Headkrack spills beans on Dallas music scene
Working in radio can be a wild ride. Here hip hop artist Headkrack shares his experiences as a New York entertainer working in Dallas radio, his opinion of the area’s hip hop scene and a few workings of the radio industry.
Q: So where you from?
A: I’m from the Bronx, N.Y.
Q: How’d you wind up in Dallas?
A: My mom moved out here and where a mom goes a little boy gotta go…
Q: How did you come up with your stage name?
A: I went through a whole bunch of different rap names. But when I was in high school I was too young to work and we played c-lo. Basically the way c-lo works, when you roll a 4-5-6 you call that a headcrack. You can’t beat a headcrack-so I basically applied that to the rap game. I ain’t tryna be beat by nobody.
Q: How long have you been rapping?
A: I’ve been kickin’ rhymes since like ’87, but I didn’t really start getting serious about it until like 1990.
When I was living with my grandmother she was apprehensive about letting me go out crazy hours in the night so I used to sit home and listen to the radio -back then it was Cool DJ Red Alert on 98.7 Kiss FM, Chuck Chillout on WBLS. When you spend weekend after weekend, night after night listening to the radio you just can’t help it, you just want to take part in the culture.
And plus man, being in the Bronx man, that atmosphere, the environment, you just breathe it in. It felt like the natural thing to do.
Q: How did you get your gig with 97.9 the Beat?
A: When the Beat came to Dallas I was doing marketing for EMI and they didn’t have any jocks and they were playing a lot of music that I liked that the other stations weren’t playing.
Over at the beat they were playing De La Soul, Ghostface Killah and all this other stuff that I wasn’t getting from other stations. And I figured any station that does that I wanna be down with it.
I was at a party with Supa K and Keynote, we were talking about the station and said we should all get together and do an air check. And the next day, hangovers and all, we went to our man’s studio and bullsh***ed our way through and air check and turned it in.
They dug it and they put us on. We were the first show on the entire station. I did hip hop news on K104 for about three months but the other two didn’t have any radio experience at all.
Q: You guys have great chemistry. Do you do any other projects together?
A: We might do a little collabo in between working on our own projects but right now I’m working on these mix tapes.
We’re tryna take on this whole guerilla music-marketing type thing. The industry is a lot different than it was a couple of years ago.
So my thing is, why prostitute myself to a major label off the top when I’m only gonna make like 20 cents off of each record I sell when I can grind these streets really hard and sling these tapes for like $10 a pop and make a full profit?
Q: So what mix tapes have you released?
A: I just got finished with my first one. It’s called “Is This What You Want?” And it’s like 60 minutes of joints that I didn’t pick for the album that are still hot.
Q: What artists have you worked with?
A: Mike G from the Jungle Brothers, I’ve done some stuff with Lil Flip for his next album and some local cats. I did do the Blaze battle like three years ago. I came in third place. It was up in the magazine and everything.
I battled King Sun-took him out. I lost to this dude named E Dub, I totally say I was robbed. But you know *laughs* that’s what it is. I was on the Wyclef tour when he was promoting The Carnival.
Q: How’s the Dallas music scene to you?
A: The Dallas music scene is terrible because there’s not really a lot of outlets for artists. The radio stations only half-heartedly support what the local artists are doing. On 97.9 the Beat, we’ve got the “street heat” thing now and that’s helping out. But that’s just like, the first step.
Also, there’s a lot of close-mindedness from a lot of people in the metroplex when it comes to hip hop. No one sticks together out here. I mean, instead of working for a common cause, people are more on a stance where it’s “oh he’s doing what I’m doing so I’ve got to do it better than him” instead of working together.
Q: You think it’s better in Houston?
A: Yeah, people stick together a lot more and they really support their local scene out there. The scene there is totally different. It’s thriving, there’s a hunger, the radio supports it. And that’s why you have so many high-profile releases coming out of Houston.
Really, the only rap artist to come out of Dallas and blow was D.O.C. and that was 89. And it’s a shame because you have so many talented cats out here doing their thing. Record labels don’t respect this city – and this is coming from someone that’s worked behind the scenes.
Q: Tell me about the rhyme battles you host – the Monday Night Fights.
A: Monday Night Fights at the Caribbean Bar and Grill, that’s like a breath of fresh air. Action Jackson [another DJ] came to me with the idea and I wanted to jump on straight from the ground floor. The crowds just keep growing. Each week there’s like 12-13 hungry cats going for the gusto trying to win the coveted freestyle battle.
Q: What advice do you have to anyone that wants their music played on the radio?
A: Being that I do what I do, I try to fight as hard as I can for local and independent music because the industry is so jacked up right now that it’s hard to blow up unless you’ve got a major label pushing behind you who have $15,000 to spend with a radio station doing promotion.
I don’t know if I should be telling you this. I don’t wanna put my foot in my mouth, so let me choose my words carefully.
There are people from record labels who are paid to deal with the heads of some of these radio stations to get their records on. And usually the people who do that are the ones that get their records on. I’m not saying that’s particularly how it works at our station, but a lot of stations work that way.
The only freedom left was on mix shows, but now mix shows are being policed and monitored because some DJs were taking money to spin records and it spoils it for the people playing fair.
