S. Samuel
[With G-Unit head 50 Cent shaking up the industry this month by leaving Interscope Records, buzzing independent rapper Chuck Inglish gives SOHH readers his take on the shocking power move.]
50 Cent [going indie] is more or less him just knowing probably enough now and the opportunity to do stuff on his own, because he probably couldn’t play catch-up with the rest of us. He probably couldn’t drop music like he wanted to or be up to the current climate as everyone else due to label restrictions.
It’s not about independent or major. It’s about restrictions, it’s about, ‘We’ve invested this amount of money in you, so you don’t get to do what you want to do’ versus, ‘We haven’t invested that much money in you, so you get to do what you want to do’.
That’s just the difference. There’s a grey area between independent and not-independent, it’s just all about the people you have working with you.
When there’s people like 50 Cent, at any given time, he can drop something super-hot and it’s back on. So you don’t want to be with a group, business or establishment of people or investors, that’s all a label is.
You don’t want them to tell you that you can’t do, or play, or do whatever you want to do or play the game that everyone else is playing. You want to drop records all week? You should be able to do that.
So I feel that’s probably where his motivation for doing that is. There’s no more exposure they could get with someone like 50 Cent. When you’re a big artist, you really don’t need them, when you’re an artist, in between stature, in between records, a more niche fan-core, audience and the masses – a record label gets you to that level.
Once you are past that level, it’s kind of just the pull and tug between both.
