Cyrus Langhorne
[With the Lyricist Lounge paving the way for New York artists nearly 25 years ago, co-founder Anthony Marshall talks to SOHH about hip-hop in 2015.]
Hip-hop is to the point where it’s grown up in the 40’s now. We have different generations that are at different points in their life. Culture reflects life and life reflects culture, so what you have is people in different stages of their life and reflecting their state in life through their music.
So you have a lot of young cats that are representing what they’re representing, whether it’s the street life or the strip club life or whatever their culture is, but it represents what they’re up to.
I think what you have, as well, is some older cats that are saying, “Hey, I’m older, I’m 40-years-old but hip-hop didn’t stop for me at that age. I’m still able to be a part of this,” such as artists like Big Daddy Kane and others are killing it more than a lot of folks in the game that are just behind the curtain working in the music business.
The culture’s amazing. I think we’re international now in so many different ways but, for me, I think the thing we have to get better at is just being smarter and not creating a whole culture that other people can financially benefit off of.
It’s really about time that artists become business men and women and truly understand how to monetize their creations.
We’re good in terms of looking fly and being fly but when it comes to really handling our business, you can look around and count on your fingers how many folks have become strong businessmen in business because of this culture. There’s not a lot.
That’s the only downfall that we have right now. We’re too distracted with whose album is hot and we’re not really focusing on what’s the next 20 years of the culture and what’s it going to look like and what things we need to do.
That’s the thing I always want to highlight. When folks talk to us, you’re not talking to music industry people, you’re talking to people in the culture, curators and folks who are about business.
I think when you merge those two things, people who care about culture and business, then you have people who know how to do things and do it right and not kind of rape the culture.
