How Not to Be a Rap Star
Paul Mussan and Stelo X rolled into Atlanta’s Freight Room for the afterparty of BET’s First-Annual Hip-Hop Awards. There, someone told the Kansas City rapper and his manager that they’d need to buy $5 tickets to use for drinks at the bar.
Mussan wasn’t having it.
It was November 2006, and damn near every star in hip-hop’s firmament was descending on the Freight Room, a gala event space reserved for the night’s festivities. It was also Nelly‘s birthday, and the St. Louis rapper was set to perform live, along with Rick Ross and Jermaine Dupri. Snoop Dogg was there. Eve was there.
Mussan scanned the scene: 6-foot dudes stirring drinks in tiny plastic cups. He reached under his paisley designer hoodie, deep into the pockets of his jeans, pulled out five $100 bills and stuffed them in the palm of a passing event staffer. “I want bottles,” he said.
There were no tables set up in the ballroom, but minutes later, the waiters brought one. They set out bottles of Grey Goose and champagne. A bucket of ice. A case of orange juice. A couple of candles.
All eyes turned to Mussan.
“Motherfuckers were looking, like, Who the fuck is that?” Mussan recalls. “I’m looking at the rappers and shit, they got plastic cups in their hands. We’re walking around with big-ass Grey Goose bottles.”
As the night progressed, Mussan kept a bottle of vodka at his side and filled strangers’ cups. He took a picture with Snoop Dogg. Someone passed around Ecstasy, and people popped the pills like Altoids.
It felt like the peak of Mussan’s year, but 2006 was about to get even better. Radio stations around the country were starting to play his single, “59Fifty.” Kansas City’s top-rated radio station, KPRS 103.3, played it from December 2006 through February 2007. “People said he reminded them of 50 [Cent],” says the station’s program director, Myron Fears.
Mussan had the essential trinity for making it in the music industry: talent, connections and, thanks to a wealthy investor, money.
But it was starting to go to his head.
Mussan should have been Kansas City’s Nelly.
In 1999, a record exec’s map of America would have looked like this: pushpins up and down the coast of California. Pushpins in New York, in Atlanta, in Chicago. A pin in Houston. A pin in Miami.
When Nelly dropped his No. 1 hit album Country Grammar in June 2000, the Midwest finally got its pin. On his way to fame, Nelly hauled his hometown with him, name-checking the Lou in effervescent party songs that looped on Top 40 radio. Nelly’s momentum carried the rest of his crew, the St. Lunatics, which released its own album (like Nelly’s, on Universal) the next year. Though St. Louis-born Chingy was a protégé of Ludacris, Chingy’s career took off after he went on tour with Nelly.
Kansas City’s hip-hop scene is still waiting for that kind of star. Many local artists blame KC radio, complaining that the city doesn’t have a station committed to pushing hometown music on regular rotation. (Charlie Chan, a DJ at St. Louis’ WHHL 104.1, broke Nelly by playing his singles in St. Louis clubs, which prompted DJ Kut to play him on New York City’s Power 105.1.)
Record execs are looking to break someone from the Midwest, says Terry McGill, CEO and founder of a Texas company called Major Money Entertainment. “That’s our goal — to put Kansas City on the map,” McGill tells The Pitch by phone from his office near Dallas. “Not just Kansas City but the whole Midwest. Tulsa, Wichita, Kansas City, Omaha — there’s about four, five, six artists in those markets who have a shot. The key is just finding ’em.”
[page]
In the 1990s, McGill worked at record labels such as Motown and RCA. His résumé is dotted with old-school hip-hop royalty: Too Short, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-ONE and Skee-lo. (Remember I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller ?)
These days, McGill is a consultant. He says he knows what sounds good in Brooklyn, what works in the Bay Area, what plays in the Dirty South. He creates an image and a marketing campaign for aspiring rap and R&B stars and shops their music to labels — for a fee. He says he knows the program directors at every urban radio station in the country, and he sends them music to test his clients’ potential hits.
In 2006, Mussan was one of McGill’s clients.
“The record was there,” McGill says of Mussan. “The record hit. I mean, we got it on the radio in several markets. A lot of artists, a lot of these guys, they’re young, and they start getting girls coming after them, fans start coming, and they get caught up. Their head gets big.”
Mussan moved to Kansas City in 1997. He’d been living with his father in California, and he wasn’t the type to be star-struck. At age 12, he says, he had a friend who landed a record deal as a “back-burner artist” and had minor roles in movies such as Sister Act 2. That friend’s manager used to sneak the teenage boys into clubs.
“Ice Cube was, like, my favorite rapper,” Mussan says. One night out, he bumped into his hero. “He looked at me like, What the fuck you doin’ here? I mean, ’cause I’m a fuckin’ kid in a nightclub. It was crazy.”
In Kansas City, where his mother’s side of the family lived, Mussan started performing in Westport nightspots as a rapper in 1998. “But I wasn’t shit,” he recalls with a shrug. “I was just one of the dudes that was there that had a verse on one of the songs someone was doing.” It took awhile for people to hear what he could really do, he says.
Mussan dropped mixtape after mixtape, rapping over well-known borrowed beats and including one or two original songs in the mix. Eventually, he found his own signature style.
During a lyricist’s battle at what was then Stanford and Son’s in 2002, Mussan advanced to the final round and faced a rapper called Stelo. (His real name is Melvin Artist.) Each was quick-witted and charismatic; the crowd picked Mussan as the winner in one round, Stelo in the next. The battle was a tie, and the rappers left the club with a mutual respect.
A few years later, Mussan showed up with friends to record at a Kansas City studio called Midgrange Music, and Stelo was there. The two former rivals became reacquainted. The more they talked, the more Mussan was convinced that Stelo was his key to navigating the music industry.
“I needed a manager, and he seemed to know what he was doing,” Mussan says.
Stelo had learned from Dallas hip-hop guru McGill. In 2000, Stelo was in Dallas performing with a rap group called High Style. Their unique sound and aggressive promotion caught McGill’s attention.
McGill had managed a group that included Frank Nitti and Don Vito, who both went on to produce platinum records. (Atlanta artist Yung Joc used a “Nitti beat” on his hit single “It’s Goin’ Down.” Don Vito recently produced the beats for three songs on an album by Jagged Edge, who is signed to Island Records.)
[page]
McGill remembers Stelo as the most talented rapper and writer in High Style, but the members of that group eventually went their separate ways. Then Stelo’s mother in Kansas City had a heart attack, so Stelo moved back and got a job at Tyson Foods in Olathe. During his off hours, he helped build the Midrange studio.
McGill decided to make Stelo his protégé in Kansas City and told him to shop around for area artists who had potential.
Stelo found Mussan.
Mussan already co-owned an independent label, Final Track Records, with his friend Richard Coleman, who goes by the nickname “Milk.” (He’s Caucasian, with white-blond hair.)
Coleman had come into money due to awful circumstances. In 2001, his wife and mother were killed when an Auction Transport tractor-trailer hit their car. Coleman’s nephew, Brandon, was also in the car and suffered brain damage; Coleman escaped with back injuries. He sued Auction Transport, and a jury awarded him $5 million; Brandon won $22 million.
Milk is careful to point out that the label existed before he received any money from the lawsuit and that he’s not the only investor in Final Track Records.
“There is a lot of money in hip-hop, and that’s why everybody wants to be a part of hip-hop,” Milk says.
Milk was a motorhead and loved flashy cars. He bought a Hummer H3 and put the Final Track logo on its side. Mussan loved flash, period; he bought a diamond-encrusted pendant shaped like the Final Track logo and rocked it on a long chain around his neck. He bought a sparkling grill for his teeth.
Stelo knew Mussan and Milk had money in Final Track Records. He told them that he’d be happy to be Mussan’s manager and hook him up with McGill, but they’d have to buy him off his job at Tyson. He wanted $50,000. They gave him $30,000. It was early 2006.
Mussan came to the table with a potential hit single under his belt. He’d recorded “59Fifty” using a beat from Basement Beats, a St. Louis production team that Nelly had made famous. The song had a simple piano plink, an easy pace and a catchy whistle behind the hook: You can lean it like this or lean it like that/You could tilt it like this or tilt it like that/You could rock it like this or rock it to the back/You could swing it like this or swing it like that. It’s about style — how to wear a fitted hat.
McGill liked the song but thought it sounded like a Bay Area track. He asked Mussan whether he was interested in using a Don Vito beat. Mussan jumped on the chance and recorded a new song called “What You Heard.”
McGill sent Stelo and Mussan on a tour of urban radio stations. Armed with the two singles, they drove from Kansas City to Wichita, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston. At each station, Mussan would walk in and be interviewed on the spot by a program director, who would listen to his tracks and tell him whether he’d consider playing them on the air.
In Houston, Mussan met DJ Chill at KPFT 90.1. Chill loved Mussan’s music and played both singles on the air, back-to-back.
“Just to meet DJ Chill and for him to have love for me off the bat like that was big for me because, you know, he’s got history behind him,” Mussan says. “That was beautiful.”
[page]
But Mussan returned home to a slap in the face. A concert promoter in Warrensburg told Mussan and Stelo that they’d have to pay $600 to perform as an opening act for a show with Atlanta artist Lil Scrappy (“Money in the Bank”). Stelo convinced Mussan to shell out the money, figuring it was worth it if they could network with Lil Scrappy’s management team.
Along with Milk and McGill, who was in town, Stelo and Mussan drove to Warrensburg. They watched rapper after rapper take the stage — acts that hadn’t been listed on the promo flier. It started getting late.
“Those people were giving [the promoter] cash right there on the spot to get up onstage,” Stelo explains. “The people who were actually supposed to be on the itinerary were getting moved back.”
Finally, it got so late that Lil Scrappy’s management insisted that the headliner take the stage. After that, the show was over. The promoter promised to refund Mussan’s money but never did.
The Lil Scrappy show was the first in a long line of mistakes.
Mussan hopped on part of a tour with T.I. when the rapper’s career was at its peak. In a hotel parking lot in Louisville, Kentucky, Mussan caught sight of Jim Jones and up-and-coming rapper Stack Bundles, who were also on the T.I. tour. Mussan was eager to meet Stack Bundles because of his reputation as an underground mixtape hustler who was fiercely loyal to the streets. Stack had deliberately turned his back on the music-industry machine but was coming up in his career anyway.
Stack mentioned going to Kansas City the next day. “Dude, we fucking are KC, bro,” Mussan told him. Stelo brokered a deal: They would pay Stack a couple of thousand dollars to record a track with Mussan at Midrange Music.
Accounts differ about what happened next. According to Stelo, Stack was ready to record late at night after his Kansas City show, but Mussan didn’t have the cash.
According to Mussan, one of Stelo’s partners at the studio ruined the deal.
“He [Stelo’s partner] walked up to Stack in front of his manager, in front of Jim Jones, in front of other people in his organization, and was like, ‘You supposed to be coming to the studio and doing a track with Paul Mussan later,'” Mussan says. “And Stack kinda backed off like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Because people do shit under the table. When you’re signed to these record labels, you can’t just go around doing what the fuck you want to do, because the record label will want a piece.”
The track with Stack Bundles never happened, and there wouldn’t be another chance. On June 11, 2007, after a night of partying with friends, Stack was shot and killed outside his house in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens.
“Do you know how much money that track probably would have been worth?” Stelo says. “It would have been one of the last recordings he ever did.”
Mussan and Stelo dusted themselves off and went to the BET Awards in Atlanta. They came home and partied at the Emerald House, on Main, on New Year’s Eve 2007. Mussan had always dreamed of performing on New Year’s Eve.
The party was intense — plenty of liquor, plenty of Ecstasy. The bottle-popping, pill-dropping lifestyle flaunted in music videos was Mussan’s reality — a calculated one, he says.
“It’s all promotion,” he says. “When people actually see you doing shit like that, actually comin’ in the club, iced the fuck out, geared up, they’re trying to get next to you in the VIP room, roped off, y’all poppin’ bottles of champagne — it’s promotion. Motherfuckers want to see that, so when we rap about it, they be like, Nah, them niggas really do that.”
[page]
On Ecstasy, he could drink all night without getting too drunk. The drug also helped him craft his stage persona.
“I can’t perform without pills,” Mussan says. “That’s part of my character. The Paul Mussan character, when he steps on stage, is I’m the shit. You shut the fuck up. You love me, don’t you? Yeah, I know you love me. Fuck you.“
It’s like Slick Rick, he explains. When he saw Slick Rick perform live, Slick Rick told the crowd, “Settle down, peasants.” And they went wild. Mussan loved that Slick Rick insulted his fans, and they responded with love.
But Mussan’s reputation for “thizzing” was becoming notorious. When other rappers wanted Mussan to drop a verse on their tracks, they asked him to rap about Ecstasy. “I remember I did a show in Wichita,” Musan says. “The dude who actually booked my show — I guess he’d heard my music. So he checked me into my hotel, and in the room he just pulls out a bag of pills and throws ’em to me. I’m like, ‘How much?’ and he’s like, ‘It’s you.'”
Mussan’s flashiness was starting to make Stelo nervous. He was worried about someone robbing Mussan. Mussan admits that Stelo warned him to be less accessible to his fans, to cultivate more of a mystique.
The two often drove together to the Lawrence club Last Call. Mussan’s friend Hobo Tone would spin Mussan’s tracks there. And though they both had girlfriends in KC, Stelo and Mussan had a second motive for going to Lawrence: a pair of female roommates they’d met one night at Last Call.
“We both dead wrong goin’ over here,” Mussan says now.
Mussan considered his woman friend in Lawrence to be a “little groupie chick,” but Stelo fell hard for his — a “real beautiful-ass Italian girl,” Stelo calls her. “I was serious about wifing her up,” he adds.
Early one morning, Stelo showed up unannounced at her house, planning to take her out to breakfast. But he found Mussan and one of Mussan’s friends there. Mussan’s friend had been sleeping with Stelo’s Lawrence girlfriend.
Stelo was irate and blamed Mussan. But Mussan says it wasn’t his fault. “You can’t control what anybody does,” he says. “They’re grown.”
It was January 2007, and the NBA All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas was fast approaching. Mussan had bought plane tickets for himself and Stelo to go to Las Vegas to hand out fliers, mix CDs and singles. But Stelo was nowhere to be found and wouldn’t answer his phone when Mussan called. “And I paid $800 for his ticket alone,” Mussan says.
Mussan asked Milk to join him instead. He says the two tore up the town.
When Mussan returned, he had to track down Stelo through McGill. The two patched things up, or so Mussan thought, and traveled to East St. Louis for a show they’d lined up with the Derrty DJs.
Mussan was doing the show for free, but the Derrty DJs tried to make him feel special by making him the headliner.
“Everybody knows the headliner goes on last,” Mussan says. “But at this venue, after every person that performed got offstage and left, they took a little piece of the crowd with them.” By the time Mussan was set to go on, he says there were only eight people left in the room — and they were mostly staff.
[page]
Mussan refused to perform. Stelo felt that Mussan’s decision was unprofessional.
Their next stop was Houston, where Stelo, Milk and Mussan had a date with hip-hop history.
Scarface, the iconic rapper whose career began with the Geto Boys, had performed at Last Call months earlier, and Mussan was his opening act. After that show, Scarface told Mussan to call him the next time he was in Houston so they could record a track together. Scarface named a price that was incredibly cheap for a rapper of his status.
Mussan had spent more on shopping sprees.
Once in Houston, Mussan called Scarface and set up a time to meet at the studio. Then Mussan and Milk started spending money.
“We was in this big-ass club. Everybody was in there,” Mussan recalls. “I’m sitting at the bar, and I order, like, 15 motherfuckers’ drinks. Like, What you want? What you want? What you doing? What you want? You want something? Just the look on their faces was priceless. It’s like, Damn, how come I ain’t never heard of you before?“
It was fun. But it wasn’t smart.
“We spent too much cash,” Mussan says. “And when it came time [to record], we were trying to scramble and get money out the ATM, out of my account, out of his [Milk’s] account, out the Final Track account, and for some strange fucking reason, our limit was reached.”
Losing the track with Scarface hit Stelo hard. Mussan says Stelo was more upset than he and Milk were.
“Now how come Mr. Big Shot Manager didn’t have a G to just pull out his pocket and be, like, here?” Mussan asks. “It wasn’t no ridiculous shit why we couldn’t do it. It was just bad timing. We just fucked up. We miscalculated.”
Later, the Kansas City contingent met up with McGill for dinner at Timmy Chan’s, a well-known after-hours spot frequented by a who’s who of the Houston music scene.
“He [Mussan] was so drunk and thizzing … he embarrassed me and Terry [McGill] at the restaurant in front of a shitload of people,” Stelo says.
The way Mussan remembers it, McGill was partying with him, pouring everyone drinks, and Mussan was making jokes at Stelo’s expense, teasing him the way that the entourage usually made fun of one another on the road. But in front of McGill, who’d been Stelo’s mentor, Mussan figures it hurt Stelo’s feelings.
Back in Kansas City, Stelo again stopped answering Mussan’s calls. Mussan’s connection to McGill fizzled away.
Regrets started catching up with him.
“I mean, it’s like, when you run through $100,000 in less than six months, you gotta kinda step back and figure shit out, get yourself together. Like, what the fuck are we doing?” Mussan says.
He decided it was time to take a break.
Two months ago, Stelo says, Mussan showed up at his house selling bootleg DVDs and apologizing for the women, the alcohol, the pills.
Mussan denies making an apology. Their professional relationship is over. Milk says Stelo quit prematurely, after he’d already been paid. “We had one weak link, and the weak link is gone now,” he says of Stelo. “Now we’re at a point where just me and Paul handle his management because we don’t have a trust issue. We know that we’re both out for the interest of Final Track.”
For his part, McGill says he would love to work with Mussan again. “Paul’s a talented artist. He’s a good kid. Like many other artists in this industry, he just got caught up in the fantasy.”
[page]
Mussan admits that he could be accused of being blinded by the glitz of his image. “I was feelin’ myself,” Mussan says. “But at the same time, it wasn’t like I was caught up in my own hype. I was caught up in the hype they put me in. I mean, if you don’t think you’re a star, nobody’s gonna think you’re a star.”
Mussan walks through the doors of Chapman Studios in downtown Kansas City wearing a lush, cream-colored hoodie. A thick dude who goes by the name Donta Slusha is eating potato chips in the studio’s luxurious kitchen area, all exposed brick, rock counters and glass. Donta Slusha hands Mussan a CD in a plastic sleeve, and Mussan goes to another room, with a wall full of audio equipment, to play the beats.
Lounging around the studio are several other artists, including Big Ben, a rapper, and S.G., a producer. Everyone is here because a formidable Kansas City rapper called the Popper asked them to be guests on his upcoming mixtape.
“Slush, who made these?” Mussan calls out after a few minutes.
“My lil’ cousin,” Slusha calls back.
“How much he charge?”
“Fifty.”
Mussan wanders back in, disc in hand. “I guess I wanna be a rapper again.”
Suddenly, the Popper bursts into the room from behind double soundproof doors. “You ready?” he asks Mussan.
Mussan tells the Popper that his verse isn’t ready yet.
“He ain’t got his verse for me. See how they do me?” the Popper says loudly. He sighs theatrically and goes back through the double doors.
“Is he for real?” Mussan asks, wondering if he has really pissed off their host.
“Nah,” Slusha says.
In the recording room, a sound engineer sits behind several monitors and a soundboard covered in knobs. A monitor above the engineer’s head shows a live camera feed from the studio’s front door in order to see who’s coming and going at all times. A glass window separates the recording equipment from the booth. The Popper’s allotted studio time ticks down in red LED numbers on a screen.
Big Ben is in the booth, attacking the microphone’s pop screen with a barrage of quick-spit lyrics. When he’s finished, Mussan is up. The Popper lounges, wide-legged on a black-leather couch, and looks at Mussan expectantly.
Mussan steps into the booth and smoothes a crumpled piece of paper on which he has inked a verse in less than an hour.
The engineer presses “play” on the beat, and Mussan’s head starts bobbing. He runs through his sheet of lyrics almost flawlessly on the first take — no stumbles.
The lines are metaphorical, their meaning veiled, but it’s clear by the end that Mussan is rapping about being a pimp. By the time he’s halfway finished, his audience has grown — everyone in the building has crowded into the studio to hear Mussan’s perfect pronunciation.
“I can’t rap that clear,” the Popper marvels.
Mussan has been in the studio ever since. His new mixtape, KC Landmarks and Final Track Records Present Bad News Volume II, comes out this month, and he’ll release a compilation, Two Cities, One State, on Final Track Records shortly after.
