CURTISS KING / DIYERS / SPOTIFY IS CROOKED / THE FIGHT FOR MUSICAL INDEPENDENCE / CONCERTS FROM HOME /

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Curtiss King is a prolific rapper, music producer, and a guiding light for independent artists worldwide. With a career that spans over a 20 years, King has not only left his mark but continues to redefine what success looks like in an ever-evolving industry. From producing tracks for heavy-hitters like Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, E-40, and MURS to having his music featured on major platforms such as MTV, VH1, and VANS, King’s versatility and skill are undeniable. His beats and rhymes resonate, telling stories that traverse the human experience, capturing hearts and minds across the globe. However, Curtiss King's influence extends beyond the recording studio. His book, "The Prosperous Hip Hop Producer," stands as a beacon for up-and-coming artists and producers. It’s a treasure trove of wisdom, charting his journey from crafting beats on a video game console at his grandma’s patio to topping the iTunes Hip Hop charts with his vibrant and soulful sound. King’s prowess in the independent music scene isn’t just showcased in charts and accolades; it’s evident in the community he’s built. Through his YouTube channel and the DIYERS community, he mentors thousands, sharing not just his knowledge of the industry, but also his passion for authenticity and ownership in music and life. Curtiss King stands as an unwavering beacon of inspiration, resilience, and independence in an industry that's constantly in flux. His legacy is not just in the music he creates, but in the community he uplifts and the artists he inspires to forge their own path.


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Transcript

0:18

School is in session. Welcome to the Chop Shop. I am Eddie James. Next to me is my brother from another mother. DJ React. Hello, good sir? Yes, yes. Peace, brother. Peace, peace. Man, school is in session. Man, we are we are here in the presence of an influencer. Talented, super duper talented producer, songwriter, MC. I mean, I mean, come on, man, motivator, innovator. Man and I can't wait to actually pick this guy's brain pause But about everything Yes, we are Hailing from Inland Empire California the one and only Curtis King people Yeah! Yay! Yes, yes y'all. You know, Starkey Boy to the show. man? Oh man, I can't call it. Thank you for the invitation. Oh dude, happy that you made it man, happy that you made it. Yes sir. So just to clarify, the intro that you play in, that's actually from the, we did an alternative version of a project, Storm Symphony, and that was the, that's the melodic, the melodic compositions that I sampled for the actual project. So, yeah, there's a whole nother project that is the one one, that's the one that we, that we're really focused in on, but that was kind of like an extra bonus for the producers out there that want to use that, so. Nah, nah, it's in the same pack, bro. Yeah, it's in the same pack. Go to the band camp and buy the shit, people. Stop playing. There it is, curt So yeah, and I appreciate the invitation and glad to chop it up with you guys. Yes, sir. man. Man. The before we started talking, I mean, before we started recording, I want to say that, you know, shame on me because I did. I did not. There's so many talented people out here in the world. And you just can't. I mean, I just can't wrap my head around. you know, getting at everybody, you know, like, and listen, I listened to a lot of music. We're both DJs, React and I, and I came across your page, not for music, actually. It was, you gave a gem, and I was like, somebody reposted the gem about, that you said about 40-year-olds in hip hop. Mmm. Mm-hmm. And I was like, and it struck a chord. And I was like, who is this guy? And I was like, I'm following this guy right away. Not knowing that, you know, you had already, you know, paved the way musically as a producer, MC, songwriter, you know, influencer on YouTube, the whole nine, you know what I'm saying? I was just like, man, I'm following him. And then the homie house shoes, man. He was like, oh yeah. Yeah, I got Curtis. He was like, yeah. Yeah, Uncle Shoes, man. So thanks for coming, man. Speak about your, you know, we have to cover the music before we get into the nitty gritty, because like I said, people, school is in session for real. This man does not play. Am I right, React? Yeah, you were correct. Sorry, it's fucking hot in here and I'm sweating. I might have to take my sweater off. Yo, first of all, this guy is either hot or super freezing in there. What are you doing? First of all, it's a garage. It's a garage turn studio, so it's like, no, man, I got a shout out to Belief and Y. I'm wearing one of their hoodies, but it is like a real thick hoodie, and I'm like, it's fucking hot in here, so I'm gonna have to take this shit off. Man, so yeah, you are a machine, Curtis. First of all, we know your government name. How did you become Curtis King? I want to know. Sure, so Curtis King is two stories. There's one short, short story I can make. That's the real story, but the other one I had to redefine it. The real story is, actually, no, let's start with the fake one. So the fake one, it's not really fake, but let's get into it. I went to a middle school called Curtis Middle School. It's probably one of the only times you're gonna see Curtis spelled with two S's. It's in Carson, California. Curtis was a pilot, right? Glenn Curtis, I believe his name was. But I met a buddy of mine that I started making music with that went to another school in the area called King Drew. And so he and I both came together and, actually I mixed both of those together. So forget it. Here's a story. Here's a damn story. My brain is like all over the place. So basically he went to King Drew, we went to Curtis together, we linked back up and was like, yo. Hey, we should form a group. We should do a whole Neptune's things because he was a producer, I was a producer. He was more of a classically trained pianist. And we decided Curtis King was a good combination of the two. However, when he eventually left, I had to redefine it. And I thought about who I was at Curtis Middle School. And it's so much the opposite of the things that you outline for your audience and let them know what I do. I was not outgoing. I was not outspoken. I was not influencing a damn thing. I wasn't... I was barely talking to my friends at that, but it was always at the surface. And so I had a lot of insecurities. When I conquered those insecurities at Curtis Middle School, I became Curtis King. So that has been the kind of conversation, the dual conversation that happens. Anybody who gets my book knows there's two versions of that, but yeah, that's the story. Oh, you have a book. Yes. I didn't mean that. So ladies and gentlemen, he's an author as well. Holy crap, I'm getting the book. Yeah. And there he goes. Don't you just love it when they just, they just, you know, the flight, the flight. but nah, it's the other room, it's any other room, but no, it's called the Prosperous Hip Hop Producer. And the whole idea that, we could talk about that obviously, but that got presented to me because of me making YouTube videos that the publisher felt like were out of the norm for that time period. I wasn't making tutorials, I wasn't making kind of the things that I guess most. producer, artists, musician, content creators were making. I was focusing on mental health. I was focusing on the idea of what does it mean to give true value? And I had read a book called The Go Giver. And when it defined through this fictional story what value is, I understood why I kept hitting a ceiling in my career. When I flipped that switch, that started my YouTube, my YouTube career, my YouTube video content creation career. and the publisher approached me and said, I think you may have a book ready to write and you don't even know it. And a year and a half... creator, cause I'm, I'm super intrigued about cause yeah, I'm not, I'm not, um, an avid reader, but I am on, I am a fanatic on audible. I just. got an audio book too. I narrated that. That whole 20, about 20, 22, 23 hours of narration, but I narrate my own story in that audio book as well. So there's a version of that. I appreciate it. The Prosperous Hip Hop Producer is the name of that book. Hip Hop Producer. or you can go to musi and it shows up on Amazon. There you go. Don't worry, we're gonna put all the links too in the show description. Prosper... No, just play it. Spell it? No, I'm kidding. if it was up to me, it probably wouldn't have been that long, but it's part of a prosperous series by the publishers. And that was the only one of the only stipulations they wanted to make sure that they kept that prosperous series going. It's like the prosperous coach, the prosperous consultant, and the prosperous hip hop producer. And so I got to tell my story in that. man. Wow. I am. I'm so happy because you trust me. I'm I am a I am a I am a audible junkie man like for real. I'm gonna get the phone call like 2.30 tomorrow afternoon, New York City time, or I'm gonna get the text, yo, with like 10 exclamation points, and then five minutes later I'm gonna get the phone call, like yo, this shit is crazy! Yeah. I mean, I mean, I process the information, you know, hearing it better, you know, I mean, yeah. I mean, if I'm not in front of a computer or working on some of these things that take multiple steps, I can find myself falling asleep pretty easily. My body only catches up. So audibles, the audiobooks, like right now I'm reading 50 Cent. 50 Cent. I forget which one this one is. I think I look past that one. Only because. as a first motivational self-help book that I've heard. It's called Hustle Harder that actually still that still has shade in it. I've never heard a motivational book that still offers shade for anybody that's an enemy of his. I love it. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, thank you. You know, I'm somebody who's read the less Browns and the Tony Robbins and that's a certain type of brand of motivation with him, it was like, he'll just be telling a story and he'll be like. Let's take Floyd Mayweather for example. I'm like, I didn't ask for specifics, I didn't ask for specifics, but now that we're here, we might as well talk about it then, 50. Yeah, I mean like man like we were I mean, I yeah, I'm telling you right now I went through Viola Davis's memoir Crazy. If you want to be inspired people, I'm telling you right now, her memoir, man, talk about from the dirt. I mean, from the, I mean, I'm surprised that she's alive to this day. So, yeah, man. So, so, so Curtis, Curtis King, um, high school, uh, you and the homies. And then didn't, did he give you the name or did he just drop off or, you know, uh, it was one of those situations where he kind of had some things going on in life and music just wasn't a priority anymore after those things in life. And I found this out about a week after I got it tattooed on my arm. So Curtis King is just sitting on my arm like, you know, this is for life. Let's go. Like I had already had aspirations first to be an artist. Really wasn't into production at that time. It was really about like production was out of necessity in that. I didn't want to become the producer, but if I didn't produce, we would still be getting stuff off of Bear Share and Napster and whatever was available to us, right? And so it dawned on me that I started off in a group way before that group. My guy Keaton has been one of my best friends for the longest, but he and I started rapping and I downloaded all these instrumentals like, you know, Oat Stain Cream and... you know, stuff by Twistas, stuff by, you know, Notorious B.I.G. And it's like all these different instrumentals, I thought I had a gold mine until we started exchanging local mixtapes and we all had the same beats. I was like, something gotta change here. Everybody got the same, exactly. That's that, that price is right. Everybody had the same exact one. So then I said, okay, well, let's go lease some beats. Cause at that time, the leasing business was very different than what it was. We're talking about 2002, 2001, before the ringtone. We took them on public funding. We took them even before that. So I would ask them and they wanted $500 for non-exclusive rights. And I was like, we're in the high school. We don't have that. What do you mean? And so. I'll give you $5 and... pocket, you was like, I'm up. price, but not for me. Who you think is gonna pay? So then I said, you know what? We'll figure out at some point. And then it happened to be a chance visit to a store called Electronic Boutique, which is like the first GameStop version. And we went into Electronic Boutique and we were supposed to be getting NBA 2K2, I think, or 2K3 with Allen Iverson on the cover for the Dreamcast. Cause my homie had a Dreamcast. I didn't have a Dreamcast, I had a PlayStation. So I was looking in the used section as he was in there, like kind of like, we put our money together, like is this, we really want to buy? Let's see. And I started looking through the used section of the games. I see like Tomb Raider, I see like Crash Bandicoot. Then I see a game called MTV Music Generator. Say hello to Nick. I mean, come on, react. Like, react's going crazy. Come on, come on Savannah. Look, look, I cracked, I cracked it open and I looked and I saw as a two disc. Wait, not even, not even yet. I told my boy, I was like, we might have to hold off on this Dreamcast 2K cause this is interesting. This might be something he like, he asked me, he's like, you think it's something that you could figure out? And I'm like, I don't know, but it seems like. It seems like we should do something with this. If our problem is production, we want to be artists. And so we made a really tough decision. Um, I think we slept on it. You know what I mean? He went, he went and thought about it. I went and thought about it and came back the next day. It was like, we get in that game. So we got the game. I think he took it home the first day and he came back at the bus stop the next day and was like, you take this shit home. I don't know. He was not the tech guy in our group. I was the tech guy. Right. And so I took it home and, um, didn't stop making music for the next 19 odd years. Now obviously it transitioned from the PlayStation into computer space into the DOS, but that's what I started off with, is that PlayStation game. And yeah, it was some ugly recordings, but it got me started. It was ugly. I do have a question. Was it the first one or was it the second one with flex on the cover? Nah, nah, it was the first one. It was the first one. I got the flex one afterwards. That already had a car by then. I had a little job and whatnot. Like I was like, yeah, I know how to do this. I know how to do this. like, yeah, fuck it, I'm gonna get the second one, the second generation. But not at first one, man, it's interesting because it definitely taught me what I needed to know about layering and sequencing and things that I didn't understand would translate to the program I'd eventually use, which is FL Studio. But this was kind of like visually, I think that's what kind of primed me to go the direction I did. Because I tried to get into hardware, but at that time gatekeeping was very strong. and folks were not trying to tell you, like there wasn't YouTube videos that show you how to use it. It was like if you're either in the circle or you're not and you get shamed either way. So, yeah man. That shit taught me how to arrange a record. Like bars and you know what I mean? Sections. It made you count, especially when, you know, the other dude that was in a group with me, since he wasn't gonna be the producer, he was a rapper. So I had to like, I'll be on a PlayStation, like you need more bars? All right, let me go do this real quick. And I had to like sit here and write my lyrics afterwards. Yo E, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'll show you. I'll show you. You could be blown away because it was so early. I mean this is, I mean yeah, I think the first one came out in like 99, 2000. Yeah. had it. I had it 3000 by then. I already had the NPC. Nah, it's just funny, because you're the first person, actually no, Eddie's right, you're the second person to come on the show that mentioned MTV Music Generator was my first introduction to actually making music, and then it was, you know, gear after that. Actually no, then it was, sorry, it was reason after that. And then it was gear, yeah. But yeah. Yeah, I think the only gear that I did at that time was the... Was it the Roland Phantom my mom bought for herself? It might have been the Roland Phantom that she bought for herself or either that or... No, no, the homie had a Triton. So he used to bring that over that I started Curtis King with. He had the Triton with all like the clip sounds and all of that stuff. And the... Yeah, I was like, he was like anything out there. I found the grinding drums. I was like, no. Like that was... next to each other. Yeah. Yep, yep. other, even like the dropping like it's hot. Like when that dropped, I was like, oh, that's the Triton. But no, my mom had a, had one of the rolling phantoms and that's the one that has had the floppy disk insert. And so I still was trying to like, I was like, at that time you got shamed for using FL studio at that time. If you didn't know, have some kind of control over hardware, at least the OGs are in the scratch magazines. Like you were getting shamed for that. And it was like, I can't afford this stuff right now. beer. And I didn't even come into this looking to be a producer. I came into this looking to be a rapper, be an artist, a songwriter, but production just kind of like, it came a lot quicker than the process of writing songs for me. And a lot of people gravitated towards it. My first opportunities that came, came so much quicker than what my rapping was bringing. man, I mean, so obviously you're saying like, okay, like, all right, these beats that we either you can't afford these beats, or you're not feeling the stuff that you're hearing. So you just like, oh, I was just, we might as well just create the stuff ourselves and keep it moving. gotta figure it out. Like, and it was, shout out to my guy Keaton, because he rapped over some horrendous beats. Dogs crying and yodeling type sound effects and beats with no bass lines because I would record it with, my first microphone wasn't any kind of like omnidirection. My first microphone was a operator headset from Radio Shack. Nice. That's a good one. about. You got the one that come on this side and the other one just rests on your ear. You're a son of ideas want to want to give me the place So like I would have people that came over to my quote-unquote studio, which is really just my grandmother patio and um, I would literally set up I mean you literally felt the elements like it was the inside indoor patio But when it was cold, it was cold when it was hot. It was high There was no controlling the elements and plus I had an old-school military grandfather Yeah, so you know the elements that he wasn't he wasn't okay with me having a floor heater in there He was almost like he didn't want me doing music So he was like, I'm gonna put them through the test. So I felt like I was really in some kind of military conditions from his doing. But I used to have a little itty bitty mic and people would come in the studio and be like, why you got two pop filters? Cause I'm like, do you see the microphone? I gotta figure this out. I think I got two pop filters for this itty bitty little microphone and it had a cushion on top of it. And I think I even put... I bought a plug-in called a mic modulator that could turn the sound of your mic into another type of microphone. So I was like, Jimmy rigging everything, trying to figure it out, but that microphone was one of the first times I worked with, eventually, my first placement was Ab Sol. Ab Sol came to that same living room. Ab Sol from TDE came from that same living room in my grandmother's patio. And he didn't, he wasn't bougie about it. He rapped on that same microphone and said, All right, what we doing next? So it's like so many things happen that I think really define the way that I approach things to this day and that it is really about your resourcefulness and not really your resources. You can do more with what you have. Mm, see, I like that. As React still shames me over here in my primitive studio. Nah, listen, I joke around, I break your chops, but it works. If it works for you, it works for you. You know what I mean? I'm a minimalist. I like, you know, yeah. to my studio, there's more video production equipment than there is actual music equipment. And it's just like these things are, I have what's necessary for me. And even if I didn't know it, I've always been more of an artist, more of a creative, let's just zoom out, more of a creative than I have any individual thing, right? More than the artist, more than, excuse me, more than a rapper, more than a producer, creative has always been like a part of my fabric from day one. But as a producer, it was something that, first it stumbled upon me and then too I started to find a lot of success with it and I was like, all right I gotta follow the sin of success even though I really want to be writing these songs which I still did but you know production can pull you in so many directions that rapping can sometimes. Yeah, I mean, you speak about, talk about your mother. She had, she copped the Phantom. You come from music background, mom, okay. Speak about that. yeah. So moms brought me up in a church and at that time moms was usually the choir director or she would be the one playing the piano. She would just always be in a, be in a place where she was leading the charge on music. So I was in church, even if I wasn't understanding what was going on, I was always in some LA church and she would play in so many different churches. Like it was like she was on tour during Sundays. Um, what Ma's like was after it and was doing what she's doing. And so I got to see her, she was classically trained from I think her before she like eight or nine. And I just saw her always making it work through music. While still keeping a regular nine to five job, she would do this on the weekends. And I never really learned directly from her. in terms of her teaching me the craft because she was always having to utilize it. It's like, you know what I'm saying? It's like having a parent that's successfully doing it right now. They don't really have the time to switch gears and kind of go there. So, but no, she definitely was the extent of my music background because my pops didn't have any of that. Was she, was she, was she into like, I mean, obviously the Phantom was, I mean, pretty advanced keyboard at the time. Um, was she sequencing stuff like that? I mean, so you sat around, I mean, was she doing it at home? I think she just got a deal on it. And she just loved, she's somebody who loves sounds. Like my mom was the first person to sit me down and ask me if I could name all the instruments inside of a record. What I didn't know is that my mom's had opportunities to go to Grambling, to play music, and another opportunity to go on tour with George Clinton. And this is when she was super young, right? George Clinton and Bootsy Collins have inquired about her plan, but at that time, you know, them shows was wild and her parents wouldn't have any of that. I'm watching Dr. they picked up aunt Fiddler got rest of got guy rested dead the amp Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like she, she really, like funk is one of her favorite genres, even though now most folks know her for playing gospel music, but moms could just like listen to something for a few loops. We were doing this a few months ago because I wanted her to play something on my home shows or for some content. She was listening to SWV Rain and she was just, she just pick up by ear and go. So that's always been. you know, uh, any environment, even if it wasn't directly taught to me. And I think that's part of the reason. And even beyond that, even my past, like they're both, they're both huge music lovers. They both love, they were, they were divorced, but they both love music, you know, in every separate household moms was into stuff from like Lionel Richie to, uh, Wham to, uh, Marvin Gaye to whatever. that soul is and my pops be on the other side with confunction and he will be on there with cameo when earth went in fire and so you put all of that. I never forget the time I went inside my mom's collection of cassettes at my grandparents and really, really deep in her collection. Like it was like a bunch of gospel stuff. Really, really deep. I saw a Scarface tape. Oh, huh. I was like, hey mama, what is this? And she looked at me and she said, I like the piano one and I mind your business. I was like, that ain't my little piano right there. I was like, her name is Rochelle, but that's when I call her Roro. I said, uh-uh. I wonder, hey, that piano could have been the homie, Mr. Lee. It might have been React. That's right, shout out to Mr. Lee. It had broken glass and raindrops on it. I forget what that was, but that was the cassette tape cover. I'll never forget that. But she was like, I like the pianos on it. I said, you ain't get this for no pianos. It's okay. He was young too, mama, you know, but. See when I grew up in the hood. Yes, hey, hey. But that's really dope because, you know, see that's why I think that, you know, the difference between, you know, parents, because I had, you know, my parents are now older and like in their 70s. So my mother, when she was in the church, and I had the same similar background that you did. church every Sunday. She did not travel to churches, but we were in church every Sunday. Choir practice, stuff like that, choir rehearsal. But the music was always flowing and then rap happened, hip-hop happened. My parents did not give me... I mean there weren't really that many curse records back then when I started. listening to hip hop, you know, you know, we had the, you know, run the MCs, the, you know, Houdini stuff like that. And, you know, early 80s stuff. So, but there was a couple. No, go ahead, bro. I was gonna say you talking about first tapes and hip hop tapes. Not really a story but when I was little, you know what the first tape my parents bought me, actually it wasn't my parents, it was my aunts, my two aunts, rest in peace, both of them. You know what it was? We went to the Wiz, nobody beats the Wiz. And I picked up the Onyx tape. Oh my god, are you serious? Back the fuck up. Yep. And luckily for me, it was spelled phonetically. it was. It's all right. That's right. So they didn't know. And long story short, they bought it for me. We went back home. I put it in. And the first record, punk you better back the fuck up. She was like, what is, no, no. She took the shit out. She went, I was like, no, what are you doing? and Jack, the black vagina finder. It was crazy. So, so, so I would say that my, my mother, um, you know, she never really was on me about, okay, I know parents that, you know, were producers and artists that just didn't let their kids listen to the cycle of music. So they had to, you know, hide it and stuff like that. My parents gave me the freedom. And plus, like your mom and dad, they had, I grew up off the same stuff too, Earth on the Fire, and then it became a soft jazz stuff and like Gerald Albright and Najee and stuff like that. Mm-hmm, I'm not nauseous my pops played the he played mess out of nauseous What is it the dedication he did to Stevie Wonder oh my fly album. So they never gave me, plus I was a DJ. So they was like, we made money? Yeah, so they gave me the room to do that, man. I love to hear about artists like yourself that your parents allowed you to do that. It's not the true. It's not the fool. It's not the full story. I mean it moms Moms was very open to that right moms was like a lot more encouraging of it pops was kind of like You know he He had so many transitions from you know Working in insurance to like owning his own business. And as he kind of got deeper into the entrepreneur space and then eventually the teaching space, oh man, he shifted because I remember a time period where we would play like, or he would play Ice Cube and NWA and like, and, you know, some of that stuff. But then it would just start to slowly shift. And I guess the older I got, it's probably would happen. But yeah, he was probably the most, he was probably the most. Adam and against me having a career in music. And it took years before, you know, I found some undeniable success before he was more open to the idea. But yeah, it wasn't a free for all in the households. Like I'll be telling a both faced lie if I said that. My mom was a lot more open about these things. But more importantly, man, when I think about, you know, like, you know, when it comes to, you know, secular music, I mean, there's the parents and then there's the I know you went through it. but they had They had stuff too like I'd never forget I found him my grandfather selection I found him but I forget the dude's name but I put this record on he said I'll be stroking like Clarence Carter Clarence Carter. And he cursed on that record. Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter. Ooh, shit, Clarence Carter. That record, stroking, bro. I stroke it to the E. Yeah, man, that was a. why there were certain vinyls that were stacked on top of each other. And then you get to like the real like, the real like, oh, this is like 70s Playboy style type stuff. Huh, this is. Ha ha Yeah, like that nitty gritty, because Clarence is on, you know? I mean, like, we should, back in the day, he's like, we had the first Curse records I heard were like, this guy was like, Blowfly. Blowfly was like an MC. But he was like, it was like Rap Dirty. I think the record was called Rap Dirty or something like that. And it was like, this is Blowfly, the master class. And I'm going to sock some soul to your ass. Oh man. like the record was crazy and we would just be like, you know, playing it low and shit. I was like, what are you listening to? But my pops had like Richard Pryor records and stuff like that, teaching Chong records. So, but yeah, man, I just love to hear that, man. The wonderful gumbo, you know, that makes who you are. So, I mean, so we can, I guess we can even fast forward to like, you know. You mentioned Ab Sol and there was a record, I think it was like Watch It Later, something like that, with a young K. And you guys were all about, I mean probably the same age, did you notice the greatness with Ab? Because Ab's incredible. absolutely. From that first time he came over to my grandmother's patio, I recognized what sounded like a young Jay-Z. Like when I thought about reasonable doubt, when I thought about like the technical skill that he held, the attention to detail, the way he would kind of like bend approximate rhymes. I knew that at a young age, because I was like studying this as an artist myself. But when I saw... First time he came over to my grandmother's patio, I always tell the story, but he came with another guest of mine that I was working with, my guy Grim, and we were all in the same neighborhood, and he brought him over, and he was just like the urban legend in that part of Carson. Like you had heard about him, but like a lot of folks was like, man, wait till you see him cook up. And so he came over to the house, and I had a beat that I already had created, and I was gonna write a verse, I think Grim was gonna write a verse, and... he's the only one that didn't have pen and paper. And I'm just seeing, looking, and I'm kind of like, you know, I have my back turned. The patio was kind of like set up, like that I had my back turned to my guests. He just sitting in this old school couch that my grandfather had, and he's just like, kind of like bobbing his head, not even mumbling. He just bobbing his head. And he got his hands over his mouth. And I texted the homie Grim, and I'm like, yo, you think he's feeling the beat? Like I could pick another beat. He was like, all caps, watch. And I was like, all right. Oh, kid, you're not 15 minutes later. No exaggeration. 15 minutes later, he gets up and starts delivering this almost like I compare it to, um, call it disjoin it, but it is very connected. Like he'll give you like a few of these syllables rest in a very awkward space and then give you a few more and make it all make sense. I compare it to like listening to like a Miles Davis solo at the end. You don't know where it's going, but everything that it lands on feels like it was supposed to land there. That's how it was. delivering words and when I saw that I said, first of all, this is something I've never seen before but I know in my soul, I know in my, no pun intended, I know in my soul that this is somebody that's going to be elite at this because if they're operating like this, you know, 1920s or whatever we were at that time, like there's nothing stopping him. And I think at the time he was, he wasn't even signed at TDE, he was signed to another label called Street Beat. And it just seemed like all... You know, all direction, everything was playing in the direction of him being successful. But the more he worked together, the more I started to see just how talented he was. And so he was the one that when he did get to sign the TD, I never forget. He was like, Curtis, make me a CD full of beats. And, you know, I float them over around the studio. And at the time, J-Rock was the biggest artist at the time. And so I really wanted to work with J-Rock. I was like, man, that could change a young producer's life. Yes, absolutely. Shouts to J-Rock. Yeah. Ho TD. Yeah. he did it. He did take the CD over there. Only problem was that the majority of the beats probably weren't that good. They weren't that good. Right. Um, but two in particular have a great story in that the one he chose that Abso chose for his project ended up being the one he featured a young Kendrick Lamar on, and that was one of the first official collabs on a project that they did together. So it's called watch a lady. Cool. The second one. There was a beat that I made. I was hoping J rock was going to pick it. It was terrible. It was nothing but 808s and gunshots. And that was actually the beat. What year was this? 2004, five maybe? I don't. so, and to make you feel a little bit better, Dr. Dre did the beat, you know, on 50 cents, and it was just the 50 cent joint with the gunshots. Doom. was a heat. Yeah, heat was probably the thing that inspired that idea. And I thought I'd think about it. That was a good pickup. I didn't even think about the connection. But yeah, I was like, yo, this is going to be it. It's going to be a West Coast version of it and all of that. And so I had and in plus I had heard, you know, the joint with two pocket and bone thugs. I was like, all of that was coming together. I was like, throw that 808s on. It's going to feel different. And so I did that. And J-Rock didn't rap on it. But there was a young dude. This ain't it yet. There was a young dude who was auditioning to get signed. He was just somebody who was kind of hanging around at first named Schoolboy Q. So the first beat that he rapped over there was that beat. And he is funny. He has it in an interview with the good folks over at Homies at Homegrown. He's like, that beat was trash, but shout out to you Curtis that he said, man, that's the one I auditioned over. That's the one I got signed on. So that definitely was like. my initial introduction to that entire circle. Like you'll even see videos if you go back to Turn Me Up Some with Kendrick Lamar and Absoll. There's a cameo you'll see if you go back. There's a young Pudgy Curtis King that was there because the night before I was making beats and recording Schoolboy Q in that TDE studio. So it was like, I was in that circle for a second and then eventually I moved out to the Inland Empire. That changed a lot in my life. So. What happened bro? Fumble. He fumbles the ball. Are we there? Yeah. You there, you good. fuck? That's a clip. I'm clipping that. One second. Jesus Christ. I hate this studio. The fucking camera went out, dropped his microphone. and I haven't even been drinking. Yeah, that's right. Boop boop React, I know it reacts. BROTHER THIS GUY STINKS! times. can tell we run a tight professional operation here, Curtis. I stay on my peasy pews, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And the whole, you know what's funny? In the process of that happening, it muted. I don't know how, maybe my ass muted the mic. Shit, literally. Nah, it definitely picked up all that audio, so don't worry. Ah, I'm sure you're going to clown me. It's all right. It sound like you getting jumped. The lights went out, like microphones started fumbling around. It sound like it was a fight. You know, I don't know who's winning, but it sound like... only her. And then a fight broke out. I'm just making sure it wasn't Spotify that came at your door for interview. oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh man, this is what I truly love about this show, man. Like you never know, man. Like I still haven't, listen man, I don't even try to act like I'm super professional and we're blessed enough to get the great artist and we keep a nice little tight, I mean open forum, but hey, anything can happen. And sure enough, man. including dropping your camera and microphone mid interview. Yeah, well, anyway, I didn't drop my camera. The camera went down and then I went to reach up for it. And then I hit the mic with my ass. And then everything just went haywire. Like I got beat up. We're keeping that. the We gotta bring the James Brown shit back. Yeah, no, I gotta put it back on the, I gotta load it back in, pause. we're so professional over here at the shop shop. Jesus. I know, man. I even lost my train of thought, but I did not. TDE Studios and Absoll, Young K Dots and Chubby Curtis in the background and what else we were talking about, Young Curtis. I did have a question. So what all that being said, like you're still crafting your sound. Were you a rising and budding artist at that time? Or were you just like, you know, basically, you know, hiding your recuse? You talked about your insecurities and everything, you know, and being an introvert and stuff like that. Were you really like, have you, did you arrive at that time? You know, as far as, or were you just producing? Okay. there were still opportunities that I was working on. Now, one of those major ones, which is really crazy, I don't think I've ever told this one, is not the fact that I signed to this indie label called Rockstar ENT, but the label itself was headed by an engineer and producer named Starlab, another guy named Tabeast. Tabis was one of my early, early bosses and mentors into this space and being able to be around him brought me around another individual named Sky Hutch. And so, you know, these are folks that now, man, you know, their names are ringing everywhere. And because of all the classic records they've been a part of, but at that time they were like young and getting after it themselves. And so I was signed to a label and one of the first time that Abso met, Tabis was in a session for me as a rapper, because I had Abso coming in for a feature for a song that I did. We graduated from Grandma's Patio into a studio in Inglewood with Starlab and Tabis. And so they met there, and I think that's one of the first times that they started connecting on records. And so I've always, my music career as an artist, As well as what I've done as a producer has always kind of been a bridge in a lot of different spaces been a reoccurring theme all the way up until You know introducing Naomi Jansport Jada hitboy Like this has always been a reoccurring thing, but the music that I do has always been the connection point So the fact that Ab was doing a feature for my album called storm on Mars Was the reason why say beast was in there because he was producing on that as well for my project so Yeah. My work as an artist sometimes was like the handshake. And when that wasn't an appropriate handshake, the production was like kicking my foot in the door. Like, okay, I'm not going nowhere. Like, if you don't want a feature, that's fine. You'll want some production, right? So, but yeah, it wasn't on the back burner, but Bebe and Sign there was an introduction to structure, an introduction to having help with my career because I was super DIY at that time. And yeah, then eventually I went to another independent label in the IAE called Black Cloud Music. And so that's when really my career took off is when I moved, I say 2010 from Carson to the IAE, everything changed for me as an artist and as a producer, but more so as an artist. A lot of inspiration too, man. I mean, you're around some of the greats, you know what I'm saying? And when I listen to you, as an MC, songwriter, production, everything, everything is just... It's super seasoned. Like, man, yeah, yeah. it. I wasn't allowed to be trash. You see who I'm around? There was a point in time where if you were a rapper producer, it was like pre-Kanye where you were expected to be terrible at one of them. You were expected to let him get his raps off, but his beats is really what you need to be. The instrumentals is what we're here for. think that they would like that with you? Um, I think in certain capacity, but once again, I was always, I always surrounded myself with people that were better than me in both fields. So when I sat there to write as a lyricist, there was no Curtis King, the producer in that room. I wrote to the best of my ability to keep up and, uh, stand out. And so, yeah, I think there was a lot of situations where it was that, especially with TD, they're one of my damn raps. They, they, they were there for the production and that's, and I was, you know, that was kind of like the rude awakening, but at the same time, I knew from the very beginning, I was going to be likely, I was gonna likely have to go to independent because the type of music that I wanted to make, there was no Kanye Lane for it quite yet. But when he did arise, it was like, well, maybe there's a possibility for that as well. But I had it in the back of my mind. Independence was gonna always be somehow attached to the work that I'm doing, even if it's just like featuring and being a rapper independent or producing for independent artists. But... Yeah, I think it, there was moments, there was moments like I would get a major feature, I would have a project that charted on the iTunes and all of a sudden folks are looking at it differently or, you know, I went on tour with MERS and things people looking at this as an artist. So it just, there's times where because I was around the best people that I know, Tay Bees is a producer where I was asking him questions on how I could be the best producer possible. That's one of the best producers I've ever met period. Willie B. Ichiban Dain. That's another dude I was around very early on. So it's like when the bars at high. we even mentioned it. I didn't want to mention it, but shit, I mean, it's kind of just Kendrick. I mean, period, I mean. I'm saying. Like I remember being in the rooms, watching him record. I remember being in the rooms watching Abso, Abso coming to my grandmother's patio. So it was like, I was always exposed to top tier, top tier greatness. And then seeing it in its very early stages allowed me to see the path for. Soundwave is another one. Like, I could, how do I come into that studio session and show Soundwave something I kind of doodled together? on FL Studio, like I would hold that back, but it got to a point where my lyricism was starting to take off probably from being in that environment around folks who held a certain bar and they weren't setting that bar for me. I was just a guest in a studio sessions, but being around that and then surrounding myself with independent artists that were like that as well. And even like my God told you, I started off with Keaton, like from day one, you wrap your ass off. Are you produce your ass off? No half, there's no half ass in any of this. Are you just, just quit? What are we doing? It takes too long. Hehehehe. Did you have that kind of, I mean, did you have that mind frame or were you just in the moment back then? Or did you just like, yo, yeah. we were always, even in the book, one of the first chapters I talk about, we were like old dudes, like super old dudes and young men bodies. Like we were talking about things that, when everybody was talking about Sadie Hawkins dance, we were talking about like the security of our families into the future and how can we secure that through this craft of music. And like we were having conversations that just didn't make sense when you said, you're a rapper, you're in high school, and what do you wanna do? Like we weren't talking about the cars and all that. Like we had a very solid and humble plan for success would look like and how we want to take care of the people who took care of us. And, um, yeah, that's that, that is, that was from the beginning is that we were real really driven and I, and I gotta give a lot of credit to my guy Keaton because he was a year too older than me, but he would expose me to like the Tupac documentaries. He would expose me to like the death row red tape and seeing all of these, like the work ethic of the best of the time, the corrupts and seeing how they operated. He would give me double Excel magazines to study, like not to just, you know, get inspired, but to study. So I've always been in a very, um, ironically, like a very military discipline style setting, even within music. I've always been around folks who were like, this is what it takes to be the best at your craft. Let me get to the music. I mean, man, this is a man. Like, not even that, man, because like, you spoke about all the layers and all the inspirations that you had. And now I get it, you know? And then you had early inspirations, you know, Outkast and like you were in Outkast, I mean, I believe that. Yeah, you know, so. favorite rapper. And even if he don't want to rap no more, he's still one of my favorite rappers. Hehehe He's the best. Not the best, but definitely a top. In my book, you can't do some of the things. He was the first person I listened to when I was like. Yeah, yeah, this, this is the conversation. Like I could have conversations like that in my music. I want to have conversations. a fly dude to say leather in the summer, silk in the winter. You know what I'm saying? Ha ha ha. yeah. Look, look, look. No, there's verses from him that I was like, if he's allowed to do that, it's almost like I unlocked a permission for me to try things because he made it sound so damn cool over the type of beats that he would rap over. So definitely was early inspiration for me. But Outkast, Tupac, Busta Rhymes was another huge one for me too. Because Busta Rhymes was so like. He was so adventurous in all of his production and his, and his, his flow switches and like concepts and even the themes of his album, the extension level event and all these different things. Like those were all part of the fabric of what you hear. So if you hear something that's like, it's out of character, it's like, no, that's just another part of the layers that, you know, are being unraveled. It's still part of the story. Yeah, I still don't think people really take Buster as serious as Alaris is, but I think he's one of the greatest to ever do it. Yeah. comes down to that simplistic thing. Animated voices don't usually have a place in top lyricist conversations. I think that's another reason, beyond the obvious of an M&M. I mean, that's another reason why people try to like discredit him as well. Those over the top animated voices, I don't even know if you put them in that category because he's kind of the exception to the rule for other reasons, but Redman. should be in that conversation, right? But Busta Rhymes, I mean, they wouldn't give it to a ludicrous because I think it's for those, they'll say things and they'll have an approach to it, but I think the animation and the voice makes it like, everybody, it's like the hip hop has one of everybody that sound like Guru. And it's like, you know, like they're cool, detached, I'm not really into this, I could be doing a million other things, like F that rap shit, I listen to classical type vibes like this. I think everybody wants that to be their favorite lyricist, but it's just not the reality of it. Everybody has different stories and different... Well, speaking of deliveries and flows, man, just play it. Play, please. Just give us where we just played it. Play the heat. I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again, huh I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again, yeah I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again Not that I need her permission but when I grab this pen I need to have the peace of mind you got my back in this You should know by now your husband ain't no average man I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again After a nine year hiatus making content I don't know what she gon' say but when I drop this Honestly I wouldn't blame her if she jump ship Over the last few years I took some dumb risk Almost crumbled my business and made my gut wrench But I'm an entrepreneur and when that hunch hits In the name of elevation I get sucked in I know I got a son but is it ill-advised? For me to revisit these dreams I had at 29 Would I be selfish if I brought this up at dinnertime? My wife look dead into my eyes and say you feeling fine? I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again this is crazy. should have just... I appreciate it. React. I haven't told my wife I wanna rap again Not that I need her permission but when I grab this pen I need to have the peace of mind you got my back in this You should know by now your husband ain't no average man My love I wanna share a window that won't minimize It's a vision you can't miss it when I'm in these blinds I wanna pen these rhymes and finally make the finish lines But I feel my window short like I'm filming vines It's got me thinking maybe baby this my pivot time I see a look a shot crawler You probably thinkin' how that music bout to pay these bills These were never your words, but I had the face to feel She told me that she got her doubts about this new career It's clear, I told my wife I wanna rap again Man. This shit is like... I told my wife I wanna rap again, yeah I told my wife I wanna rap again Now that I got her confidence when I grab this pen I think I'm really finna make some of y'all mad again Well, yeah, I was not. On one point I was going to make about is that, you know, how you get clear vision after you've released a project and you kind of see the head space that you were, you were in. And, you know, I have the belief that these ideas come obviously from a higher power and that you're the vehicle that they're traveling through. So sometimes the ideas will get laid down, recorded, written, and you still won't understand them in their full capacity until months later, years later, This is one of them songs where I'm recognizing like one of the biggest critiques sometimes of independent or if you only want to say conscious hip hop, that's such an older term, but like, is that they rap about rapping. What I'm recognizing in someone who's been in the content creation space, the people who are being rewarded with fans, with the vanity statistics that are independent are the ones who are telling their true to life story. and allowing people who don't relate to that specific theme relate to the general theme. So as you zoom out, there's folks right now who are like, yo, I wanna tell my wife that I really wanna get into this again, or I really wanna do this. I was watching the George Foreman movie and I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but seeing how he was at a place where his fighting career, he was over with, he was done boxing, right? It was done in the 70s, late 70s, yeah. the church, he was like, he was like, but he had a community center that a man that he entrusted to handle his finances had fumbled. And when he did that, the community center was at risk of losing it. It was like one of the things that he provided in that community for those kids to go to. And so him, he looked at how out of shape he was and was like, this is what I know to do. And he went there and he fought. and he got the $10 million check, I believe from Showtime and ended up winning. And then he saved the community center. It's such a 90 story when I think about it, but he saved the community center and he came. So I look at it and I'm like, there's a lot of folks who, it's not as dramatic as I wanna have a career and be an NBA player at a certain age. It's a matter of like, these are like zoomed out. This is just about difficult conversations with your significant other, with your spouse. And we all... have that thing to insert in that. So, insert into that topic. And so I'm just like, I gotta speak the truths as it is for me. And this is what's making people gravitate towards me in this new phase as an artist. But I think you have to speak to those because people will find their own reasons to identify with the song. Cause Lord knows a bunch of things I heard from like bands in the eighties, I can't relate to, but I find my relationship to it. I don't know what when doves cry means, but damn it, I feel it. I understand it when I hear it. Raspberry, like I don't know what a raspberry beret is, but man, I feel and I identify with the energy and I feel like that's also something that we can't take for granted as artists is that if you tell your truth, no matter what it is, somebody's out there on the other end that can understand it and relate to it. Man, I knew this was gonna be a great interview. React, I mean, because just alone on that, the communication between us artists or producers or DJs or anybody or any creative who's been doing something before they met their spouse. Yeah, because they know you as one thing, or they've seen you as one phase of your life, and it may not be the totality of it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, well, shit, we this is why we're here to talk about it. I mean, I've had conversations like, you know, like, really? It's it's not happening for you. Hmm You know, in a Muslim argument, you know what I mean? And, you know, I'm somebody who's played outside the fence, so yes, you know, actually, you know, yeah, independent. All my life, all my life. I would be lying to say I didn't wanna be that guy as a producer. Didn't happen that way. So I can relate to the song in a sense of. you know, when it comes to production, I've never stopped. But I get a bite on something and then, or like during a pandemic, basically reinvent myself. And we don't have the conversation. Not even allowed to have it in general in society. Like, you know, in our relationships is one level of it, but it's like society don't even wanna entertain the idea that somebody after 40 can, which leads back to the other video we had that I talked about, you talked about earlier, but like they don't even entertain the idea of, and then it doesn't help when some of the best, like a voice, like a three stacks, and I don't think he had malicious intent when he shared what he shared, but he gave. He gave voice. He did two things, positive and negative, I feel like. He gave voice to a running stereotype, to a running conversation that people were like, yeah, what do you rap about at 48? Da, da, da. The people who are questioning this haven't got to 48 yet. I didn't hear other people who were at his age saying the same thing. Matter of fact, the positive thing I think he did was getting people like Jada Kiss to talk about it, the clips to talk about it. And now we're having conversations around like, well, no, I don't think that I run out of ideas into my forties. If anything, black thought talks about it. He's like, if anything, now that I'm listening to like NPR, my concepts are now more layered than they've ever been before because I can have conversations on this level that I couldn't have in my twenties and thirties. But you know, when you really dig into that rabbit hole, you start to realize that's less about society and more so about the conditioning. that I will say that comes from the major label system that wants to churn out and work with younger artists because they're easy to manipulate. And when you see the bad decisions they continue to make, this is no longer an opinion or just, this is done on purpose because it's easier to manipulate somebody who all they see is the vanity. All they see is what they could get. And when they can offer you that and you still are only getting a slight, a small slice, And you think that you won everything at life? Like you hear the kids now, like, and I stay connected to all generations. I love all, I try to understand the perspective because I remember what it feels like to be 17 and feel like I wasn't understood, right? Like I start recognizing this new narrative of if I got more money than you, then that means that I'm more right than you or that what I'm saying is more valid than you. And it's problematic. I think also the conversation around clout. and the obsession that people have around cloud and how they've redefined and kind of took new ownership of that word because it used to mean something completely different, 80s, 90s. But in now seeing how these things operate, I start realizing like the people who have the biggest voices of opposition to the idea of somebody over 40 doing their thing and writing their truths are people who haven't met that age and are terrified. are people who are at that age and are terrified to try. But isn't it ironic that we're in a genre where some of these men are menaces in their 20s and 30s. They're anti whatever is the social norm. Then they get 40 and get real insecure about what they look like rapping. You didn't care about that. Like I remember my grandpa, my grandpa, they got your men hanging down by your ankles. You didn't care about it then, huh? So it's like, it's ironic and I meet a lot of my peers and I'm not clowning. I'm just saying like, that's the truth of it is that You built your career off of always being the opposite of what everybody told you what you supposed to do. And then you get to a place where now it doesn't look as cool, the optics don't look as cool or you don't think it looks as cool and you just stop. But yet and still I look at groups like Atmosphere, I look at, you know, a slug rap about things that are relevant to him in his 40s and his audience shows up all around the US, all around the world to support it. When I- about Killer Mike? How about that? Mike, yeah, Killer Mike. I'm just, I was just more so speaking like to like an underground, you know, in a space. Killer Mike is that, but then, you know, here's one thing, and I would love to hear your perspective on this, I don't wanna go on a long rant on this because I just did a mic. Killer Mike is inspirational to me, not because he won a Grammy. I hate the fact that the Grammys validate so much about what's possible in life. And it's like, when you know. the inner workings of that and how political it is and how these things are. But that's not to discredit it, that's just to say that we knew that Killer Mike was great way before he hoisted those trophies. When you hear the story that he put, instead of doing another Run the Drools album, he decided to invest $500,000 of his own money without a deal to invest it into a solo album. That's the things I look at and I say, salute, that's inspirational. You put $500,000 into your own solo album, even though you had a successful series with LP, that makes me like, yo, that's the crazy part. And then he aligns with No.ID. No.ID like really engineers and produces this album and he kind of like gets them ready. He even gets them aligned with a deal that puts them in the position to be able to submit his stuff off for the Grammys. Him winning it is like, is someone's like when you think about how hard a LeBron or a Yannis works. to be in the physical specimen they are, by the time they get to the championship, they don't, they're not, yeah, I did it. No, they're like, man, I just want my damn respect because you know how hard they work. And so I look at that with Killer Mike and I'm like, the OG is a inspiration because he bet on himself to me. Them trophies don't mean nothing to me. And like, if anything, they're just, they just prove what we already knew. about his greatness. But I understand the society's optics on it and I have a lot of like contrary and type of things. Well, just like they said, yeah, I know. But they, exactly, you know, but they got it right. They got it, they absolutely got it right. I don't care what, they finally got it right. Like, um. Took them how many years? Well, I would say the last time I'm gonna say back in 2016 or something like that, when to pimp a butterfly came out, you know, I think they got it right with that. my question is this, when they get it right, do we celebrate them for doing what they're supposed to be doing? Cause I think about that Macklemore album and good kid, Mad City, there was no more impactful album in rap and hip hop still to this day. Like that shows you the real impact. Him and Ryan Lewis, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis made a great cinematic piece of work. He, they killed that, there's no doubt about that. But when you think about what Good Kid, Mad City meant for a region that didn't have an artist that was able to reach this level in quite some time and have a cultural impact, he kept doing it. So when I think about them getting it right, I went like, oh my gosh. And then you started hearing about how the real votes go down and how layered that is. It's kind of a thing where it's like, we were hip hop before Grammys. Yeah, we just had that conversation in the last episode at the very end and how they come to come to their decisions. I think I think that shit is garbage. To be honest, like I said, they got it right with Killer Mike because the album flew under the radar. But it was not the obvious albums. One some, you know, like the Taylor Swift. We knew that they can't say it was based on, you know, you know, just somebody's magnum opus album. Like, like, no, she Taylor Swift ruled the world for the last year period. in a Super Bowl too. Like when your climax is in a Super Bowl, that's crazy. Like she wins a Grammy and then the climax is not even there yet. She won a Super Bowl before my Cowboys, before Dak Prescott won one. She just hopped into the game a year ago and she won a Super Bowl already. Uh oh, they're coming back. Hahaha. We're good. But yeah, man, it's just, man, like there's so many. That's why, that's why. But getting back to just I don't want to lose focus on what we're talking about in your song, like men, we as men, responsible men, family men, you know, I've had. conversations or arguments and I'll keep it real like you know as if you know what I do is a hobby you know but you know like why you know why you know what I mean and I know a lot of MCs, producers, DJs who find themselves in that spot like where they don't want to They want to have that conversation with their spouses or the significant others. And they don't. And maybe they should. I think it would relieve a lot of bitterness that you see in our peers, a lot of like underlying bitterness in a lot of condescending conversations. I tend to see my peers, and when I say peers, I mean more so my age group, the ones that are being condescending about the idea of me restarting my rap career after deprioritizing it in the name of content creation on YouTube and I still release projects. Like I was still, you know. a lot more busier than the average artists. But I was, I appreciate you. I appreciate you. But with that said, like when I finally came back, it was like, I can operate at this level. See, go against streaming, go against, do all these things and still be looked at like it's a hobby. And I started recognizing that energy usually comes from folks who are not living in their truth. Because who in here ever, when you're happy, you wanna see somebody else miserable? Like how was that part of your dynamic? Like we mixed together these conversations of like we need to have a real talk. Like as your friend, this is real conversation. My thing is, well, it can't be one sided if we're gonna have a real conversation. You gotta understand also too, that there's a possibility that you may be wrong. There's a possibility I may be wrong, but what are we gonna do about it? Are we just gonna continue to live and do what we... I always say, especially if you're not neglecting your responsibilities, if you're taking care of your family, if you're taking care of your bills and all the things that you're doing, who can say whatever they wanna say? But I'll tell you right now, I know folks with nine to fives who struggle and worse than rappers, right? As much as they talk about, and that's not even like to like throw no shade, that's just a matter of we're human beings trying to figure this out in our own ways. leave the space for people to figure that out, even if it is creative. Like I put up a tweet that said you're never too old to be creative. And I pray that that's something that as broad of a statement as it is, I pray that that's something that gets normalized in hip hop. It feels like the writings on the wall. It feels like, you know, first that, that conversation has to shift. In the independent space, then it has to happen on a mainstream level for society to adapt to it. And it's happening. When you see some of the, like the album of the year songwriters and, uh, even like the song rap song of the year, I think had like some of the oldest, uh, ages in that group, right? So this year, so when you see that, and this is like, you know, like I said, we don't use as a validation factor, but it is a, it is a temperature and where the, where society may be at, uh, I think even some stories earlier last year that talked about, uh, ticket sales or not, where they were, right? You got record labels that are deprioritizing, signing rappers over Afrobeat artists and, you know, world artists that are, you know, they're safer bets for them to invest the money they invest into it. So I think the writings on the wall, I think a lot of this stuff has been pushed down the pipeline and the imagery. Folks have been tired of it, but I think sometimes when you're great at marketing, you can convince people that. You can convince society that people aren't tired of it, but when you follow that dollar, you start to see people are making different decisions. I'm proof of it. People investing in me are not coming to me because, I know ratchet, should I say. Ha ha ha. Hehehehe Well, I mean speaking of money and speaking of dollars, you talk about independence and well known that you are not a fan of streaming platforms and if we're speaking about money mean? I got this Spotify green all in this room. What do you mean? I'm not talking about, I'm going green, set out to Hopify. Excuse me, I'm just getting over a cold. Speaking of dollars and cents, why don't you tell the people how much money you earn per stream on Spotify? 0.003. I'll make the same amount as the guy I just started rapping yesterday and Stevie Wonder. Sounds about right to me. I'm sorry. See, when I say these things, I get fought. And people fight vehemently against me. I understand this is my place in history, right? I understand that. Like I'm at that place right now, right? I get it. I'm watching the movie from outside and I'm like, oh, this is that part of the movie. Okay, well, they're gonna make you look crazy for saying something that should be an obvious statement. But I make the same amount as someone who just started and Stevie Wonder, we all in the same thing. Cause that's just, you know, And then on top of that, in order to flip a profit just off of the very product that should be at the center of what I'm doing called music, because I'm a musician after all, I have to work quadruple the amount of time and quantity and effort just to flip a profit in that system to something don't add up. The math ain't mathin'. It's crazy. And instead, hold on, let me see what it is. And then in Oppify, instead of saying, hey, you know what, we created this, this system was created of stream payouts because we were reacting to the surging piracy that was occurring at one point. We were scared, we were trying to figure out a system and then Steve Jobs came in and said, this is what I wanna do for iTunes and we followed suit. Instead of updating that, you chose to also put together a threshold. for artists that use your service. Oh, so now, shout out to legendary Lloyd Lang, now you're hiring us to meet a sales quota. So now, instead of paying more. Instead of paying what my music has generated, you have a pull system in which the people who stream the most get the most of the pie. So you could listen to my music for the next month and let's say your amount of streams, 500 streams is 10 bucks I think it is. Imagine you get that amount of streams. I only get about two to $3 of that 10. The rest of it goes to all the people you thought you weren't supporting, the Taylor Swift's, the, you know what I'm saying, the Drake's. Cause you're like, I'm independent. No, that's, we get a very small fraction of it because it's a pull system. When you think of it like that, and you start to realize even the people who are behind the beginnings in steel, Daniel Eck, the CEO of Spotify, used to also be CEO of a program called U-Torrent. And U-Torrent was very well known for distributing, it was a software that wasn't as intent, but it was known for distributing music. and movies illegally. So then that guy, I guess to sell that company off for 10 million, 10 million or whatever it is. who used U-Torrent for some cracked plugins back in the day. I said, look, I ain't gonna tell myself, but I understood the assignment. What I said, that guy becomes the CEO and then he brings on the other person that's a part of the programming to be the lead programmer for Spotify. When I started to dig that deep, it wasn't a matter of conspiracy theory or putting foil hats, I said, oh, the jig is up. So you get to create the reason why there's a rehab, but then benefit off of people going to rehab. You created the drug and the rehab center. Whoa, what a hell of a plan. I can't be a part of that, but I get it. So I rip. So it was a lot of things that led me to it. The threshold was a thing that really got me because it was about, it wasn't gonna affect me. I was gonna get the stream numbers to make that threshold. It's not a big deal. Like. Do other streaming platforms have the same type of layout, I guess, or structure? So there's one called Deezer that is experimenting. They're all trying to figure out how to like get their money back because With the introduction of AI one of the factors that AI is bringing is a lot of fictitional streams It is bringing a different kind of wrinkle to the game And so I think they're trying to prepare so that they're not paying out a bunch of robots I think that's one of the one of the things I've done a lot of reaction videos that have kind of led to it, but These platforms are all figuring out new systems. Some of them, they're trying to figure out that are artist-centric. Most of them are really about supporting their company. The thing that makes Spotify so unique though, is that they're one of the only music distributors, or not distributors, one of the only music platforms that doesn't have a product outside of music. When you think about Apple music, Apple music has Apple. You think about Amazon music, Amazon, right? So they're one of the unique... Title? Who ended up buying title? I mean, I don't know, Jay sold it off. But the point I'm making is that the reason they have such an issue, like, I don't know about title, but I know that the reason that they have such an issue was because here they are, I think they have like a 30% market share, right? Which is ridiculous. But it's been on record that 70 cents of every dollar go to Warner Music, go to Sony Music. and universal. 70 cents of every dollar. You know who else was in that same situation in 2012 Netflix, where 64% of their income was generated or excuse me, was accounted for from the people they were licensing movies from our TV shows from. Well, they changed that from, I think 64 to like 20 or 30% when they started coming up with original content. So then you get old, sorry, you get house of cards, you get stranger things. Eventually you get People were actually left too, I mean like Marvel left and all that stuff. They were like, they were like screw you. Like, yeah. content. Well, Spotify attempted to do that when they couldn't renegotiate these licensing deals and they got threatened with all kinds of lawsuits and they got scared and they backed away. So this is oligarch that is in their pockets. And so they don't, their only pivot to original content is podcast. 250, but you know what's crazy last year? You know what's crazy last year? They did. Well, they did this pivot after having, you know, Michelle Obama, Joe Rogan, uh, you know, Barack Obama and all these different folks they had for the podcast, Kim Kardashian, and they still didn't flip a profit. So for you to find out of nowhere, $250 million that you can secure a Joe Rogan with, in my opinion, is a slap in the face to the people that were the foundation of why you even have a platform that can pay out $250 million. When you're, when you're now saying to artists who would have gotten paid, whatever they got paid for, whatever streams they did that, no, you can't get that anymore, you got to reach a threshold and then to present in a way where it doesn't have enough details. And the artists who are making that threshold are now turning on the artists that can't make the threshold. That's an evil, evil game. So now you got folk artists who feel like I'm above all this. And they're laughing at the ones who can't meet the threshold. And now those same artists are looking up and seeing their songs and albums are disappearing because of 90% fictitious streams. So they're not touched. They're not unaffected by all these changes going on. So I saw this a mile, I saw this 15 miles away and I'm a big Prince fan, big Prince fan, and a Nipsey Hussle. well. And both of them saw something with the streaming. Nipsey said at one time that it was his goal to figure out how to create experiences that you can't stream. That's stuck with me. Prince removed his music, I believe in 2015, from the streaming services entirely. I think he might've even like only brought it back to title for a second. Tell us what, well, I know she had some other issues going on with, you know, who actually owned the music and whatnot, but with his, his category, his? Prince could do that and still generate hell of money because he was a beast in business as well, independently. With that said though, I kept having the thought in my mind of everybody that I ask about whether I should remove it doesn't know what it's like to remove it. The only person that's gonna know that is me when I do it. I had someone like, bro, I interviewed LaRussell. LaRussell was cracking up. He was laughing at the idea. Like, what you gonna take your music? He was laughing, we had an interview. He laughing at that. I talked to one of my former managers. He's like, this just doesn't make any sense. You know, he compared it to being a restaurant that doesn't accept credit cards. He's like, you've got to make it for your fans. I'm at the point now where it's like, I have the flexibility to say this because I'm not, I believe the relationship between an artist and a fan should not be slavery. It should not be slavery of your mental health. It should not be like, people have a thin line between loyalty and slavery. And I think a lot of times they will sacrifice their own mental wellbeing and their capacity to even create the art that people fell in love with to satisfy people who will never be satisfied. And so when I thought about it, I was like, I'm tired of trying to make everybody else happy. And yet for the last 19 years, nobody has done anything to adjust for artists in that space. You know, I'm taking my music off. And the thing is, I never not once, you look at through all these videos, I never not once said, you guys should follow me. I said, this is what Curtis King is doing because I see it clear as day. That the icing on the cake was the whole threshold and in learning about these new rules. And I wasn't gonna be affected. But the folks that I've been given information to and advice to, mentorship for the last nine years, they were. That's not the way that when I say DIY, I say do it yourself. That's not the way that we operate in our tribe. We wanna look out for, we wanna look out for us as a whole and do things that make sense. And so for me, I was starting to thinking about like, all right, well, what options are there on the table for me to actually monetize my art? And could this be the reason why you see so many artists putting out half-assed versions of even their own ceiling of greatness? Yeah. Oh man. This is. know what I'm saying? Like I've had many conversations with my peers, bro. Like I have a rapper, man. You guys can look this rapper up named Stevie Crooks. He's phenomenal MC. And we were talking about him. We're like, man, this current ecosystem does not support the idea of us reaching the highest levels of our artistry. It doesn't support that. It supports us going quantity crazy to check off boxes. But when do we ever become great? Maybe that's the reason why music doesn't stick to people as long anymore. Maybe that's the reason why so much is getting dropped, but so little of it is so special that you wanna revisit it in a year or six months. Man, you really truly are an advocate for this shit, for real, because I don't make music like that and shit like this doesn't affect me because I'm not necessarily in that space where I'm making records. But just knowing that this shit exists is mind blowing to me and knowing that there's an advocate like you fighting for people like yourself. and like EJ and all these other fucking producers that came on the show is incredible. Huh? EJ, Eddie. all right. We called each other. I called you Nick earlier. He just called me by calling. Are we on governments now? Okay. No, it's all good. yeah. react like I would argue this does affect you though, because the folks that you're fans of, you may be asking questions like, damn, what's going on with bro? Like, why is this music sound on the way it sounds? You start to die. for sure, and in the future, who knows? It might affect me in the future, I don't know, who knows? I just had a conversation this morning and I cannot mention the artist. I'm sure one of my good friends is the manager of a huge artist. I know where this is going. on the brink. Just. TikTok out the sky, just everything that adds up to what you were just saying about. And he said, I said, my wife said, yeah, my wife said, how come this artist isn't signed yet? And he hit me with Spotify. Like he said that their presence on Spotify could be a little bit more. That's the excuse. It dry. When I tell you this artist is super talented, out the roof, super major pop artist. She's going, she's going to, I say she, she's going to be, but the fact that, that these labels now are. That's their go-to. There's no artist development anymore. Nobody's relying on a human to go into a show anymore, to say, yo, I'm signing that person. Think about this for a second though. And I saw somebody bring this as a songwriter that brought this up on Instagram. He said, could you imagine if the movie started doing this or if TV shows started doing this where we would only get the actors that have gone viral on TikTok. And it's kind of happening on certain platforms like, you know, shout out to Tubi. Some of these movies is kind of like, it's the viral stars and these movies are not that good. Like no disrespect, but the movies are not that developed because there's an art form behind this. And it's crazy that I become a polarizing voice saying this and it's such an obvious statement. Like there are people who are professionals. Like there's pros and cons of this era. Like what we're talking about right now is the same thing happening in sports media and that the people who went to broadcast and journalism school, they're now being replaced by the athletes who have played sports, right? So that sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. Cause when you, cause I low key as a, as a, as a, as a basketball fan, I want to know from somebody who's going through an injury how long Anthony Davis might be out for this. I've had this like that's there's benefits in that even knowing that X and O's and some folks get on there and all they do is that's what I'm saying. and I don't want to hear about skip bail. I don't skip bail is has nothing for me For clickbait, eh. So, but I think we're living in a time, not to interrupt you, but I think we're living in a time where both of those are happening and we kind of have to like, something has to give. It's just unfortunate that if you do that in music, you know what happens? You get somebody who does the numbers you're talking about on Spotify, somebody who's great on TikTok, their presence is amazing, but they've never done a show in their life. and they haven't gone through any hole in the wall shows to build their character, to build their confidence, to build their stage presence. No! These labels go and put these folks on the rolling loud stage. Cause they went viral. And you wonder why people don't want to buy tickets to come see it. Well, look what you're putting out there. I wouldn't go see movies if it was nothing but people who went viral on social media, but never got their acting shops up. Cause all they know how to play are the people they created in their skits. Damn. So now music has become that, but it's like people treat music so cheaply. And even it's not just the folks who are in business, it's artists who are doing this too. That's why when I had that song that I told you about playing business. Playing business is me realizing like, yo, Santa Claus ain't real, bro. I'm looking around a lot of artists and I'm like, you're talented as shit, but you don't want this. You don't love this. This is a way for you to address your daddy issues. You want to find some love through music. You want to find people that come in here and validate you because nobody in your life really validated. I can tell because you don't want to take the extra steps. You don't want to stay in a studio a little bit longer. You don't want to iron on the details of what would actually make you great. You're not concerned with being great. You're concerned with spiking off dopamine. You're concerned with fighting with those inner demons, but not necessarily conquering them, just hustling with them. So when I started seeing that, I was like, I can't kick it. I can't make songs with you because when you work with folks like this, it's draining to the people who care Yeah. Man, man. that to happen no more. And that's in any form I would suggest that. And yo, I mean, it's funny, man, React, because I don't know if it was you or somebody else. I was like, had a conversation. Like somebody asked me, like, man, like how come you're not working with this? I'm like, because like, why? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like. When you've been in that situation, you never want to go back again. And when you work with somebody that don't love this and they shortcut every part of the process and they whine and complain and it's like, I don't look at this as a hard job. People are artists who are like, I don't want to create content. And I'm like, I don't want to do shows. It's a part of your job description. Why did you choose this job? But you want to change all the rules to, to satisfy your laziness. Nah, bro, I can't rock with it. Maybe I'm the old head talking when I say that, but I can't rock with it. Ha ha ha. not at all. This is Eddie's reaction when somebody asks him if why he's not working with that artist, that specific. Huh? I love it. I love it. Yeah, I don't do it man. Yeah, I mean. And they gonna call you pretentious, they gonna call you Hollywood, they gonna call you everything with a not. Yeah. called that. I've been called that even on the DJ circuit, man. I've been called like, oh man, just because I'm handling my business. Like I know my worth and if you don't want to do it. cat off the screen though? Why is this cat still on the screen? Huh? What the fuck is it? Huh? Why is it still on the screen? Huh? Huh? Huh? He's insane! greatest man. This is the greatest whoever created this one. That's okay. Can we play the right? Maybe if we play the playing business record, the cat will go away. There we go. Oh, yes. Here you go. A world premiere I'm sick and tired of playing business And all of that pretending I done heard a million ways to make a million Now I'm really bout to get it And I don't care who get offended It's a limit on my time and it's ticking Man, I'm tired of playing business And now I know that y'all pretending I done heard a million ways you'll get paid But now I'm really out here getting it I don't care who get offended I can't let you waste my time, homie, quit it I don't wanna hang around you rappers If this music ain't your passion Not cause I'm a peerist, but clearly I feel detachment Two categories of rappers the thought was crackin' So you look inside they eyes and see a lil' Donnie Brasco The rapper on the TV that be lyin' by his dreams And the up and comin' rapper that be lyin' by his dreams I thought that he was merely a product of a lot of practice Workin' on his craft but he been workin' on his actin' And in the underground you got a man that's a distraction He always won a bill but he ain't never got a ratchet You always talkin' money, nigga, you a Franklin Hatchet Won a ball but you never come to practice Second try to playin' fitness All of that pretending, I done heard a million ways to make a million, now I'm really bout to get it And I don't care who get offended, it's a limit on my time and it's ticking Man I'm tired of playing business, and now I know that y'all pretending I done heard a million ways you'll get paid But now I'm really out here getting it And I don't care who get offended, I can't let you waste my time, homie quit it G Malone said there's a record business, and a music business And Curtis King I think could help you if you knew the difference In the record business it's about the Grammys and the vanity Fusing the who's who's, losing their insanity In the music business, music is the top priority The centerpiece product and the object is authority That flawed me, I see that I'm playing the wrong sport So ignore it, the billboard charts and they reports it's distorted It's just another business, I'ma leave now Before they try to come and lead Curtis down the green mile I got a business of my own and we gon' eat now I got my LLC typing on inkfowl I don't wanna rap at no shows if niggas speakers out And now you leaving doubt, and every potential fan And now these niggas leaving out I got a stages at my house, nigga peace out This one go to all the promoters that didn't want to pay me what they know that they owe But now, now We doin' shows at the house, we doin' shows at the house now I'm doin' shows at my house now, now Now, now, now I'm sick and tired of playin' business And all of that pretendin' I done heard a million ways to make a million Now I'm really bout to get it that. But first and foremost, I'm gonna tell you something. I'm changing your contact photo in my phone, and it's gonna be the Tupac photo when he's got his fucking middle fingers up. That's your new contact photo, bro. It's a very, very different, this is a very different era for me because I have not been the controversial figure. But then I started realizing like, we're living in a time where standing on your truth is controversial. We're living in a time where sticking to your guns is looked at as like, no, we don't really do this. not really controversial though, bro, when it's the truth. Well, I say that only because of the polarizing reactions that I've been getting. This is the first time in my career that I've been seeing Curtis King think pieces and take down videos of my character. And it's like, I'm like, Doug, all I said was that, probably. MLKB. I mean, I ain't even going back that far, but like, you know, we ain't doing about making some, you know, but I looked at it and I'm like, no, I do. I, I'm, I'm well aware, but the same time I look at this stuff and I'm like, I think we're living in a time where like, shout out to cat Williams and the way he started this year off, we're living in year of truth. Like we're really living in a time where it's like, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it's ugly, you got to stand in that. And I think that when you I think when you straddle in the fence, people see you as more dangerous. I think when they know where you stand at, there's no surprises. I've told you where I stand at. Nothing I've said is irrational, right? Everything that I've said has been backed by actual information. You can look up yourself that I've looked up and I have a channel where you see, it's funny. You can watch videos where I do my first Spotify video and I'm like, okay, you know, I still got my music on here. Hey guys, I tried to delete it last week and they wouldn't delete my page. The next one that's like, hey, did you see this new Threshold thing? You see me progressively getting angry because it's like, it's this real time reaction. So that song to me represents, you know, me really standing into my tribe is, I call them DIYers and it's not just do it yourself musician, right? But I think a lot of folks see do it yourself and think it's somebody who. you know, is begging for help and they think it's an up and comer. No, I think that DIY is the new generation of independence and independence means that you're taking your business serious. It means that you do understand that there's different departments of a business and that marketing is a part department of it. You understand the music as a foundation. That second verse in that song is so important because that was a real conversation I had with a legend out here, glasses Malone. And he told me he was like. Mm-hmm. Hell yeah, shots of glasses. Yep. He recognized, he was like, there's a difference between the record business and the music business, Kurt. And he said, you've been thinking that you've been operating in the record business, he said, but that's why you hear like death row records. You hear all these different records because in that business, the symbols of success are very different. It is the vanity statistics. It is the fake streams. It is, you know, the Grammys. It is all these things that mean something in that world. But when you're in the business of selling music, you're in the music business. That's why they don't worry about music selling. They don't care about that. That's not their focus. It's sponsorships and all the things that are surrounding the branding of somebody in music. So in a music business, I recognize like, this is why I care so much. Used to get like criticized for caring as much. Now I recognize, Oh, I've been operating by the wrong business ethics and the wrong business system. but I don't think I would have seen this as the business it was had I not been on YouTube for nine years creating a business out of that. Now that I come back to music, I recognize all the errors of the younger rap and Curtis, the younger producing Curtis, and I'm able to come to this and say, how do we create a self-sufficient system where I don't have to rely or kiss anybody's ass to be successful? What does that look like? That's really independent. That's really DIY. Shout out to Arsonist from the Heatmakers. He made a statement that went super viral about like, how could you be on these streaming websites and say you independent when their pockets is being shook up by the people who are the major labels? Some of them even like Columbia that had shares of Spotify, like how could you say that you're fully detached if you're not independent in your business? I took that as a challenge. And now I'm direct to consumer. And I know what that means because I studied that during my nine years on YouTube of. This is what direct to consumer looks like. I am Amazon selling my own batteries, even though I may have an Energizer and a Duracell, I'm selling you the Amazon basics. That's what it is for my music. I'm in the music business. So I just, my job today, create the best music possible that I can through the best producers that I've worked with. Shout out to the Naviens, the old goshes, and all the folks I have access to, who in their own right, like Naviens produced for Travis Scott and Drake and... You know, Nas and oh gosh himself, very accredited, huge on social media. And so those are the folks that are like, those are my, those are my folks that I'm working with and doing this business with. Now what I can do is say, what else can I go independent about? What about media? You guys are the first interview that I've done in this entire run of projects. And I did that on purpose. And then I wanted to talk to media that was mature. media that wasn't going to ask me questions that you can Google. I didn't want to talk to a platform that was like, did I going to understand the energy of where I'm coming from and ask me like the clickbait type questions? Like I, I appreciate the respect y'all have for me and what I'm doing and not like trying to belittle it or run up, you know, so. Yeah. I couldn't wait because I knew after looking the last four days I've been looking at the content and I was like, man, I was like, we're going to school. And well, I don't say think about this. I want to end this last point in that. So music, this is the room that I record and I produce my music out of because I still produce my own music. I engineer it, mix and master, get it out there, right? Export it, upload it in this room, cool. Now I can get my CDs from a website like Kanaki, my vinyls, get that produced up. My merch is print on demand. Cool, so that hasn't even touched the house. I can go downstairs now and I've set up an extra living room to basically be my live performance. So now media is optional because I have a YouTube with a quarter million subscribers on it so I can plug my own music as my own mid-rolls in my videos. And those do great numbers, right? Right? So I don't have to go. So there's some of these media outlets that if you don't kiss they ass on a regular basis, they're like, well, let me see if I can fit you into my busy schedule. No, no, that's cool. I'll just plug my music into my own platform and treat me like I'm just another artist that I support. What happens if they come knocking on your door, B? Because the way you're moving right now, it is going to happen. That's what happens. They want you to do it yourself for a while, and they know. And then the music is upper echelon, and that's no cap. I appreciate it. So they may be knocking on it for what I did want to ask you before we go any further What pushed you into this? Because you know so much you know so much was there a point in time where you said Fuck it like I'm tired of this shit I think it was a point in time where I thought it's, I thought that I was legitimately blackballed. I, there was opportunities where the writing was very clear on the wall that it's not your talent anymore, Curtis. It's, it's, it's really the fact that this person got pissed off and now hold your, your future in their palm to a certain degree, because if you want to get on these blogs at the time, if you want to get into these types of shows, Well, you got to go play the game. And it was always a part of me. That's like, no, cause those are not the folks that I look up to the folks that I look up to you talked about, like, you know, uh, Pock or these are folks that Pock was a lot younger. He died at 25 and I feel like he would have transformed into other, other aspects, but I think of a nip who as much as he is celebrated now, I remember a time period where he was ridiculed for that a hundred dollar album. People thought he was. Like they were calling them out names. I remember the Toplick magazine said he was one of the laziest artists, uh, that was untapped potential when he took a lot of offense to that. I remember all that stuff. So when you say they come knocking, I think about that as a reason why you go to my stage, Prince is on the wall with slave on his face and nipsey's on the wall. My attitude is always going to be, if it's not a hell yes, then it's a hell no. And if there's anything and what's going on that makes me say hell no, which there likely is, it's a hell no, because one, you coming to my door is only reminding me how serious the work that I am doing is. It's a reminder that, hey, y'all don't go looking for people who need you. You go looking for people who don't really need you, but they don't know they don't need you. Yeah. Do you ever turn it off? Because it... You see these bags? I wish, I was talking to my wife today, I was talking to Jack GPT about this. I was like, my friends keep saying I don't have an off switch. My friends keep saying I've been going hard, but I feel like, here's the, here's the, gotta go. like my mind, my mind, my mind is blown and I am so, I am so I'm, I'm the, I'm, I'm the more, uh, you say that? I'm just in my feelings and when I come to an artist, when I sit and listen to your story, I am just like, completely overwhelmed and just in awe. And then I just look about it like, damn, he's like, he is really doing a lot. Like, do you ever turn it off? My body will turn it off for me. That's the answer. My body knows how to turn it off for me. It'll get me sick longer than usual and remind me that you're human. Sit your ass down somewhere. But it doesn't help when I listen to folks like David Goggins. It don't help. I got mambo mentality on the wall. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm surrounded by people that make me feel like I'm not. to show a flex right now. do. I feel like I'm surrounded by people that make me feel like I'm not so special for doing it this way. And this is my job. Like, I don't feel like I, I don't go doing this looking for anybody to celebrate me or, or applaud for me. I look at this like, dog, this is my job. So you could tell this is probably another reason why, what you got a signed copy? By the man. Yeah. Come on, man. Yeah. That's one of my favorites. Shouts to my brother, my brother-in-law, G Edelstein. It's one of those, it helps you to see the true limitations of what we can do as human beings. Like I don't think that anybody should, I'm not saying I don't think anybody should go for a four mile run on a broken leg. I'm not saying that, but what I'm saying is like, I look at this and I'm saying, dog, we got one life and we're living in 2024. And there are people 20 years before this that could only dream. about having the things we have. Yes, it's overwhelming. I tell my parents, I understand this shit is overwhelming. I get overwhelmed doing all the things I do, but we get to be overwhelmed. And this is the easiest, when you really think about it, today is the easiest it will ever be, because in 10 years, as crypto develops, as the demands of what an artist is supposed to do develops, it's gonna get even more complex from now. So enjoy this time right now. Yeah. of focusing on what you're overwhelmed by, take it steps at a time and recognize like, this is the easiest. You're talking about algorithms and trying to get in front of people, dog, just do your work today. So there's times where I think it's a beauty. I think it's a beautiful benefit of not living too close to LA. And that when you're in LA, you're always surrounded by people that make you feel like you're not doing shit because that's even if they're not doing I live out here and it is so peaceful and the people around me don't care about nothing that I do. They don't bother me. They don't, my music, they don't care about none of that. And that peace of mind knowing that I can look down the hallway and my son is right there after I've worked on music, no more late night sessions. There's so many things that I don't have to do that. If I listen to my peers, I would be crazy to think as possible. But when I saw some of it was possible and I kept pushing it, So media is taken care of, my recording is taken care of, my merch is taken care of, my shows, because dog, that gets supremely political if you don't kiss the right ass there too. And even like the way shows are designed, at 39, there's things that at 29, I was like, oh, I'm just paying dues. At 39, I'm like, I could have kept my black ass home for this, and it sounds better at home. Because you know what I'm saying? Like we got... It's straight into the computer, straight up. So these ideas I think came from a place of frustration with the situation and feel like I had no control. That idea that somebody can be blackball pisses me off so much because nobody should have that much power. And I wouldn't want that power to blackball anybody. My thing is this, we're living in a time where that's not possible anymore. You can cancel you whatever, but you make the final decision upon what you want that to be. I sat up here and I'm not a... supporter of his but I watched a guy like Trump say the craziest shit over four years and when they challenged him on it He doubled down and got more powerful So I'm when I see that exists in the same time as cancel culture cancel culture is Santa Claus to me So I'm just gonna speak my piece I'm going to talk to my tribe and the people who come into this equation and want to help I'm not gonna let you slow me down. First of all, and second of all, I can read it a mile away like You either get this shit and understand that I am the value, not even from a place of ego, but I am the value in this situation because I know my ultimate source is God, first of all, but I know the value of this and it's been tested and tried for so long just to get here. And I'm still not a household name, that's cool, but I am paying my day-to-day bills, my rent, my music is all what's determining that I'm taking care of my son and my wife. She has her own business and so it's like. I thought about this before I had a conversation with you guys. There was a conversation I had in high school with a young dude. He was my age. You were both young, whatever. He said, man, what do you define success as for yourself when you get older? Is it the Grammys? Is it like the mansion? He, and he pointed out past the high school and he was like, you see that house up there on the hills? He said, man, if I had that and did nobody know what I did, I'd be straight. And something about that stuck with me to where it's like, we have our idea of what success is when we're young and wet behind the ears, but then to actually live in it and recognize like, it's not as loud as what you thought it was gonna be. It's not as gold as what you thought it was gonna be, but damn it, if it's not satisfying. So as I'm doing these things, like doing a show from the house and broadcast, I'm like, I really feel like I'm, I'm first of all lucky. Even with all the hard work, I feel lucky and blessed to be able to do it. But also like, I'm not finna let nobody or no amount of money come in here and disrupt this. I don't care how tight shit gets. Cause I recognize like, I recognize the moment that I'm in right now and it has to happen because if not, you let these folks determine that your music is going to be worth shit in a few. Man. Good night, folks. I know, like just my brain is like... They can't have it, bro. Some of us actually care, man. We care about the quality. We care about the presentation. Y'all care about the presentation and the quality. Why in the hell would I ever half-step the thing that is the centerpiece? Why would I do shows where the sound is trash and I'm trying to sell people audio? Facts. high quality audio I'm trying to sell them and convince them, hey, I know I'm a florist and you walk into my flower shop and every flower is dead in here, but I guarantee you, if you pay for it, we'll send it back as the best. No, so like everything now I'm recognizing, like when you finally get some momentum, all that work y'all doing on social media, I'm doing the same kind of work, protect your brand at all costs and stop. sacrificing it to the lowest bidder, because now you got to go right back and do that same groundwork to convince the people that came to see you that you're really on your stuff. me and React have, we just had a conversation about this a couple days ago and we were like, yeah, fuck that. React was like, nah, we. Nope, not me. Talking to the wrong fucking guy. Yeah. Just about, you know, you know, talking in terms of joining somebody else to do the show and stuff like that, you know. And he was like, no, like this is our shit. Then it becomes a glorified job that you didn't want to create. When you created this, you created an opportunity for you to tell your story, run your plays. And then you're at the mercy of somebody else who's... and they paid you, and they paid you. So now they paid you, now they get to determine things that are outside of, and was crazy. And I heard currency say this, he was like, he thinks that there's, he thinks that there's less creative, there's less people who wanna choose to use their creativity than there are people who choose to use it. And because of that, you have more people who are in a position to, that have money, that want to pay folks like you and I to do the things that they see as tedious. and unnecessary work because they know that that's a means to get them more money. What I recognize is that they're not they're not aware that there's artists like myself that have the ability to create music at a high level, but also who have critical thinking skills to understand what is good and what is not good for me. And I think that this is when I get in conversation with some folks, man, they talk to me so condescending because they're like, you're just a rapper. you're just a producer. And I'm like, I don't think you understand what that means because you've never made music. But me going to be in a rapper after being a producer, it just made me realize how many damn steps go into production. I was sitting here in front of a verse and two verses and two choruses like, damn this, this is it. No going through snares for the next 40 minutes. You know what I'm saying? No tweaking and subtractive EQing and trying to figure out the proper. you know, a compression for this drum bus. Like they don't understand that our genius and I think that's partly because it's our responsibility to launch these things on our own so that we can show others what's possible. And when they come to the table to do business with us, if it's not mutual respect and obvious respect and they don't wanna partner, they can leave. They don't have to be here. We'll figure it out, cause we're creatives. See? Yeah, yeah, man. am I gonna tell you yes when I don't have to? Wait a minute, wait a minute. And then you're gonna come knocking and tell me that what I'm doing is so great that you wanna break bread with it? Oh, you messed up. You gave me a number that I know is double that cause you wanna make your profit. It's a hell no to the first seven deals that come through here. Hahaha Yep. That bag better be super duper right. I'm telling you. The contract would be right too. Like the bag is cool, but make sure that you're not gonna take my control away. Like you're not taking none of my control away from this. Cause these folks don't know how to make it work. All they did was figure out how to make money work. That's right. Yep. They come in here and try to tell you how to, you know, what? They try to come in here and tell us how to do. They try to tell us how to cook. All you did was buy the franchise. You don't know nothing about cooking. You figure out how to franchise it. Cool. But you don't know nothing about this cooking. That's what brought me to the door. I'll throw, just like you said, that, or I said that bag at you, to the point where you're like, ah, and then you give up the, you just forget about it, and then you lose control, and then, you know. Family, you know how many folks I meet in this that remain nameless? How many folks I meet in this that find supreme levels of success that are waiting for somebody to come save them? They're waiting, like they don't want to be, you know, that's what I'm saying. Like it's folks, they don't really want to be independent and I don't blame them. I don't, I don't shame them. I just want them to stay the hell away from me because it's a distraction of what I'm doing. I am building this just like any other person in this, in this country that wants to build their own business from scratch and pass it along their family line. I want to do the same thing. I'm not looking for the highest bidder to come relieve me of all this work. No, no, no. I'm trying to build up something. that has a legitimate system, a reliable system, that I can now delegate responsibilities to and scale. React, did you? Man, we gonna talk about this tomorrow, React. I mean, because, I mean, you know, we sorta touch base, we touch base on this. You know, I get pep talks, he knows I get pep talks. Yeah, we talk, I mean, this is a daily conversation between the two of us. Yeah. But damn man, like this is what I'm talking about too. This is a beautiful thing about, and it's a running theme on the show about, like I've mentioned a couple times about staying a student. You know, I'm your senior by 13, 14 years. But I just love being a student. I just, you know. Like I said, we're all masters at our craft, but still, you can always learn something. This is the message to the older guys who are my age. Do not think that you don't have it all. I'm looking at React, who's younger than me, who just is a genius and picks up things when it comes to editing and software, and then... And then I got, you know, D. Curtis King right here, who is just a straight up influencer and a motivator, period. And then on top of that, there's the music, which is, you know, super fire. You know what I'm saying? Like, and I'm learning. You've given me so many gems right now where I'm literally going to go to, I'm going to bed tonight like, yo, fuck. That. Yeah, yeah. Double down, double down. They're not they're not they're not prepared for that. They they're prepared for what's your price. Let's get this over with. And when they talk to someone like us, when they talk to us and we say no, it's no different than when we were younger. We're in high school. And there's a fine girl that walks into a building. Everybody's like, all the dudes is like, oh, my gosh, she's bad. And you don't give her no attention. All of a sudden she finds her way to being in front of you. It's like, well, what makes you so different that you not trying to get my number and all of that? Um, I think it's the same thing with, with business, especially in music and that they're used to people. Kat Williams said a lot of it. It used to people giving up any and everything. Hey yo, in order to get to that next level with a not used to as someone standing on what they say they are in working towards it on a daily basis, like The last three days I had to take a break because releasing two albums in less than a month that I gave full on campaigns to, plus still being a dad and a husband and taking care of my responsibilities still as a YouTuber, like it was a lot. And then doing this show was a lot. But thankfully now I'm starting to get help. Thankfully now I'm starting to recognize those times where I'm like... I recognize his voice. This voice is not telling me to stop. This voice is telling me to recharge and come back and be refreshed. So I'm in that place right now where it's like I take those days off because I can, but tomorrow I got content I got to go out there and we're going to get that done. But I never lose sight of the fact that I don't have to do this. I get to do this and that makes the difference in this man, but everybody don't love this shit. And when I figured that out, I started figuring out everybody is not. entitled to your time or your energy. So I'm protecting that at all costs at this point. Yeah, yeah, smart man. You have to Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, I love that. I love that because and I think also other people have um, they have their agenda as well for sure. You should have saw the first time we threw one of these shows. It wasn't at my location. It was at a different location. And it was a dude, I had never met him before at this location we shooting at. And he was like, he was like, he looking around like, man, this is crazy, man. Like, y'all should do this every week. And I'm like, no. I didn't say that. I was like, yeah, man, I get it. But I see the fangs coming out. I see people who are like already asking me, man, how do I do this myself? And so in me recognizing that this is a business, there's an opportunity here for me now to teach my fellow DIYers how to do this themselves as well. So I'm currently working on a few different courses because I came from the YouTube space and I understand what that requires, right? So it's amazing to do that now. It's amazing that we're able to do that in this space where it's like. It used to be a time where you started teaching and people thought you were like over the hill, like, Oh, that must mean like the money's low and you can't do it. It's like, no, this is our responsibility to help one another. This is our response. The more you know, the more you owe. My grandma used to say, the more you know, the more you owe. So I'm in a place now where it's like, I know all these things, not to just keep them to myself. I need to share these things because if you get more independent artists, or excuse me, more up-and-comers who see the appeal of being independent, they'll be more independent. and you'll see less people crashing out, getting these deals and burning themselves out by the time they're 24, 25. I look at some of these 24, 25s, they look 60, 70 in the face. Shit, it's stressful. Social media alone, but then add on top of that a deal, a debt that you can't pay off for the rest of your life. It's a lot. So I feel like it's my responsibility to bring light to truth. But truth tellers always have a difficult time. I get that. It's always gonna be a bumpy road. I didn't come here to expose it all. I came here to just make my music and tell my truth. yeah, yeah. No, this is perfect because I mean, I did want to ask like, you know, like, you know, you're a YouTuber, so to speak. And then you get a guy. that I've known in my past, a guy like Leor Cohen. Mm-hmm. his past and what he's doing at YouTube now. Are you in contact with any of his people or stuff like that? Because you're like, is there a threshold when it comes to YouTube? And then they're just like, okay. I mean, there's a threshold of I think they switched it now to a thousand subscribers and a certain amount of watch time. They just updated it recently. So there's a threshold system. I think actually the same folks that designed the threshold for what company was that? Some of the streaming platforms is the same guy that they hired. It wasn't Lear Cohen. It was someone else they hired to establish it for YouTube. I think what people and people have made this connection before, like, why are you on YouTube if you don't like the streaming platform or the streaming setup? YouTube was not my passion. Music was always my passion. Music was a thing that I did as a means to express myself, that I put my all into the product from the packaging down to the theme down to the title, the songs to the production mixing all this work we do. I should not be the one crazy saying it's worth more than zero, zero point three. I don't want to figure out a new algorithm hack. I don't want to figure out a new way to pimp this. I don't want to fake stream because you can't win at that game. Russ just exposed that. You can't win that game when these folks are doing this and Spotify is saying, hey, we'll let you get away with 89% fictitional streams. But after that, when you're playing in that game, it's rigged. It's rigged. So it's entrapment and you're being told to meet a sales quota. So Yeah. up to you ultimately to say, do I want to play this game or do I really just want to make money off of my music? And that's not an crazy concept. Other art forms see this every day. So for us, I don't care what people tell me where society is at, how much it ages. Me. No. If I have like, let me know what the real number is. If I have 220 people, forget it. If I got 143, which is what I had that went and purchased. Storm Symphony. They accounted for $4,000. I know that may not be a lot of money in terms of the industry, but it's like, bam, that money can do things when you're independent. I can make some furniture and I can pay some people who my collaborators. So now they're getting paid what would it took three months for them to even sniff a fraction of on the regular platform. So now I'm looking at this and I'm like, all right, this next album, it did about a thousand a day. So it's like, this becomes my business model. All I gotta do is make the best music possible and people who know that I appreciate their business and I absolutely stay in contact with them and let them know what's going on, they will come to support. I had never had anybody pay for an album from me for more than 50 bucks in my 20 year career. But in the 20th year, eight people bought my last album, Storm Symphony, for $100. Eight. people bought my album for $100 plus. So I look at that and I'm like, every time somebody tells me what's not possible, we go and do it. And then the more I start recognizing it's possible, the more quieter I wanna get then. Not even, I don't even wanna talk shit no more. I just wanna be like, you know what, you're right. You know what, you got it under control. Because what artists I think need to understand, especially in the hip hop, from my peers that I've mentored, that I've talked to, you don't have to figure out what's gonna work for it. everybody to figure out what's going to work for you. It's not your responsibility to figure it out for the entire, what do all independent artists need to do? Curtis King, figure out what they need to do first. Cause your success model, your success formula is very different from mine's. Mine's just happened to look the way that it does and it's working. Now that it's working. I don't got to tell nobody about nothing. I, they ask, I'll share. but I'm now figuring out my business because this is my business to figure out. So folks who got all of these, everybody who got all of these ideas about what's possible and what's not possible, 90% of them don't make music. So what does that tell you? First of all, I mean, anything is possible, you know? Curtis, let me, what'd you say? Oh yeah, of course, bro. I mean, internet, baby. Huh? great teaching tool. I'm not gonna lie to you. It's a great teaching tool. Not the, not the flanger, in and again. That's crazy. And this one's good too. Hahaha! That's hilarious. I just think. Speaking of um speaking of internet, uh, you know, we're talking about independence and being independent being an independent artist Um, have you heard of a platform called even? Yes, yes, that's the one that I actually launched Storm Symphony with. Okay, can you speak about that platform? Only because, you know, I mean, I see it, I see it from time to time coming up as like, a sponsored ad in my Instagram feed, and I was always intrigued by it, and... So they're doing a thing that they're not necessarily a DSP. They don't categorize themselves as a DSP, but they are basically, um, I look at them almost like the same way you look at crowd and community funding for Patreon, how it like, it gathers the people that want to support you. It's an organized, uh, sort of experience for your listeners. So with even, They have this platform, I believe, La Russa's actually an investor in Even. But with Even, you upload your project, they approve it, and then you start to discuss rewards that you wanna offer your fans based upon what tier that they decide to invest into. This model wasn't actually new to me. I just did it in such a barbaric way before. Like I've had two albums, One called Jetpack on E, another one called, not Jetpack on E, one called Jubilee Year, and the other one called Summer Salt that both went number three on the iTunes charts. I did it again in 2022, and it reached number one, DIY2. It was an album to reach from its reward system. So they were to me a structured website that created this for you, because I had to deliver these rewards. Like you send me a screenshot to my email of the pre-order. and then I'm going to send you your two courses or your production or your beats, whatever. And so I ran that as a reward system, but this was more of an organized approach to it. I heard about them and I was interested in doing work with them and seeing what that would look like. And we had a successful launch. It was dope. But then that other voice started kicking in for me. Like there's a lot of artists right now that are really doing their thing with them and shout out to them, because it's the structure that most artists need. I don't think it's. that Curtis King needs. And it's not a place of arrogance because they were, you know, they were dope. They were, they really worked with my ideas. I had a lot of rewards, more than the average. So sometimes it created a little bit of complication, but now I'm at a place where it's like, if I'm going to go independent, that means at all costs. I don't really need someone to kind of be the middle man between me and my audience. I know how to develop a website. I know how to, you know, put my music on Bandcamp for a seamless streaming experience. I know how to work these things. I know how to code. So it's like, for me, I need a little bit more in depth control of what's going on. And I'm just control free. So even as great that if you're at a place where you're like you want to go, you want to, if you want to test direct to consumer, but you don't want to have to have the responsibility and the weight of developing your own website to do that right now. I think it's an excellent, because they create a landing page for you and all that. For me, yeah, I had to, of course I had to develop my website and work with Reg. We're direct to Reg. Every CD that's out there got my fingerprints on it. Hahaha with that being said, will there be a day that you say I'm entertaining the thought of? finding somebody to do it, to help you out. So for that to even be a conversation to entertain, I don't want to be in a place where I need the help. If anything, I want to be in a position. Yeah, well, partnership. If we're talking about a real partnership, a real deal, you respect me, I respect you, and we have ethics that are aligned business-wise, because that's so important to me. I know people say like, You know, there's no emotions in business. It's like, well, there's emotions in the business of humans. That's part, that's what we do, right? Everybody says, no emotions. It's just business, just business. No, somebody who plays that game was an asshole outside of business. They're not just a good guy because they decided to be a... You're not, stop it, stop it. So if you're gonna do some assholish in business, you're that person all the time. And I don't align with that. Like, I get you wanna have the better in... I get that, that's cool. And if I'm being altruistic, if I'm being like delusional, that's fine. That's why I choose to do it myself because I don't wanna be in a business of screwing people over and feeling like that's just the way that we gotta go get it because I know way too many successful businessmen and women who are not in music, who have not had to go that route to support their family, their livelihood and create generational income. But I think that's thrown upon us. So if there's a situation where I have scaled this, I don't think that it makes sense if I'm able to scale it. Now, I find some restrictions because there's like, mind you, you know who planted the seed? And they have no idea. The homie Murs invited me out to Strangeland to do a music video with him. We have a song called Lemon Juice. And I went to their Strangeland location, right? Tech N9ne. I went to the location and I got a great tour. And the tour guide told me, this is one acre, this is another acre, another acre, another acre. I go through all of these buildings and I'm like, what did this place used to be before? And they said it used to be a Montgomery Ward warehousing facility. And when you see, hey, do you guys have Tech Nines merch from 2016 from this tour? They look down on the paperwork, oh, it's over here. Pull down a box and everything is there. When I saw they had that organization of one building is their merchandise, one building is their physical albums, one building is their car wash, the strange music car wash. Even the golf carts are strange music golf carts. I go to another building, I got frustrated with working with the construction companies so they invested in their own construction vehicles. There's forklifts and all that stuff in there ready to do construction. If these construction companies start acting up, when I saw that it planted a seed. You can be self-sufficient. And I don't know what that looks like for everybody who desires that. I know what it looks like for me now. Like all I needed was a house with more rooms than we need to live in. And we're gonna figure out how to make, every one of the rooms make some money. Right, my wife, another one, she does her nails. She has her press on nail business that she's expanding upon. Like it is difficult, it's a challenge, it is not easy work, but damn it, when I saw that it was possible in those multiple warehouses and they had people who were like, this is one of the most sought after jobs living out here. I'm already a strange music fan. When I saw it was possible in those warehouses, I said, I think I know what I need to do, even if I didn't know at that time. So now I feel like I'm not creating my own strange land, but it's like. I'm inspired by that because I got exposed early and they're not relying upon like, I just can't imagine a strange music saying, would you ever entertain an Interscope deal? It's like, no, we got pork lids. What are you talking about? Like we got pork lids here. If I'm doing my business, if I'm doing my job and this is the business that I actually want to be in, I will live the line with the right people that can scale this properly. And if I scale it properly, why are we partnering? Well, I was just saying in terms of like you wearing a lot of caps. You know what I'm saying? It can be, you know, I mean, you are human. But you know what though, this is what I'm getting at. That's our job. If you had any business, if you had like a mom and pop Chinese food restaurant, like it's your business to find the proper management. If I had real estate, it's my job to find a real estate manager for this particular property. And so that comes along with the job description of me saying I wanna have a music business. Yeah. So I'm looking at this and I'm saying, yeah, there's no way in hell that Curtis King, the deeper I get in my 40s and 50s, I do nearly the amount of work that I'm doing now. But if I understand how to build a business properly and I'm aligning with the right people, these other companies won't really make a lot of sense because they're going to morph it into something else. At that point, I might as well just sell it. Right? Yeah, if I'm doing my job, I don't think there's a reason that conversation needs to come up. That's right. If I'm not, if I'm struggling, because I've been taking too many risks, you know I'm in a different head space. But the place I'm in now, I would be surprised if I looked and I fast forward a video some years from now and I'm sitting up here like, yeah, man, just I signed the deal. All that for what, Curtis? You created this, you know what I'm saying? You created this environment just to... to give it away to give it no to literally give it away literally give it away. And if it's just for the sake of money, I'm sorry for me that comes from a place of scarcity. I know we got bills that gotta get paid, but I'll be telling, I'll be telling, what you think I'm out here trying to do? Like we're building a business and I know I have nobody to blame but myself if certain ends don't meet. Cause I do reinvest a whole lot of my money, all my money back into what I do. Sometimes it works out really well. Sometimes it don't. I've had plugins that I've done, Curtis King plugins that I had one called Tape Boy. That went crazy. And then I had a few duds after that, but I've gone through it to know what it feels like. I know what it means to launch a successful campaign. I know what it means to do too much. So now when I build the systems out, whoever I hire already knows you're never gonna be angry at me. You're angry at the system, but the system works. So I'm in that space now where it's like, let me structure this. Let me just get it, like, you know how folks be trying to like, bro, you know how many people come to me and tell me like, man, what you need to do is, leave me alone. Like, let me, you know what I'm saying? Could you imagine like, like you have a vision in your head and you're painting it on the canvas and you're like, ooh, okay, I can see this. And somebody's like, that don't look like a house. Ah, yikes. even need a house, right? Like, can I cook? So that's how I feel like right now, where it's like I've allowed, because I'm so open to different perspective, I've allowed so many people to get in my head and tell me what I should do. And all of them have led me to crashing. One person I haven't trusted is me. a so with that being said too because we wrap up in a little bit like no this is great I mean we man I mean this by far might be the most educational one like for real this is I'm gonna call it, I'm gonna say it right now on camera. This is the one. This is the one, like my mind is blind and we've had so many artists on here and producers that have dropped gems, man. But this one right here, man, like my, like. game is tilted. It's you know, my brain is like. Yeah. I might not get enough sleep tonight. Now you know my issue. They won't let me rest. I know. So with all that being said as well, like because like I said, you are your internet personality, you are a motivator, influencer. Getting back to the music. I know we don't want to talk about the music, but do you have the bug again? Is the bug there? Oh no, we, I'm my 2024, I've been saying my part-time job is content creation and my full-time job is being an artist. And this is why I had to release this project, this full album, because Storm Symphony is like instrumental album plus a few songs. This is my full 10 track album. I'm rapping everything. I'm obviously producing on some of it. Like, no, I am fully back as an artist. And that is me at my, that's me at my best. That's me and my piece. So this is. getting you back on the road to perform? Are you going back out or are you going to stay in? Okay, because what you did last weekend was pretty. was all I had to see. We, you know what I'm saying? I even be open about it. Like we're just building something new, but the fact that I sold $405 worth of tickets to a show that was in my living room, no, no advertisements, right? No advertisements, no, no. Oh my god, yes. so wait. Triz is a legitimate artist is out here as well. Like, but I didn't even advertise. He'd even promoted. I told him, I said, bro, we just gonna do this organically. And when you pop up, you pop up. So it's like, I know my number now. My number doesn't have to be a million or I'm embarrassed. There's too many artists out here who are afraid of their number being 55 people. And so what? You only get 15 of them in your live stream. You got them and they're paying. So for me, I'm like, yo, $405 worth of tickets for a liver for the first show? Oh, it's a wrap. At my crib, I got to, you know what I got to do after this show? I didn't have to wait till two o'clock, three in the morning to get in my car and hope that I don't get pulled over. I didn't have to like get home and then get, I didn't go to Jack in the Box because that's the only thing open. right? Saw my son high-five don't kiss my wife and said man. Thank you so much she bought pizza for us and all of that and I went upstairs and went to sleep and Then woke up the next day and chopped up content while I sip coffee like life for me like I think people like they think they think that every rapper desires to have like the super start up and it's like I Want peace I want peace. I want prosperity. I want to absolutely bank out and kill it at this. But I don't have to worry about that as being the number one priority, because first of all, I believe in God. And second of all, I know that I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm not led, like I keep getting people. So I said on Twitter, I said, for the next six months, I'm not doing any shows outside this house. I'm going to build this up and make this the thing. And then out of nowhere, I get an inquiry from a show in North Carolina. Oh man, we want to book you for da da. I get something the other day about the LA County Fair. We want to book you for this. And I'm like, all right, God, I know what part of the story this is. I'm sticking to it. I don't, I'm not, I'm not going away from that. So to me, that's the ultimate test is that no, we're going to build this up to the point where now show promoters who used to have a monopoly on things and get to determine whether or not you could perform or not, they can't do that with me. And if I exist, there's a 100 other folks that can do the same exact thing. And I'm gonna teach them away. So I have like this point, it's just like, what are we touring for if we're not going to go there to generate income? And would it be something to where it's like... Would I be going out there just for the look? Or would I be making less money on the road? Because now I can't make YouTube content the way that I'm doing it. Can't do reaction videos. I'm not gonna be able to see my son on a regular basis like I do. My wife is gonna have to hold down the household, you know what I'm saying, for like anything that happens. So it's like, at 39, this makes sense. And then you start realizing maybe this is the reason. You got artists that get in a forties and start having all of these health issues. There's nothing out there on that tour that supports healthy living. talk about it man because that's this is how I this is how I actually I was put on to Curtis King I actually was going through Instagram and then I saw Jim and you were talking about 20 year old rappers, yeah. Depleted, they steal all the life out of them. These tours is not like, I won a tour recently and I realized like at this age, I can't eat the way that I used to eat. I can't run that same play like I used to run because now I'm like, dog, my body is not, Taco Bell don't, it don't operate the same way in this body now. I fucks with Taco Bell. I do too. I love it, but man... had Taco Bell and I don't realize, I don't, I'm telling you right now, word to my Nana B, I haven't had Taco Bell in about almost a decade. Shout out to my wife, Taco Bell Gang Gang, all day. I didn't figure out I was lactose intolerant until I was in my 30s. My mom was like, oh, you didn't know you was lactose? I'm like, what you mean? But being on tour, I'm glad I'm sorry. I was like, yeah. all I know is that I tried those, they got them new stacker joints. Oh, Lord. That's that, that's that casein, or whatever that is, that addiction, that addictive cheesy. Damn. I do. is, right? Yo, it's like a Crunchwrap Supreme, but like a quarter of the size and like a little triangle, and then you add the sour cream, dog, let me tell you. And then the next day when I got migraines and gas issues and all these other things. So, so touring for me, fam, touring is that every touring is that every night, because you own like when you, by the time you get out that show venue, what's open Jack in the box, McDonald's places that are not places you go to. If you value, like you don't get to a supermarket, good luck. And Or you're in the hotel and you don't get anything and you got candy bars and chips with soda. Ha! I'm sorry, in your 40s, in your 20s, run it all day long. Top Ramen was my friend. In 30s, Top Ramen, that sodium started making my heart beat faster. I was like, I am good. So now I'm like, I recognize it, especially because this is the first year that I broke, or last year was the first one I broke it, but I was a vegan or pescatarian for 10 years. So I know how to... Repair my body when I've been doing like, okay, you starting to eat like trash but on tour it doesn't promote that So I'm looking at it and I'm like Damn, so the industry stresses out these older rappers The the this is just doing business in general will stress out any human being Then you're eating bad now. You're smoking now you're drinking Now you're not sleeping because these shows in that like we did our show at 7 p.m We were done at nine. I was in bed at 10.30. I was like, never. I'd have to have a show at noon to do this. So I just started noticing all the things that I was complaining about at these shows. I had the capability of doing something about it. So I chose to do something. Didn't have to be the best thing, but I chose something. That's all. Hey, but when I see that, you know, the crowd that you had, like it's the human element. Like when you, in 2012, when you did the pay dues, John, like the thrill, like. Don't, we need, sometimes we need that, no? you know what, you know what, the reality of it, I love people. I love performing in front of people and seeing faces. That moment was over in a second. I can't pay for 97 days in a row, daily content, daily blogging, vlogging. I asked a hundred people why I deserve to be on Paid Dudes before I even got the call from MERS. And then I did the show and it was over faster than a sneeze. And reality was a 15 minute set, but it was over with, the moment's over with. That's when I realized the same thing exists for an NBA player who wins the championship. Like all of this is practice. All of this is practice. That show was practice for another show that I have to do that is gonna be folks. But now all that practice allows me to be a professional from the convenience of my heart. Are we ever gonna see Curtis King in the metaverse arena? for sure, for sure. Cause I've been getting into the metaverse Monday myself. So yeah, yeah. to MC Shan is in the metaverse now. MC Shan, yeah, shout out to MC Shan. I don't know if he's got them chompers in the metaverse. If you're that close to the metaverse, you got back up. You got back up, you got close. Listen, I love Shan, but I need Shan. Shan, come on OG. One time for your mind, two time for the teeth. Two time for the teeth. Put them back in pal. hop. Come as you are, that's hip hop right there. All the other folks got teeth. I ain't trying to have no teeth today. How about that? That's hip hop. No, he don't. But I'm grateful. I'm grateful we living in time now where it's like, yeah, that can happen in the metaverse. But. Yeah. Hey, we're living in a time where flavor of flavor is clean and it warms my heart to see flavor clean, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, we, it's a lot of stuff is happening that, you know, glad it is happening. Some stuff I'm glad that I'm wishing wasn't happening, but damn it, we get to complain about it and I'm lucky that it's happening. But yeah, I don't, I have, right now, my thing is let's, let's get, this maximized what we have right here. Cause we ain't seen the tip of the iceberg of this. This is just showing me what may be possible. Seeing that, I was like, dog, y'all can't tell me nothing. Cause when I get this, when I get this popping off, You gonna have to like use the claw machine to get me out this house. You gonna have to like, what? And I love people. I love performing in front of people, but bruh, I don't like coming home at three in the morning and taking my son to school at 6.30. There is nothing. Yeah. Oh, talk about it, boy. Talk about it, my G. Yes. dog. Yeah, I know bro is 3 a.m. when shows go according to time, but a lot of these shows will never be on time. So it is funny. Cause I'm already starting to see, I'm not getting booked for stuff. And that that's cool. This to me is the reason why I keep saying this stuff publicly because I need to put myself back myself into a corner so that I can't wiggle out. This is what I'm going to do it. Now you have to do it. So I'm grateful, man. I'm grateful because so much is possible. this is wonderful. You know, there's a song, man, I really, before we dip, first of all, I mean, this by far, I mean, I don't know by far, but personally, I love everybody that comes on the show, all my friends, family, but this episode right here, man, to me, I gotta say I've learned the most. Like, like, and I'm all about, um, about learning things, you know, from, from each and every artist that comes on. Um, but man, like just, I look forward to, I do, I'm gonna be not, I'm definitely gonna be standing in your ass, B. I want, I'm going to be Curtis, Curtis King Stan for real. Yeah, I'm a pro. I'm a part of the DIY crew. Yo, yo, react. We are down with D. You got the merch for DIY? Funny you said that I just dropped new merch and nobody even knows I dropped it because I haven't put it out there yet. I got the Oppify T's. So you go to CurtisKing.com. I got Oppify T's. I got a new DIY merch all the way around, but CurtisKing.com. Do you have the DIY? Oh, there we go. There we go. Like we'll post everything and the show description and all that stuff. Like man, like I'm definitely, because just alone, man, do it yourself. can, man. There was a time when you couldn't do that. You can. I was going to say there's even I call it the DIYer Black Card, which is four gigabytes that gets you an introduction to pretty much my entire discography. It's a USB business card. So it's like, we just have to find different ways to provide value. No other business is struggling with You know what I'm saying? They're not struggling with how do I, how do I figure out a way to monetize a part? No, you just have to figure out where the people are at and what they value and, uh, meet them where they're at, but also don't be afraid to make things available that, um, you know, that they may see value in, but you're going to ask about a specific song. Yeah, it was on the arm. your latest release. It was the very first song. First of all, Sunshine. I mean, come on. I apologize, I'm over here talking and my mic was muted. Oh, I thought you were stopping us. No, I know, I know, I know. here talking, waving my hand, and talking to nobody. And my mic was muted. Huh? I'm sorry. No, before we get to the song, you just mentioned something that kind of struck a chord. I have a very large background, besides music, in sales, specifically direct sales, with a couple of different companies. But what I learned in direct sales was value. And regardless of what you're selling, It was always about value. If the customer that you're dealing with or the person that you're dealing with sees the value and what you're selling, you could fucking sell anything, it doesn't make a difference what you're selling, the person in front of you needs to see the value in you and in what you're presenting to them. And that's your job. Artists don't, it's like they don't wanna, so many artists don't wanna hear this. This is your job to figure out, like, cause it'll be like, okay, well, how do I make them see that it's valuable? Like I rap well, that's not good enough. Oh, I make beats that are better than everybody. It doesn't matter. What matters is the things that you don't wanna talk about that really are who you are. And those are the things that like, I read this in a book called, a brilliant marketing man, I forget the gentleman's name, but he said, if you want to understand this new modern lay of things, replace the words, branding with reputation and then replace content with message and see if that doesn't change the plans or the strategy that you're trying to align with what you're doing. So artists who are like, man, I just want to, you know build my brand up, no, no. You want to build your reputation up. What type of things build up your reputation? Right. I got to make content. No, no, you have to distribute messages. What message do you want to distribute today? And so I think in that scenario where you're talking about folks who are like, who don't understand value, it's like, Doug, that's your job. And it may be a year, two years before you figure out like, Oh, I thought they valued this. I thought they valued my voice as a singer, but really what they valued was like. how I speak for single dads or how I speak for whatever the case may be. You gotta find that at the essence, but that is our job. That is our endless pursuit as a business and even our pursuit to figure out when it switches, when it pivots to something else. Right? M&M or Tyler the Creator couldn't be controversial the entire career. They had to pivot. That's their- job as artists, as businesses, your job to figure out where everybody's at and where you're at in life and see how it aligns with the music you're making. So yeah, I don't make no excuses for that. That just don't make no sense to me. Sorry about that, I just did a DJ EFN to the bathroom. Real quick. Shouts to Dream Champs. As long as you don't know Rick Ross and you just leave and don't come back. Heheheheh. Oh shit, that's right. I know it's late where you're at, but I genuinely appreciate you asking some of these questions because it's questions I haven't been asked before. this has been amazing. Yeah, I mean, like you had the song. I mean, I mean, first of all, the very first song out the bat on the extended warranty joint was, you know, immediately was I was like, wow, this is what we're doing. This is and then everything else. It was just like an amazing pause a ride. But but Yeah. I tried not to let it go. had to get one in there, right? You just had to. I said pause, bruh. What the Sometimes the pause makes it even more pause like the pause sometimes know. you because you know about you say some real zesty shit like. Yeah, like, it kinda like puts it in bold. It kinda underlines it when you say that, like, damn, I wasn't even seeing that. I didn't even see that word. Nah, I see it differently. Sometimes I don't even recognize the shit unless you say pause. too old to be playing this game. Never too old. Never too old. It's part of our creativity. I ain't worried about it. Um, but, but you know what, man? Um, I did want to, uh, talk about, you know, there was a record, uh, the very first record by the way was fire, but the record, um, that, uh, we want, we talked about, uh, was sunshine and um, and it, E, hold on one second, I'm sorry. Curtis, is his video lagging or delayed? It is, it is. It's been doing it for many. It's been doing it for a minute, right? Yeah, yeah, but like really, really bad. I said like the last probably 20 minutes has been like that. How does it not? That was when the cat went up there, that's when it started kind of doing it. Ah, so for me, it's super delayed. Are we delayed on your screen, Eddie, or not? Uhhh... no. Are you delayed on your screen? I am not delayed on my camera, but on my screen slightly. I'm always delayed on my screen slightly here. but I mean, this is a significant delay, like 15, 20 second delay type shit. So I had an issue. I had an issue where I froze. I didn't want to say anything, but obviously I froze. To me, solid. Try to, I don't know. Log in, log out. Nah, nah, don't log in and log out. Maybe like switch your camera off and switch your camera back on or nah? Or will that fuck it up? That might fuck it up. Because I don't think you could change your camera preference. You can't change your camera preferences once we start recording, so yeah, it will mess it up. Okay. It's not. Well. This is the part where React has to do its job. Yeah. But you know what though, we got, listen, we made it almost three hours without any real fucking mess ups, so we're good. Yeah, no, but there was a point where my shit actually froze and then I came back and you guys were completely talking and I was like, okay. It might be rendering in the background anyway as it's uploading, so we might be fine. turn my camera off. Nah. Nah, leave it on. This is like a bad, a bad movie on Tubi. Ha ha ha. To... Tooby. Voodoo. with braids and then disappear and come back with a fade. It's the only time it's bad. I was watching a clip last night where a guy was walking up on a house, like a drug house or a crack house. And he was like, man, we're not gonna stand for that. He was like, who's we? And then went back to the guy and he had like a whole neighborhood behind him. It was like, where do these people come from? This is too before you. This is too before you, make it make sense. Well shit, I mean since I'm super delayed... huh? Huh? Huh? Um... Yeah, man. I mean, all right, you guys just ruined my... All right. I was trying to get serious. It's okay. good? You were at, I can end it on that note if you want me to, about sunshine, right? So the song you're alluding to is called Sunshine. It's a song that I've been wanting to make, but I didn't know quite what it would sound like. It was something that was a very serious topic in that as a parent, you know, finding out my son was on the spectrum, going through the initial, you know, fears when he was speech delayed and really just honestly living in it in real time. It was why this song didn't get created, but I just had it in the back of my mind that one day I'm going to create a song that Doesn't just paint it as like, you know, oh everything's good. It's like, you know, a perfect little Disney movie. Everything's perfect It's like no it's some frustrating times. There's some really beautiful times. There's some unexpected times. And so that song was dedicated to finding out my son was on the spectrum and Coming to grips with not only what that means for me as a parent, for him as my son, for my wife, but also finding peace within it and also finding like, nah, like he was sent to the home he was supposed to be sent to. Right? Like I have a line in there that says, I was sitting in the living room. I was asking God why as I was sitting in the living room, then I heard a man say, who'd you rather that I give them to? And like that's... That right there was the thing that helped me to understand. Like he's going through the things that he's going through and the parents that he has are the perfect parents for him to succeed in all aspects. So yeah, I made that song and that song, I've never had so many folks, probably one song, I had a song called, Fuck Cancer, but this song definitely had a lot of people saying, man, they were in tears and they related their own ways. It's crazy, man. a there's no question on a West Side Highway listening to it and I think if I react and I know because we were game planning for your interview and I was like and do we bring it I was like he was like yo this record got to, got to. And it's not something I'm shying away from. It's like, you know, I'm not embarrassed of it. It's something that is, I think we need to, right? Yeah. a beautiful song, you know, and I have three kids. My daughter's, she's a little older, she's 11, and then I have two twin boys who are three, and I just, I... God bless you, bro, because I don't know, like, I wouldn't know how to handle it, personally, you know? And I know it can't be easy, you know, I'm definitely listening to the song. I could tell it's not easy, but I could also tell that, you know, it's, you know, rewarding too, so. Right, right. I was like everything that they told us to be prepared for, he's gonna require more patients. I'm like that's parenting. He's gonna require more attention. God willing that's what parents are supposed to do is give attention, right? So everything I kept hearing, yes, I know that it's it obviously has its extremes, but I've been told every crazy thing. Man, I've had, you know, folks close to me that have said like, oh, you know, before he had his diagnosis. Oh, don't. Don't accept that. This sounds like a curse. Don't accept that curse. And I'm like, it's not a curse. This is his journey. And it is my job as a father to guide him to the best of my ability to be as independent as possible. And like, what better dad to teach his son independence than the one that's in the line of work that I'm in, right? whole fact, bro. That's right. And I can relate to that. Yeah, I can completely relate to that, Curtis, because I had two sons. Both of them were speech delayed. And we had, but immediately. You know, my wife, she knew that, okay, we need early intervention. And they came to the crib and it's all about parenting, man. We, you know, there was no shame in it. You know, I have a son, my eldest man, he's super brilliant, super brilliant and smart at BC, a junior at BC. Yeah, man. He has, he has, he has, he's a stammer. He's a stutter. So he had a 504 plan put in place for kids who have disabilities. And they allot time, and then there's services set up and stuff like that, speech and all that stuff. But we dealt with it. And I never said this, and he'll probably never hear this interview. But you know. Sometimes we do like, like because he's such, um, he's so, he's so like smart type, certain introvert type thing and awkward that we look at each other. My wife and I, we just like, well, he, uh, he might, he might be on the spectrum. You never know. We didn't, we didn't, we didn't do that. We were so once this, once the issue of his stutter. came to play, everything else was kind of secondary because he was excelling in school. But socially he was super awkward and there were certain things, you know. And then my youngest, you know, was an IEP, Individual Education Program, throughout his life. And he's at a school right now that specializes in with kids like that and to get them prepared for college. And he is super proud of him, he's done a 360, but you're right, we were put in place as parents, I can't think of my kids being with anybody else, right? their sense of humor is when you think about like you said the things that they specialize in and the areas that they do need your assistance in there's a these are usually things that you're pretty efficient at like you're prepared to be the ones to fill in those gaps and so I hear you I'm realizing like most of the parenting I think I'm doing I'm doing more learning than I am teaching See, yeah, every day. I'm still, I mean, still, I mean. every day. The moment I'm like, oh man, this is way too difficult. Like how are we gonna, he'll just surprise me with the way that he connects things. Like he has such a phenomenal visual memory. Like he's not in a position where he's able to spell his name, but he can get on an iPad and get on the maps and drive us from home to his school. Multiple routes I can tell the kid I say hey son Go get on my I got my eye for my eye my watch and I'll tell him I'll say Go to basketball and he won't say it, but he'll go to the to the to the watch and go to the NBA logo And I'm like we've never had this discussion. I'll say I'll say pizza. He'll go to the Domino's app. So it's like I There's areas that obviously I will need to help with his ABA schooling is going to help with, but I look at it and I'm like, you know, we are given, we're given the proper challenges. There's no mistakes in this at all. And, uh, I'm, I'm actually supremely grateful that, you know, God thought we was this strong. Like, all right, here it goes. Here, here's what I got prepared for y'all because every child is difficult to some degree, every child that's parenting. So if this is the degree of ours, I'm not comparing it to nobody else. I just look at it like, All right, this was the delivery that came to our household. And this is the one we gonna have for the rest of our lives. This is our package, cool. Let's figure this out and maximize everything that we can. But no, he's one of the kindest souls. He got his moments. He got his moments where he get a little angry, but kind boy. He's definitely somebody that, anytime I felt myself getting lower motivation, I don't have to look for her. I just look at him and I'm like, it's time to get. Yeah, man, all for the family, man. This is why, man, I looked at just everything, all things, Curtis King, and then React. It's right. React said, family man, period. And that's something we can all react. Man, we applaud you, brother. And we thank you so much for coming on to the Chop Shop. I appreciate you having me. Man, this was a fucking, man, this was a doozy. It was, man. Yeah, for anybody else that want to try to get an interview, if you ain't going to be on this level with it, don't touch that DM. Don't hit me. If it ain't on the level of the chop shop, don't even bother. Don't even bother. Like if we can't have this kind of conversation. your followers, dog. Just play it. If we can't have this kind of, I will, I will hit me with the collab post. Like if you can't have this kind of conversation, I don't want to talk about, what do you think about what Nicki Minaj said about Megan Thee Stallion? I have no desire. I do reaction videos as a part-time job. I don't want to do none of that here. I appreciate y'all having the conversation, even though I know it does center in a lot of production. I asked you beforehand, I was like, I am pivoting out of the producer space and I don't want to send mixing signals. The fact that you guys did the research and we had the conversation. That's cool. man. because I was react told me because you guys like I guess you guys had the conversation about or I was not looking at the text at the time And you said you want to pivot out of that and I was like fuck that. I'm like this motherfucker's dope Like I'm gonna talk about music like you'll be and that's when and that's when I sent them production. sent them, I sent, I sent in, I'm like, yo, but your music be, remember? I was like, and you were like, and then, and then, and then class, class was in session people. And, and, and I'm just, I'm so glad that, you know, this is, this is the great thing about this show too, cause you know, we can pivot to, to real life situations and, and just, and, and how to, to just, take care of the things, your job, and living life day by day, not getting ahead of yourself. And man, thank you so much, man. I can't thank you enough. Thank you so much, man. Ladies and gentlemen, Curtis King. Hehehe.