A native New Yorker, Zornow is an acclaimed battle DJ, having won several national competitions before he even entered college. He’s performed with members of acclaimed DJ group The X-ecutioners, and he’s worked alongside major-label superstars The Roots and Gang Starr. Since coming to Harvard, he’s DJ-ed dozens of area parties and performs with Awkward Landing, a trio of Boston MCs.
But he, like Tha League and WPP before him, believes firmly in the primacy of artistic vision. “If I want to do something substantial for hip-hop, and I see Lil’ Wayne is the one on the pop charts,” he says, “I’m gonna go somewhere else.”
According to Abe R. Kinkopf ’04, any reports of a shift in the industry towards D.I.Y. success are greatly exaggerated.
He’s a co-founder of The Indefinite Article, a group of Harvard grads who rap with live instruments—“a cross between 311 and The Roots,” he says.
They’re set to self-release an album later this month, but the group has yet to catch the attention of a label or get big-venue gigs. As important as self-motivation might be, Kinkopf says it’s still not as important as looking like you came out of the projects.
“It just doesn’t make sense to get into an industry that almost requires that you come from the bottom,” Kinkopf says. “Harvard grads like myself have very little [going for them], other than that they are committed to a career in music.”
Part of Cublunk’s mission is to stress that artists like Kinkopf and Shiftee have everything to gain by giving at least a little bit of the spotlight to alternative styles of hip-hop, even if those styles are more mainstream, more traditional, more “street.”
“It’s not like all college kids only listen to complex, abstract underground hip-hop,” Deleon of Tha League says. “If that were true, N.W.A., Mobb Deep, Public Enemy, and every hip-hop artist that’s ever been played on MTV would not be successful.”
In Cublunk’s equation, Dave Mays made it big because he offered up a Harvard intellect to the existing materials of street hip-hop. Until the rest Harvard comes around to the other side of Boston hip-hop, though, he’ll remain pessimistic: “I’m waiting for some new Harvard kids to come into Boston and say, ‘I want to hear what’s going on here.’”
—Staff writer J. Samuel Abbott can be reached at abbott@fas.harvard.edu.