The Book That Introduced Me to Chris Lighty

I am going to start back writing about the books that I read throughout the year. I have read countless amounts of books this year but I will start from what I am currently reading at the moment. Some of these posts will be short and some of them will be long.

I just got done reading The Big Payback: The History of Business of Hip-Hop by Dan Charnas. I picked the book up about a year ago from Recycled in Denton, TX. I go there to get random books and read them when I just want to read random things. This book was read with a purpose though. I am currently in the beginning stages of consulting with a client who is trying to build his brand and rap career. Word to Kreadiv Consulting haha. Anyway, we are working on backend stuff and setting up the first mixtape release party so it behooved me to pick up this book. I just finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson a couple of days ago so I was due for a reality based book.

The Big Payback takes you from hiphop in 1968 to November 4, 2008. The book includes the beginnings of hiphop with jazz all the way up through Jay-Z’s Black album. I wish the book explored several topics deeper but it was a 657 page book. I learned a ton about hiphop and its origins in the book. The character that caught my attention was Chris Lighty. Chris Lighty started off as a troublemaker and grew into one of the biggest players in the industry. I am definitely going to look more into him. If anyone has any material or books to recommend please send them my way.

There were several characters I had no idea about really since they were popular before I was born. The Ice T story was detailed and it allowed you to see what Ice T went through to keep his freedom of speech. It was interesting to see how Rick Ruben got started in the industry and was able to make a name for himself. He also has a way to go between genres in music and still create GREAT music. I liked the contrast between his character and Russell Simons.

Throughout the book Russell Simmons was portrayed in a negative light but once you actually stepped back and thought about what he was doing it was GENIUS. Now every genius significantly lacks in some area and Russell was no different. He was known to say anything he thought for example, when his friend hired a female for a job within the office. They were having a conference call and Russell was phoning in from his apartment a few blocks away. They introduced the female employee, and Russell immediately said out loud on speakerphone, “Have you boned her yet.” Those were the kind of stories that were told about Russell. Even though he clearly was out of line for a lot of his behavior I think they could have also focused more on his genius. For example, the foresight to go into movies, and also get deals for HBO with Def Comedy Jam. He singlehandedly brought urban comedians into the houses of white America and made them stars. He had his negatives but you can’t negate his positive contributions to hiphop in general. Read the book for more of his scandulous antics.

There was also mentions of P. Diddy, Notorious B.I.G., Wu Tang, Jay Z and Dame Dash, 50 Cent, and Eminem amongst others. The P. Diddy story sticks out because it follows him from intern running around the office completing tasks as fast as he could to getting fired, GQ running a feature on him, to landing another job and then starting Bad Boy Entertainment and selling 7 million copies of his album after Notorious’ death due to the lack of a current superstar.

The book was a good read and very informational. I am glad I got a chance to get another individual to research in Chris Lighty. I think he was interesting and it would be good for me to followup and read about him and things that influenced him or that he consumed. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to be informed about hiphop and its origins. I think it is a great crash course to the industry, and it also provides a way for the consumer to peak into the boardroom.

Related posts:

This post will be the first in a series of posts about how I solved challenges from CodeWars. For each post, I will give the prompt, what the prompt entails, and how I solved each prompt. Get the…

Little known fact about expiration dates: they aren’t an exact science. The easiest way to find out if your eggs have ACTUALLY gone bad is to get a large bowl and fill it ¾ of the way with water…

Did it ever occur to you that, you tried to use an identifier and compiler complaints about it!. Something like. Yeah, it happened when I tried to write a default configuration for my new…