December 4th is always a special day for me because I get to bump Jigga’s track by the same name every year. It’s one of my favorite songs so every year I include it on my socials in some way every year just to try to get others to appreciate the art like me. And that’s just always been who I am as a human being. I want to share everything with y’all. But this December 4th took me on a whole new adventure. I came onto IG to get ready to prep my story for December 4th and then there was this post from a rapper/producer named Wiardon out of Austin, TX that caught my eye.
Wiardon is somebody that 99.9% of you who read this won’t know and that’s alright. I see the sheer talent in the kid and I love watching to see how an artist matures into the lane they feel is best for themselves. It’s a shame when large corporations step in and take over ownership of an artist’s work but that’s just the way the music business is. Wiardon to me is somebody who can be next up if he plays his cards right. So yeah… I saw his IG post in early December of 2022 and noticed that the rapper Murs had liked the post. Murs and I go way back but somebody of his stature liking a post from a youngster like Wiardon? It then struck me that Wiardon and Murs needed to collab with each other. I hit Murs with this DM…
Then Murs dropped something crazy on me. He had known Wiardon since Wiardon was 12 years old. You see, Wiardon was a big fan of Murs through all of his work with 9th Wonder and when Murs hit the road on tour, he had a show in Austin, TX. The show got cancelled but a young Wiardon hit Murs up on social media and wanted to meet him. In the mainstream rap world, the only way to get “close” to your favorite rapper is to pay a crazy amount of cash for a meet-and-greet with the artist where you get a pic and you’re on your way so the next paying customer can get their 5 seconds of fame. It’s a revenue stream for both labels and artists that gives the fans a fake perception of their interaction with an artist so that they can get likes on social media. But rappers like Murs and a lot of those that came from the 90’s West Coast Underground Rap movement were different. They were young entrepreneurs who took the “how to hustle your music” blueprint from bay area rappers like Too $hort, E-40, and Master P. These businessmen were building empires before there were how-to tutorials on how to grow your own business available at your fingertips. (And yes, I’m aware P isn’t from the Bay but he was hustling in Richmond at the time so I’m keeping him as a “bay area rapper” here.)
While the early bay legends we’re “selling product out of their trunks”, west coast rappers like Murs and the Living Legends collective sold right out of their backpacks direct to fans at their shows. They were the OG DTC (direct to consumer) business model at a time before you could purchase or get access to everything at your fingertips on the world wide web. Wiardon grew up watching the hustle from underground rappers so he reached out to Murs directly on IG in 2015 in hopes to meet him at a show in Austin, TX where Wiardon lived. Here’s the original screenshot of the DM’s back in 2015 when Wiardon was 12.
This shows the type of stand-up dude Murs was, is, and forever will be. Yet like Wiardon who most of you do not know of, you might not even know Murs. Murs was the rare rapper in the late 90’s who was mixing the boom bap with the gangster talk over lofi beats created by producers like The Grouch, Elusive, Eligh, and Eclipse 427. Now it seems like everybody is rapping over mellow lofi beats with some gangster bars but Murs is one of the OG’s in this space. While in high school in the late 90’s in Cali, me and all my homies always bumped the gangster sh*t but to a small crew of hip hop heads, rappers like Murs, Mystik Journeymen, Eligh, and The Grouch were everything. When their 4th generation dubs hit our Sony Walkmans there was no away we would be paying attention in school that day.
25+ years later I’m still here bumpin that underground hip hop sh*t but I’m not that youngster without any funds anymore. I’ve established myself in my career as a Director of eCommerce in the business world and while it pays all my bills and I’m grateful for it, it’s hip hop that runs through my veins. So with that passion in my bones, I worked behind the scenes with Murs, Wiardon, our engineer Nothing Else Productions, and my close homies Vizual Rhythm and ThatGuyYams who helped with everything on else. We all collaborated to release this project called the Speak N Spell EP. And while I could tell the story further about how this all came to fruition, I want to let the art speak for itself so you could create your own story in your heads. That is what art is to me. It’s the creativity that comes from individuals that put their passion into a collective piece of work and get it out into the world. That’s what this Speak N Spell EP is to me. It’s a proof of concept that somebody like me from the corporate 9-5 world can pull together various artists to put together what I feel is a beautiful piece of work. Shout out to Vic and James for their work because without them and everybody else involved, this release wouldn’t have hit the reach it needed.
And oh yeah! I almost forgot! We have a whole Vice style Mass Appeal type documentary about this project that gives you a great behind the scenes look at the whole process that went into this project. Give it a peep. Give the project a listen. Share the music if you like it. Spread the word. Good hip hop is out there but you have to take action if you want the algorithms to find you. Otherwise you’ll just be fed some bullsh*t. The choice is yours… you could deal with this Speak N Spell EP or you could deal with that mainstream music that record labels are force feeding you.