“I’m on My Grind.” Not since “Keepin’ It Real” has there been a more overused and misunderstood phrase in the Hip-Hop lexicon. What, exactly, is “the grind,” and how do you get on it? Nobody can give a definitive answer because the word “grind” is so bland, so blanket, so… blah. You could even call it insipid, if you knew what that meant (step ya vocabulary up, young’n).
“The Grind” is relative, so the only way to get a true definition is to ask someone who claims to be on theirs — and that’s just what we did. FreshDot caught up with Swishahouse founder Michael “5000″ Watts — a man whose personal mantra is “If you don’t grind, you don’t shine” — and got the story of his personal “grind” and how he made it from the street to rap’s elite. Peep:
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Nobody starts off on top, so you’re gonna have to give some things away at first. We had this big northside/southside rivalry in Houston back in the day, so whenever I would go to the southside and try to sell my CDs, people really weren’t accepting it because a lot of those guys were down with [legendary Houston DJ] Screw. Whenever I would run into somebody that didn’t want to buy my mixtape, I would give them one for free. We did a lot of charity at first, but it made people see what Swishahouse was about and the name started to catch on.
When I was doing mixtapes back then, I would get thousands of copies pressed up, load ‘em in my Suburban and travel to wherever I needed to go until I sold every copy. I would end up in Oklahoma, I would end up in Louisiana, I would end up in Arkansas. You gotta go where the money is, and that’s what I did. All my CDs had contact information on them, and that’s how I kept track of who was feelin’ us. I knew where to go and push my CDs based on the number of calls I got from each area. From there, the mixtapes started getting really hot and we just started pushing it even harder.
When [Houston-based distribution company] Southwest Wholesale gave me a deal to put out my first record, I really wasn’t prepared for this stuff. I had no idea how to run a record label, I just knew we had some hot artists and a hot brand and could make some money off it. Unfortunately, I got screwed on that first record, but I left the situation with a lot more knowledge of the business. Experiences like that got me to the point where I can run a business effectively now.
And now that we’re major, don’t think the grind is any easier. We just grind smarter now. We’re doing just as much work now as we did back then, I still go days without sleep finishing projects, and I still do a lot of free stuff. But it’s all part of the plan. My main thing is expanding [the Swishahouse] brand. If I have to go out there and work for free or go without sleep in order to expand the brand, I’ll do it because that’s my main priority. This thing is a business. If you look at it as such, you can really make some money off this shit.
The main thing an up-and-coming DJ has to do to get to the next level is just get out there, work and strategize. You’ve got to know what direction you want to go. If your main goal is to be a producer, then you’ve got to get out there and produce some tracks. If your goal is to run a record label, you gotta start studying up on how a record label is run. Do your homework! Experience is the best teacher, but going in with some knowledge and some sort of strategy can make things a lot easier. If I had looked at this like a business when I first started, I could have taken Swishahouse a lot further a lot earlier, knowhatimsayin?
-As told to Max-El Saffold
