The swift chancellor report offers an interesting take on the widespread assumption that rappers can and maybe should be full-time businessmen as well as artists.
After invoking the relationship of Busta Rhymes and Chris Lighty:
Often times the spirit of entreneurship breeds self reliance which often mutates into arrogance. That arrogane often leads the artist to take on responbility they are simply not trained to handle…like booking, marketing, contracts, merchandising…
An artist who does all the aformentioned duties loves to fancy himself a renaissance man. I call him or her naive. Your primary job is to write rhyymes and songs. Inspire and be inspired. Be the icon. The candidate. Of course you must have a working knowledge and/or supervise the nuts and bolts but that is not what you are built for. No more than I am built to kick 36 bars to a crowd in Dusseldorf…
Play your position.
Let the plumber fix the pipes and let the exterminator kill the roaches.
And maybe we’d get better art if artists focused on making it!
It seems like many artists are so concerned with being business moguls that they compromise their main avenue of moneymaking.
There’s nothing wrong with hiring experts, particularly when it comes to marketing and promoting your product.