Who is Jonny Empire? A couple of years ago I couldn’t have answered that question because I didn’t know him. Last year, I met Jonny through a website called PlaylistPush where aspiring artists like Jonny Empire can pay for their songs to be heard by playlisters like myself. In the good ole days, musicians would be heard by local/national DJ’s playing their songs on the radio. If you got big enough, you could get your song on rotation on MTV or BET. But in order to get this radio/tv play, you needed to be signed to a record label who had an A&R who would fight to get you play. And sometimes pay to get you play through a process called payola. But nowadays, radio and TV is a thing of the past as the majority of music fans hear their new songs from the DSP’s like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

Rap fans from all around the world were crushed to hear about the passing of rap great MF Doom. He was a mysterious emcee and producer who had been putting in work since the early 90’s as Zev Love X in the hip hop group, KMD. His brother and bandmate Subroc was tragically killed in 1993 while KMD was prepping their 2nd album. Later that week, KMD and Zev Love X got dropped from their record label. After disappearing for a few years, Zev started popping back up on the scene as masked rapper named MF Doom. Doom, real name Daniel Dumile, then took the rap world by storm through classic albums, Operation Doomsday, Madvillainy, and MM.. Food. Doom stayed relevant in rap for just about 30 years which is remarkable. This is my ode to one of my favorite rappers of all time, the great MF Doom.