Music on a Mission

Soul Genesis hopes to reengergize hip-hop by lending it a life-affirming purpose.

by Kia Gregory

Isaac Ewell, a former record label owner and self-proclaimed music snob, is crouched on the floor. His more sedate partner Jason Green leans back in his chair with his eyes closed. They nod their heads in unison. They’re at Mantua’s Beat Factory, listening to and being inspired by TuPhace, a West Philly native who describes his sound as hip-hop with a punk/funk/reggae twist.

For them Phace is the truth, a symbol of how they plan to change the game and shift hip-hop’s mainstream from the formulaic dumbed-down packaging of guns, drugs, bitches and hos to what they call real conscious music—socially responsible, life-affirming lyrics over bangin’ beats.

The songs being played are laced with a direct challenge to the culture they all love: “You call it art, but your lyrics don’t paint no canvas/ Blatant desecration of radio stations/ This song is hip-hop ’cause I said it was/ When you need something real, call me.”

Phace describes his motivation as: “I do what I feel, and I feel what I do,” a testament to hip-hop’s roots in realness. He plays the drums, the keys and the guitar. He sings and more so he rhymes complex, thoughtful lyrics.

Family style: SoulGen plans to promote hip-hop anyone can listen to.

“Yeah, the dude is different,” Green says. “He’s not a local artist. He’s global.”

When their other partner Justin Grayson first met Phace, he Simon Cowelled him, Ewell says with a laugh, unmoved by his partners’ hype. But within seconds Grayson’s icy glare melted.

Three head nods later, and 23-year-old Phace is one of Soul Genesis’ first featured artists, part of the online community Ewell, Grayson and Green will launch at Fuzion Fridayunder the banner “a movement through music.”

When Phace releases his first solo album Change the Freakwency on Soul Genesis, he’ll bypass the record labels. He says he doesn’t want to be a slave for the majors, which Green says wouldn’t have a clue how to package and market his sound.

The tall, lanky, dread-headed former frontman of the group Subliminal Orphans has been underground for 10 years, and he’s coming out to a rapidly changing industry.

Radio is stagnant. Labels are struggling. Album sales are plummeting, and hip-hop is once again under fire, being blamed for everything from former radio host Don Imus calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of nappy-headed hos to NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s arrest for dog fighting to the gun violence plaguing urban America.

If hip-hop isn’t dead, as rapper Nas declared, it is on life support. But some cultural critics say the recent orchestrated battle between hip-hop elites 50 Cent and Kanye West is a watershed moment. It proves hip-hop fans want substance. They want something real. They just don’t know where to get it.

Enter SoulGen.com.

Last month the hosts of Black Entertainment Television’s 106 & Park declared Sept. 11 a monumental day. Not because it marked the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but because 50 Cent and Kanye West released their albums on that day.

Rolling Stone featured the two heavyweights on its cover standing face to face: the former crack dealer vs. the preppy college dropout.

The feud had all the clamor of pro wrestling—the villain vs. the good guy. 50 even vowed he’d retire from his solo career if West outsold him.

Ewell

The stunt worked.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, West’s Graduation sold almost 1 million copies its first week, the year’s best debut. 50’s Curtis came in at No. 2 with 691,000. It was the first time in more than a decade the top two albums in the country each moved 600,000 units, giving the ailing music industry a much-needed boost.

But according to Billboard, hip-hop album sales are down by more than 40 percent compared to the same period in 2000, which for some proves that hip-hop fans are fed up with degrading guns/money/hos lyrics.

“Common said it a couple of years ago,” Ewell says. “‘Why it’s over for the gangstas/ Why it’s over for bling/ Why they hype Britney up/ When they know she can’t sing?’ People want more. There are people out there who want to hear music that has some substance and has content that makes them think and move—movement music.”

Even Kanye West agreed. “I think my music is really inspirational,” he told the Associated Press, “and I really made it for the people.”

For 50, his Curtis album features songs like “My Gun Go Off,” “Man Down,” “I’ll Still Kill,” “Fully Loaded Clip” and “Curtis 187.” As with his previous albums, the rapper known for his nine gunshot wounds glamorizes a lavish world of violence and sex.

“50’s act is tired,” says Temple University urban education professor Marc Lamont Hill, who’s teaching a class on Jay-Z and Nas. “But he outsold Kanye in Europe, and around the world he’s still a phenomenon.”

Hill adds that critically acclaimed hip-hop artist Talib Kweli released his album Eardrum in mid-August, and moved only 100,000 units in the first week. Conscious rapper Common, who released his Finding Forever in July, has sold 370,000 copies of his album to date.

“Those are solid albums,” says Hill, “but those two together haven’t sold what 50 sold in one week, and his is an inferior album. But the public conversation is such that we don’t consider buying those two because the media shapes our desire. We thought we had to choose between 50 and Kanye. The media never said you could buy neither.

“We say we want better hip-hop, but we don’t buy it or support it. The problem is people genuinely don’t have access to it. But we can’t let people tell us what matters. We have to figure out what we want, and not buy stuff we don’t care about. Movements shift upon what we do.”

During the historical week in hip-hop when both albums were released, for nearly two hours hundreds of people protested outside the Washington, D.C., home of BET chief executive Debra Lee. Led by a local reverend, the campaign demanded that the network stop airing what they call demeaning and offensive portrayals of African-Americans, and that corporations divest in hip-hop culture that portrays blacks as gangsters, pimps and hos.

Two weeks later BET hosted part one of a three-part series titled “Hip-Hop vs. America” in which rappers T.I. and Nelly, cultural critic Nelson George, Rev. Al Sharpton and Georgetown academic Michael Eric Dyson debated the influence of hip-hop culture.

Hip-hop is perhaps the most powerful movement in the 20th century. It’s a global phenomenon that influences how its followers dress and talk. It’s also big business.

At a recent T.I. concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the self- proclaimed king of the South was joined onstage by Jay-Z, Diddy, 50 Cent and Kanye West, representing $1.5 billion in hip-hop wealth.

Green

The mainstream formula of hip-hop that Ewell describes as “I’ve been shot,” of rappers exaggerating and glamorizing life in the ’hood, has been profitable not just for artists, but also for record companies, leaving critics to say the culture has been co-opted and exploited by corporate interests.

“The reality is when you sell 500,000 records, you’re selling to white people, and we live in a world where black degradation is profitable,” says Hill. “It’s profitable because it’s entertaining. Black uplift doesn’t sell. As Gil Scott-Heron said, everybody loves peace, but you can’t make any money off it.”

Because of the mainstream’s focus on profit over prophet, hip-hop makes itself an easy target.

The week BET debuted its town hall meeting, Congress held hearings on the portrayals of African-American women in hip-hop, titled From Imus to Industry: the Business of Stereotypes and Degradation.

“Congress is suddenly concerned about the plight of black women,” Hill says mockingly. “Post-Imus, everybody is a black feminist. It’s disingenuous. But if there’s any truth to it, Congress isn’t wrong to ignore underground hip-hop because that’s not what people are listening to on the block. But it’s all about treating the symptom and not the problem. It’s all about blame.”

During the hearings rapper and producer David Banner defended hip-hop, testifying: “I’m like Stephen King: Horror music is what I do. Change the situation in my neighborhood, and maybe I’ll get better.” It’s the same argument T.I. and Nelly used—that they’re simply rapping their reality.

“To appeal to our reality as an excuse to put out denigrating images is either naive or disingenuous,” says Hill. “In all truth, you can reflect the reality without endorsing it. Yes, there are drug dealers on the block and women who have sex for money, but there’s a difference between, ‘Brothers get killed on my block,’ and ‘That shit is fucked up.’

“We’re enforcing that reality, and we’re normalizing it, and it absolutely has an effect. We’re naive if we think for a moment that there’s not a relationship between the constant bombardment of kids being exposed to violence and sex and consumerism, and the way they operate in the world.”

Sitting in a coffee shop one evening discussing the current attack on hip-hop, Ewell says, “You can’t ignore the race factor of it. It’s an industry where young black males in particular have found a way out of the ghetto to become multimillionaires. The powers that be recognize the potential of hip-hop, if used properly, to be a galvanizing force for change. But what does it say about the systems in place where youth feel like, ‘I gotta come up making a song that degrades me and my culture?’ What is it about the systems in place that have failed these young people where these are their only options?”

Green adds, “When we came into this, we said there’s a system that’s failing, and we know it’s failing because of what it’s creating. When a system is producing such potent destructive images, new systems must be created to help counteract the ones that are in place.”

For the founders of Soul Genesis, hip-hop’s social commentary has devolved from Public Enemy’s black CNN mindset to 50’s get-rich-or-die-trying formula.

“Dude, what are you doing?” Ewell says of the Curtis album. “This is your fourth album and you’re still rapping about killing. It just shows a lack of creativity that you see in the quality of music. You’re actually emulating yourself circa 2001.

“I’m holding you accountable because you recognize your influences and impact on people. You also have a child, and the reality is your child is gonna be sheltered and shielded from all the foolishness that your music helps create in certain communities. That’s how I see it. He’s creating stuff the people will digest, so what I’m saying is you’re in a position of power, and you should use your power for good.

“With Soul Genesis, we want to have a revisionist history approach,” he continues. “Talib Kweli and Mos Def both grew up in Brooklyn, just like Biggie, but their rhymes are much different. There are cats who come from these communities that have a whole different view.”

Adds Green, “There are many groups that have been able to stay more true to what they believe. Unfortunately those groups have had a much harder time gaining access to those mainstream outlets, and have been pushed to the side.”

On Soul Genesis’ website, which is still under construction, the featured album is Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor. The review describes the album as “the last gasp of optimistic breath for the expiring beast” of hip-hop music.

The music on the site, classified as “InRotation,” “Greats From the Crates” and “Below the Radar,” is a diverse mix of hip-hop and soul with the common thread of being both underexposed and SoulGen-certified as high-quality and life-affirming.

Each artist, album and song is approved by the SoulGen MOB (Media Opinions Board), seven members with critical ears and a love of hip-hop. Recommended music is rated on criteria including lyrical content, lyrical delivery, production quality and head-nod factor.

“In a few years,” says Ewell, “we want to have such an air-tight brand and approval process that our brand becomes in this industry what Oprah’s brand is to books. We’re not gonna be certifying garbage. And we’re not just gonna capsule a volume about positivity.

“It’s gotta be hot. The beats gotta be bangin’ and cats gotta be able to flow. The music has to be good.”

Officially, Ewell, Grayson and Green—all educators who grew up on hip-hop—started Soul Genesis in January in response to the media’s bombardment of negative images and their impact on youth.

Grayson

Green, 31, tells a story of running an after-school tutoring program, and “seeing how much the images students were receiving from the media were literally combating our attempts,” he says. “It wasn’t cool to go to school, let alone some after-school tutoring program. It’s not cool to be smart. It’s not cool to learn to read well. It was to the point where we developed a module about self-esteem building, telling the young ladies you’re not just a B or a ho, but there’s something more to you.”

The impact crystallized with the hit song “Laffy Taffy.”

Green remembers being at a wedding in 2005. When the song came on, a flower girl jumped on the dance floor and started gyrating like a stripper in training, encouraged by the crowd.

“I’m watching the scene unfold, and I’m seeing a little girl who in her unknowingness is seeing images of objectification, of ‘you’re valuable by what your body can do,’” he says. “It seems like such an innocent scene, but multiply that by thousands of little girls who are receiving this image over and over and over. That’s one of the most destructive ways for a person to grow up.”

Simultaneously, Green says, the industry released two amazing albums: Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show and De La Soul’s The Grind Date, albums the Soul Genesis founders all shared and still love, that they say should’ve been contenders for hip-hop album of the year, but were getting no mainstream play. On the website they describe the slight as “criminal, unacceptable, unforgivable, a travesty.”

“These other albums had all kinds of much more balanced images, more positive images and just great music,” says Green, “but meanwhile this girl knows ‘Laffy Taffy.’ What we kind of converged around is that there’s a problem in our media that needs our immediate attention.”

For Ewell, 36, director of the Baeo/Gates Small Schools Project, the realization was more personal when he came across his then-15-year-old son’s rhyme book.

“I’m looking at it, ‘Nigga I’ll murk you,’ and I’ll do all this, and I’m like, word? Like where are you, at Martha’s Vineyard every summer, is that where you’re gonna do it? At your basketball camp and your sheltered life?”

Ewell says he grew up poor in the heart of the ghetto to a single mother and a father addicted to heroin. He says he and his wife, a psychiatrist at the Baltimore police department’s central booking, along with his son’s mother, work hard to “provide him this lifestyle that I totally didn’t have,” he says.

“But what that did for me,” he says of his son’s rhymes, “along with the work that I do in these schools, I saw that for young people, young black males in particular, it’s so not cool to be smart. School is to emulate your favorite rapper, talk slick and disrespect sistas. I realized that we need new images. We need a greater balance of images we’re feeding our people.”

At a recent SoulGen focus group, where about 10 people gather in Ewell’s Mt. Airy living room over pizza, Grayson, a 27-year-old former radio personality and network television producer who now works as a youth development program director at a Philadelphia nonprofit, explains his goal for creating SoulGen is to make conscious cool.

Of sound mind: TuPhace's upcoming Change the Freakwency reflects SoulGen's mission.

He tells the group about his trip to the barbershop before the meeting, where hip-hop videos played nonstop on the TV.

“And this song ‘A Bay Bay’—do y’all know it?” which draws a collective moan. “And people were like, ‘That’s my joint.’ Sitting there, I had an ‘I have a dream’ moment,” he says, garnering a laugh from the group. “What if we could get to the point where instead they played 20 artists like Talib Kweli in a row?

“These days it’s actually a dilemma,” he continues. “People have a conundrum: Should I be conscious or unconscious? We want to bring it to the point where people realize there are alternatives for them, and then we wanna take the ‘alternative’ off to the point where these things are the norm.”

Over the past several months Soul Genesis has held focus groups throughout the country, and in addition to music, participants brought up concerns about social issues like crime, education, prison reform and even global warming. They wanted to do more—something meaningful—but didn’t know what, how or when.

It was through those discussions that SoulGenLife took shape. The site defines it as “doing what you can where you are.” The link features discussion groups on the day’s news, featured issues and action members can take.

And that’s where the music of SoulGen becomes a movement, promoting socially conscious and responsible living to a broader audience. Through collaborations, Ewell says, Soul Genesis will raise awareness of social, environmental and political issues, while uniting SoulGenners into constructive social action.

The idea is: Change the music; change mindsets; change reality.

In the focus group, one SoulGen member, Sadat, talks about how noted MC Rakim saved his life, rhyming about knowledge of self and a nation of gods.

“He was saying shit to me my mom couldn’t relate to,” testifies the married father of one toddler girl. “I’d still be banging on dudes if it wasn’t for him. That’s the one thing that kept me balanced.”

After the introductions, Ewell plays a cut from Little Brother’s “Boondocks Saints” for the focus group, which he says explains what Soul Genesis is about:

Black folks saying that I’m too intelligent/
And white folks saying I’m a little too niggerish/
It got me in a strange predicament/
I wish BET and MTV would judge more wisely/
But I don’t know what’s worse/
The fact that they ain’t playing our shit/
Or the fact that it don’t even surprise me/
Because I ain’t shuckin’/
And ’cause I ain’t jivin’/
Some of these crackers won’t stand beside me/
And ’cause I ain’t killin’/
And don’t support pimpin’/
Some of these niggas wanna call me a Cosby/
Well, I’ll be that dude/
I’ll scratch that itch/
I’ll play that role/
Call me Heathcliff bitch/
If this ain’t what you want, then fine/
But somehow, someway we gotta draw that line

The SoulGen logo is a butterfly, representing the transformation process, the slow movement of social change for which music has always been the backdrop.

Ewell and his partners see SoulGen—like hip-hop—evolving into a global phenomenon: SoulGen recording artists. Acts like the Roots dropping their next album to millions of SoulGen members.

SoulGen radio. SoulGen film, like Al Gore’s Current TV. SoulGen buying BET, which reportedly refused to air Little Brother’s “Lovin’ It” video because it’s, as BET’s program director allegedly said,“too intelligent for the BET audience.” SoulGen clothes. SoulGen news reports. A SoulGenner reporting live from North Philadelphia, Iraq and Jena, La. The SoulGen-designed Shawn Carter School of Technology. SoulGen-endorsed green products.

They see the group filing a class action suit against the music industry for the growing number of people murdered in Philadelphia due to gun violence, and against radio stations that promote peace on the streets yet keep violent lyrics in heavy rotation.

“It’s a fight for minds,” Green says.

“For lives,” Ewell chimes in. “We believe we can truly help move the needle and make some serious shifts. If our goals are met, they’ll impact the psyche of young people and also the things happening in our communities. We believe that a different type of music is gonna impact the people listening to it. With Soul Genesis, we definitely have a way to change the game.”