Hey everybody up front! Get up off your seats and bring your drinks up here! That's what you paid three bucks for!"
Angel Acevedo is trying to convince the local denizens of Sanita's to leave their barstools and check out "Rhyme and Rotation," the hip hop show he's hosting in the back of the Italian-themed bar on Lovejoy Street in Buffalo on a Saturday night. A following is already assembled near the microphone, but as Deepthinka Records' Promotions and Show Coordinator, Acevedo wouldn't mind more exposure.
Meanwhile, observing not-so-quietly in an orange skull cap is Tony Caferro, the co-founder and current director of Deepthinka, a hip-hop record label based in Buffalo, Cleveland and New York City. He's a 25-year-old college graduate who "went to UB six years for a four-year degree" in business administration. Suffice to say, the extra years have paid off. Most young entrepreneurs don't start off in the business world by controlling their own record company.
"Basically, it started out pretty much based on my production and engineering skills," Caferro said, as he explained the origins of Deepthinka. "Somewhere around 1997, I met up with a cat in Cleveland named Rob Hill. He and I founded the company based on the premise that we wanted to have a record label that was focused and based on the artist and actual music."
The other motivation was hip-hop music. Caferro, who is about as old as hip-hop itself, grew up listening to artists like Run DMC and KRS-One ?Ae_ emcees that cemented the rise of hip-hop in the eighties. During his extended tenure at UB, Caferro also founded the Hip-Hop SA.
As a businessman, Caferro readily admits the difficulty in promoting Deepthinka in Buffalo, which is not exactly the capital of hip-hop. He's working on establishing the show at Sanita's as a fixed hip-hop event, similar to Broadway Joe's Thursday-night Baby Steps. Although most of the support for Deepthinka is based in markets in Cleveland, Toronto and New York City, Caferro sees Buffalo as a viable origin for great hip-hop artists.
"Buffalo is very economically depressed. There's not much going on. But economic depression in my mind breeds great artists. People don't have anything to do but express themselves through their art," said Caferro.
But it does take some sifting through the talent pool to find true artists. Caferro notes that he receives "a sh-tload of demos and most of them suck." In his opinion, the bar to producing great music has reduced itself with better access through technology. What many new hip-hop artists lack, according to Caferro, is real world experience. Caferro recounts that in the past, wannabe rappers would have to prove themselves in emcee battles and live performances. Whack performers were forced to improve their skills after public ridicule.
One artist whose demo was not tossed into Deepthinka's garbage bin is Ajent-O. The Buffalo native has been signed to Caferro's label for two years. In Ajent-O's opinion, the problem with fledgling talent is the lack of both innate skills and the willingness to experiment with rhymes and the background production.
For Saturday's show, he has gathered with many artists on Deepthinka to watch the event. All of them seem well-connected with the crowd at Sanita's, buying drinks and playing darts, pool and Pac-Man before the opening act.
It's one of the ways for Ajent-O to relax. By day, the rapper admits to being a telemarketer. At 23, Ajent-O isn't sure if he's willing to devote his entire life to an art form if he can't maintain an "average man's income," which includes owning a house and a car.
But playing shows allows the rapper an outlet to express what's on his mind, which includes his beef with the Buffalo Police Department and computer games.
"Man, just one night I was staying up. I was doing my Sim City, and I just thought about it and named mine 'Metaphor Metropolis.' So I was thinking, what is 'Metaphor Metropolis?' I wanted it to be everything I can grasp in hip-hop. So I wrote and named a song after it."
Richard Panaro, a senior history major at UB, also writes lyrics that run the gamut on issues, covering the environment, writer's block and marijuana. He is one of the members of Cinemaddicts, a group of Deepthinka emcees who have just released an album entitled, "Notes from the Underground."
His main partner is Jonathan "Past Time" Palmer, who is more than willing to explain the issues covered in one Cinemaddicts track.
"On 'Notes From the Underground,' there's a song called, 'My Head Hurts,' which is performed by (Cinemaddicts emcees) Tone Atlas and Nick Zero. Tone Atlas first talks about his writer's block. And his brother Nick Zero, he talks about his weed habit. So it's really nice the way it comes down-writer's block to his weed habit. It's a beautiful track."
Palmer also has to maintain a day job at Main Auto as a parts installer. He notes that listening to "whack beats" and Ludacris for four hours in a row is part of what drives him to produce his own music.
In fact, an appreciation for innovative, early nineties hip-hop is prime source material for Cinemaddicts. Tone Atlas is fond of the smooth, jazz-based influences of acts like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest that are missing in many contemporary artists. One of his goals for Cinemaddicts is to raise the overall production quality and value of hip-hop songs.
But this does not mean Deepthinka artists are stuck in the stereotypical, underground versus mainstream music mentality. Siege, an emcee from the Cleveland-based group Edotkom, believes his music is the perfect blend of the hip-hop that is played on the radio, and the music that's performed at small venues like Baby Steps and Sanita's. All of this material is important for his repertoire.
"Who I really admire right now is probably Redman and Nas. I mean, I think we were influenced by the old school but we're not stuck in the old school," Siege comments. "Most underground cats try to create what happened in '93 and '94, and I got 20 CDs from '93 and 40 from '94. I don't need to hear that again."
His partner, Heiku, talks about the dilemma of producing new music as the genre of hip-hop ages. For him, what it comes down to is sticking to the same formula of reinventing old music. All hip-hop artists need is new source material and experimentations with the production-exactly the mission that Deepthinka records seeks to accomplish.
