going platinum." That dream may have seemed a little far-fetched then, but right now their dreams are this close to coming true. "Back then I was trying to find people I thought were talented, that we could mold into something," he says. "And I went broke.
"What I do now is invest in artists that are already ready. New artists bring me stuff all the time and I tell them to pay their dues and go make a hit record, and then look for someone like me."
Today, Chavez does radio promotions for L.A.-based Geffen Records. "Bash and Frankie brought me a hit record and I went and got it played," he says. "I told them I would get it played and then we would go get a deal." (Next in the pipeline: local rapper Gemini.)
Right now, Baby Bash and Frankie J. have made a hit record. The rapper and the singer brought it to him, and it worked just like he said. Chavez got it on the radio and both Bash and Frankie got record deals with major labels. Their rap-R&B duet "Suga Suga" rocketed to very close to the top of the charts. Many who heard it in places like Des Moines and Louisville probably never knew that the singers were a couple of Latin guys.
Chavez likes it that way. He's not looking for any affirmative action-style handouts. "There's Nelly, Eminem, 50 Cent," he says. "To me, a Latin rapper has to be just as good. It definitely has to start in the underground. You have to create a fan base, hone those skills. The biggest artists all started somewhere. The Latin people are gonna have to come to them first. From there, they can go on to become a mass-appeal artist. But in order to do that, they have to be just as good as everybody else. It's all about the song at the end of the day."
Well, that and a few other things. He's currently at loggerheads with Bash over an image thing. He wants the handsome Bash to take his shirt off on stage. Bash ain't havin' it.
"He's saying, 'Aw, come on, man, I'm hard.' I told him he would sell a million records. I'm trying to convince him, and he's trying to keep it real. 50 Cent don't have a hard time performing in a wife-beater."
("If he works out, he should do it," says Slim, when told of the idea. "50 Cent takes his shirt off. Most of his fan base is females. And it's like Tupac said: 'Rap to the bitches and you will sell records.' ")
Chavez sees "keeping it real" as three of the most harmful and misunderstood words in the music business. "I'll tell an artist in a second -- 'You want to keep it real, you'll just keep it real broke.' There's a way to make it where you can stay real. People talk about selling out -- yeah, those guys are selling out of record stores and that's what it's all about -- making good music that people like. When people say they want to keep it real, what they mean is that they want to keep making music their way, which is not a problem so long as people like it.
"Everybody that's changed music history has been somebody that's kept it real their way, but their way was good. Kurt Cobain kept it real, and he became a platinum-selling artist. The early rappers kept it real and they changed the game. But if nobody likes your music and nobody's coming to your concerts, guess what -- change your ways! Find something else real."
Chavez isn't interested in Latin rap or Latin rappers. For him, the only Latin rap is the stuff that is performed in Spanish, and the only Latin rappers were people like Coy. "I don't think Carlos wanted to cross over into the pop world. He wanted to stay true to his people, but I want my artists to become pop stars," he says. "It's a battle I have to face every day. Baby Bash is getting 9,000 spins a week and MTV's still not playing him. Do you think if he was either black or white they would play him?"
Hip-hop, Tejas - Part VII
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