Since 1991, Bay Area natives Sway & King Tech have been on the Hip-Hop frontlines pushing the skilled arts of MC’ing and DJ’ing to the radio masses with their show, The Wake Up Show.  Today the show reaches over 11 million listeners as it’s broadcasted in 19 markets and in 3 different countries weekly. The show has been instrumental in the careers of mainstream stars such as Eminem, but more importantly, it has been a home for countless underground MC’s that would not have had the chance to shine on normal radio programs. Despite Sway’s responsibilities at MTV and King Tech’s many projects, the duo continue to not only push the show but are also bringing forth new ways to help artists come to the fore front, such as their new 100K Battle contest that was recently introduced on their website. As Sway was out in New York and King Tech working in Los Angeles, we caught up with the duo in coast to coast conversation to talk about this new contest and the reasons behind it.   

You recently announced the Rap Battle contest. What are the details about it?

Sway: It was a concept that we came up with to help independent artists that don’t have access to producers that could probably help them further their careers. Due to the fact that we have a lot of resources and a lot of friends in the business, we decided to offer them, through the wakeupshow.com and ursession.com sites, the ability to do so. We have 22 producers including 9^th Wonder, J-Dilla, Pete Rock, The Alchemist, Focus, DJ Babu, Evidence, and DJ Muggs – a bunch of well respected producers that donated beats. If you tally up the value of that package its worth over a $100,000. What happens is that the members of ursession.com can download beats, take them home or to a studio and create the best song possible. When they upload it back, we are going to have the membership vote on who created the best song and that winner will receive two round trip tickets to Los Angeles to be on our syndicated show, The Wake Up Show on Power 106 FM, as well as cash and other prizes. They will get a lot of exposure and also maybe an opportunity to be on our digital label Ursession.com

King Tech: Ursession.com was formed by myself, Sway, Shavo of System of a Down and his partner Narv. About a year ago we were talking about doing something different on the web. We kept going back and forth and came up with the concept of the site. There are so many people on Myspace, how are we going to find the dope rappers? It’s impossible for 4 cats like us to go through 50 million people. So we developed a rating system to where you the listener can listen and rate right on the spot. Us being connected to the labels, it’s a lot easier for us to go to something like a Warner Bros. and say, “Hey! There is a guy that the majority of people have given a high rating to.” Labels can do A & R work right off of our site. Shavo called Rick Rubin, I called Niehiem Ali at Warner Bros. and Sway called Larry Jackson at J Records and we asked them if they would be down with something like this and they all said yes. It took us about 6 ½ months to get this together.

Sway: We’ve been working on the radio since the early 90’s and a lot of artists who are great approached us – but they don’t have great songs or great music. This is our way of giving back to these artists. We once were those artists. We were independent artists that didn’t have access to these major league producers – who if we maybe had access to could have helped escalate our careers a lot faster. Being in this position, where else is a no name artist from an up in coming neighborhood from some city that’s in the Mid-West, going to have access to a beat from J-Dilla, The Alchemist, or Pete Rock for free? If you were an artist, wouldn’t that be one of the things that you would want most so you can be competitive in this music world? A lot of what holds people back is that they don’t have the resources. With the wakeupshow.com and our show, this is basically in-line of what we’ve always done when we gave artists like Eminem a chance, before he even had a record deal. Or artists like The Wu-Tang Clan, Roscoe Umali, Dilated Peoples and all of these different groups. If I had access to Dr. Dre or DJ Premier beats back then, I would have been extremely excited. Not only that but we are trying to raise the bar on music that is being created. That can happen if you have the right production underneath the music.

So the winner will be whoever gets the most votes from fans as opposed to you guys selecting a winner?

King Tech: The fans votes will create the winner. Sometime by the end of summer, we are going to cut it off and announce the winner. It will either be in August or September.  We’ve only been doing this for about 2 weeks so far and the voting has been pretty accurate! If somebody comes on there today and puts something dope on there, by the next day it will be at 30 votes, then at 100 the following day and so forth.  We are just getting the word out on this so it’s still early. There are plenty of opportunities for anybody who still wants to get involved in this. If you come in at the last day though, it’s going to be impossible for you to get 10,000 votes.

Why make this competition based on fan voting, when you two could have judged it and picked a winner?

Sway: I had this discussion today with somebody in regards to hot MC’s. I was telling him that we are so insider at times we have to consider that we study music differently. We study charts, soundscans and downloads, but your average everyday fan – the consumer – the ones that actually makes the stars, doesn’t deal with music like we do. At radio we have always taken our lead from the consumer, the same thing with television and the same thing with print. If the consumer tells you that they like a certain record the most, they do it by going to a retail outlet to buy it or going to iTunes to download it. If they like a certain video the most, they do it by requesting it – and we react to that. With that said, we trust in the person’s opinion as much as we trust in ours. Why not have them decide who’s the hottest? Let the membership decide. I think that we will get an honest response from them.

Are you worried about voter fraud? People that will vote for themselves continually, or have others do it for them?

King Tech: We have it set up so that you can only get 1 vote per computer. Obviously since it’s all set up by voting, we can’t have anybody cheating. We ran in to that when we first started it, there were a couple of cats that immediately received a ridiculous amount of votes. They were just continuously voting for themselves – but with how technology is we can catch all of that. Anybody cheating is disqualified. We can’t stop people from listening to the music – like the number of plays and listens but we catch the votes. If you vote for someone, you can only do so once. You can’t keep voting for him.

Are you yourself going to be offering advice to these artists?

Sway: Absolutely, but just in general. We are always involved. We are going to set it up so where we can have panels for people to ask questions, and we’ll answer them. We’ve been in radio for years, so if you are making music to possibly be on the radio, who better to ask? How can I structure a song? Is a three and a half minute song better than a five minute song? What is it that they look for in radio? Is it hooks, verses or bridges? Then from our perspective we can tell you what we think. If you want to know what Clive Davis looks for in an artist, one of our best friends Larry Jackson works for him as a VP of A & R. He can get on and tell what kind of songs that their label looks for. It’s valuable information to have. You don’t have to use it but it’s at your disposal.  

So this contest isn’t necessarily about being the dopest lyricist?

Sway: Yeah. How many dope lyricists do you know that don’t make great records? They are dope lyricists but they haven’t found the knack of making a good record. You can be a dope lyricist and freestyle on the corners and ciphers for 10 years and after those 10 years you are going to have to be forced to look at your life and wonder why you are doing it? If your answer is just to be dope, then that’s fine. However, if your answer is to build a career off of this, then there are certain things that you need to think about. We’ve created something to make a few of those issues one less thing to worry about. I don’t know if you’ve ever made music before, but I am excited as f*ck over this. If I were an up in coming artist, I would download all of these beats off of the site and damn near make an album off of it [laughs].    

King Tech: I think that the industry has gotten to a place where the only way that they are going to mess with a lyrical cat is if he has proven himself already. Nobody is going out to try and help lyrical cats - the labels aren’t looking for them anymore because they want the ABC rhymes so that they can sell ringtones. The catchier the ringtone is, the faster it will sell. The problem with ringtone rappers is that they won’t have a long career – that sh*t will last for about a year. The dude is real popular for like a year or a year and a half, then its like, “What happened to him?” Then there is a new cat out there with a chorus like, “My shoes on fire! My shoes on fire!” Then he’s gone and its like, “What happened to the cat whose shoe was on fire?”

The Wake Up show is such a legendary and important show for Hip Hop. Tell us how you feel about that show.

Sway: We are the last sole survivors! One thing that we’ve been doing is having live musicians play up there,  making beats right on the spot, having MC’s rap over that and creating songs instantaneously live on the air. The Avila Brothers and Bosko are producers in the 100k giveaway. They will program a beat and play chords or guitar. DJ Revolution will cut in a hook and have the rappers rap and create new songs. It’s something that we used to do back in the day but we’ve honed in on it. There are not too many shows on mainstream radio like this. People need to support this show because it creates a balance in all of this – it allows everybody to be heard. You can be Lil Wayne or Roscoe Umali – you can come on The Wake Up Show.

What are your favorite memories from The Wake Up Show?

Sway: The Hieroglyphic/Hobo Junction battle and the Juice & Supernatural battle. I remember one time we let Jay Z and Dame Dash host an entire show. I also used to love when Eminem would come up there.

King Tech: In the early 90’s during a music convention in the Bay Area we walked in to the KMEL building lobby and we had Gangstarr, Jay Z, The Fugees, Nas, Das Efx – I mean anybody who was signed was in our lobby for the show. That’s when I knew that our show had arrived. Also the Hobo Junction vs. Hieroglyphics battle. It was around 95’ and there are tapes from that battle still floating around at Amoeba’s Records store. It wasn’t an organized battle and didn’t have money involved – it was just dudes that wanted to kill each other. The look that these cats had in their eyes was beyond rapping. It seemed like Saafire was going against all of Hiero. I just walked in to the room and it was already taking place and I was like, “Holy Sh*t!”

With all of the responsibilities that you two have, do you plan on always doing the radio show?

Sway: As long as we can maintain and convince these radio stations that it’s relevant and important – that really depends on the listener. If the people are passionate about the radio show, we’ll keep doing it. We don’t generate revenue from The Wake Up Show. It’s a labor of love, trust me.

All artists can join the 100K battle by signing up for free at www.ursession.com or www.thewakeupshow.com

Comments (2)

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rap
written by kedrick, January 04, 2009

do i just write you a rap and send it to u

...
written by Nina, September 01, 2010

Thanks for sharing this



www.heem-marteen.com

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