First Placement is a Viewfinder series on producers and how they landed their first major placement, told as a first-person narrative, with the producer’s name revealed at the end.
At 14, as a freshman in high school, I began to make beats. During my sophomore year, I became an intern at Chicago radio station WGCI. I'd skip school on Monday mornings just to be there. I thought the internship could help with placements, so I would play mashups of my beats over radio songs during the mix show. No tracks ever got placed, but the exposure helped with networking in the city as a new producer.
In 2008, I’m 18, a senior about to graduate, and hungry to be heard. Listening to Jim Jones freestyle on Shade 45 inspired me to call the radio station. They picked up, put me on air, and let me play a beat for Jim over the phone. Not only did he rap over it, but the show host, DJ Kay Slay, gave me his email asking for beats. After I sent them, a day or two later, I got an email back that said, “Yo, this shit is crazy. Don’t give this beat to anybody, it’s for Papoose.”
As a producer on the come up, this was a big opportunity for me, and I had to make the most of it. So my response was, I’ll be in your city next month, we should link. I didn’t have any plans to travel before that moment, but he replied to hit him when I got there, so I had to go. Took me two months working at Finish Line and the grocery store to save enough money for a two day trip.
When I got to New York in May, DJ Kay Slay didn’t answer any of my calls. So I went and waited outside the Rockefeller Center where Shade 45 was on the day of his show. I came all this way, I had nothing to lose. When he finally pulled up, I approached, trying to holla at him. He tells me he’ll come down and get me, I waited, but he never did. Swerved.
So on my last day, I was reading AlllHipHop.com. They had an interview with G-Unit’s staff about working at the label. A feeling, call it intuition, came over me. I walked from Port Authority to Madison Square Garden where their office used to be and met the staff, including G-Unit Records head A&R Dre Mckenzie. We had a sit down, I played some beats from my computer, and gave him a tape to keep. Three months later, he contacted me and said, 50 Cent picked two beats from the CD you left.
Those two became my first ever placements on 50 Cent’s platinum album, Before I Self Destruct, and his mixtape, War Angel LP. After the songs “Strong Enough” and "Redrum (Murder)" got my career started, I dropped out of community college. I knew producing is what I’m here for. Now I have countless placements with great artists, co-production on a platinum single that has over 200 million streams on Spotify, several classic records with the next superstar of R&B, and my debut album as a producer, Minus The Bullshit Life’s Great, coming in May, the same month I went to New York.