The rapper Papoose knows a thing about grit. Growing up in Bed-Stuy, he dreamed of being a hip-hop star. He was making great music, selling CDs out of his trunk and winning battles on the road, but he had no connections within the industry. What he did have was persistence and nerve.
“However the DJ caught my attention because he was playing recent artists on the radio,” Pap a k a Papoose a k a Shamele Mackie told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man.” “So I used to be like, yo, I’ve got to fulfill this man. So I went and I looked up Hot97’s address and I went to the radio.”
That man on the radio was the legendary DJ Kay Slay, who passed away in April 2022.
“I gave him my CD. The primary time, he didn’t play it on the radio, but I used to be consistent. I got here back … I used to be so hungry on the time,” he said. And he got here back and back and back until, he says, they each got sick of one another: Kay Slay of Pap bothering him and Pap of Kay Slay not playing his CD. Then during a heated conversation, a friend who was with Kay Slay mediated, calmed everyone down and warranted Pap that he had his back.
“I used to be back within the hood … and in the course of a situation, my phone rang, and it was Kay Slay. He said, ‘You’re on the radio next week.’ ”
It was an enormous break. Kay Slay was a human rap radar. He kept his ears to the streets and helped source and launch recent talent. He would develop into a mentor to Pap, and put him on mixtapes with big artists. Pap soon found himself being courted by all of the hip-hop labels.
“Nas reached out to me. I sat down with Nas at a pizza shop in lower Manhattan and he was going to Def Jam with Jay-Z on the time. He made a proposal. Interscope made it up. It was a pair different labels who showed interest in me … But Jive got here in with the very best number,” he said of the $1.5 million contract he signed in 2006.
But Pap soon learned, that the independent streak, freestyling and creativity that made him great didn’t jibe with the more buttoned-up, formulaic record business.
“It was actually considered one of the worst mistakes I ever made man because I lost creative control. They began telling me the way to make a record,” he said.
The “Alphabetical Slaughter” artist rebounded but his experience within the industry helped steer his newest profession move: head of hip-hop at TuneCore, a digital music distribution company that’s shaking up the normal model that advantages the label not the artist.
“I feel like as an artist, whatever your value is, you need to money in on that,” he said. “Even should you are a recent artist and you might have a small fan base. If it’s not a variety of money or if it’s a variety of money, you need to money in in your true value. But that’s what it’s all about. [TuneCore] puts the artist first.”
In his executive role, he can be advising artists. He also has some universal knowledge to drop: the connection kind. In 2008, he married fellow rapper Remy Ma while she was in prison serving six years for felony assault. He said the physical separation helped them construct a powerful foundation.
“We took it in the future at a time … I don’t need to say it was a blessing in disguise, but considered one of the things it taught us was communication. I feel like a variety of relationships fail since the communication isn’t there,” he said. “But when she was away, all we could do was talk, I mean, after I would, I’d go visit her. They might say, ‘Put your hands on the table’ … We got here up with this method that every time she’s speaking, I got to be totally quiet. Each time I’m speaking, she needs to be totally quiet.”
In doing that, they learned to hearken to one another and work through their problems. Now they’re considered one of hip-hop’s most enduring couples. Something the pair showcased while starring on reality shows, “Love & Hip Hop” and “Remy & Papoose: Meet The Mackies.”
“We was built to survive.”
Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the faculty hoops world within the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons within the NBA before transitioning right into a media personality. Rose is an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive-produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the creator of the best-selling book “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.
