The rise and stardom of hip-hop heralds with it a new music era for Pittsburgh.
The ’30s and ’40s marked a golden jazz era in Pittsburgh, when the streets of the Hill District were bleeding with the icy blue lights of nightclubs and gambling dens, and the Crawford Grill was vibrant with a strong urban swing and a deep, bellowing blues. The country branded it “the Pittsburgh sound,” a unique resonance that defined a lifestyle and delivered up legends. Music, in Pittsburgh, has met its second coming.
With the international rise of Wiz Khalifa (whose first single back in 2005 was poignantly named “Pittsburgh Sound”), the age of hip-hop is upon us. It’s gritty and gorgeous, with swollen base beats, underground edge, and a blue-collar, hard-working, pulsating passion that won’t quit. There’s no radio station to preach it (WAMO signed off of the airwaves in the summer of 2009), but East Liberty’s Shadow Lounge thumps nightly with its local disciples, and tucked into our urban, gravel-raked streets are industrious little studios, burning their lights all night to produce and record “the sound.”
ID Labs boasts boarded windows (a result of a shooting after the Hip-Hop Awards in 2007) and discretely lacks a street sign. But this is where Khalifa laid down his first tracks. Today, it’s buzzing with the energy of Mac Miller: the next big thing to come out of Pittsburgh.
He’s a prodigy, who started recording music on his home computer when he was just 14 years old and selling CDs at Taylor Allderdice High School. When he was 15, he found ID Labs. Owner Eric Dan took notice of the young rapper’s dedication, and because of the long hours Miller spent in the studio, he also developed a rapport with Benjy Grinberg, the Squirrel Hill native who is president of Rostrum Records and the man who signed Wiz Khalifa.
“That’s how I developed such a close relationship with Benjy and with everyone here: I’m here all the time. When Wiz and Benjy and E saw that I was dedicated and working, Wiz got on my mixtape and helped me. And that helped me to get buzz and to get people to look at it. When I showed Benjy the mixtape that I was about to put out, he was like, ‘Oh wow, this is really good.’”
Miller found a mentor in Grinberg, and when the artist was approached by local and national labels, he brought the deals to his friend to look over.
“He would be like, ‘That’s not a good contract for you,’” Miller says. “I said, ‘I would rather have a contract with you guys.’ And he said, ‘Oh really? OK. Let’s do it.’ And we just took it from there — ate at a couple of Chinese restaurants and went over the specifics, and then it just kind of took off.”
Grinberg says that what he saw in Miller was musicianship. “He doesn’t let on that much, but he can play piano and guitar, besides being an amazing lyricist and rapper,” he says. “He’s amazing at writing melodies and harmonies and has a lot of musicality to progress and grow as an artist. Plus, he’s the hardest-working kid I’ve ever met. He loves this. There’s nothing else in the world that he wants more. That, alone, will drive his success.”
Miller is 18 now and open to the exploration. “That’s the thing: I try to explore it as much as possible. Like, there’s the classic hip-hop that I love. But, I love to do different styles of music. And that’s the best about working at this studio: We come in here and make it from scratch.”
Miller’s first mixtape, K.I.D.S., featured “Kool Aid and Frozen Pizza,” a summer anthem that is as contagious with the windows down as it is in stereo by the pool, and “Nikes On My Feet,” a slow-grinding groove with a snarky crunch to it — it’s about “a pilot stayin’ fresh up in his cockpit.” Part of Miller’s fostering to stardom came from acclaimed local filmmaker, Ian Wolfson, who shot his music videos.
The day of our shoot and interview with Miller is the day before he leaves for his first big tour. It’s sold out, for five solid weeks, nationwide, and he’s so excited that he can barely stop talking between frames. “E, yo!” he calls out to Dan. “You’re not going to believe what me and Just Blaze did. Not like it’s the best music you’ve ever heard, but, like I’m just saying, it doesn’t even sound like Just Blaze, and it doesn’t even sound like me.”
He scurries into the studio and cues up tracks he recorded the previous day with the New Jersey hip-hop producer. The song is melodic, with a strong club sway to it, until Miller riddles it with his ammunition of sharp rhymes. Everyone in the room is bobbing his head to the beat — until the young rapper lunges for the pause button, halting the track: “I just wanted to say that no matter what you hear, I don’t really feel this way about women, okay?”
We nod and laugh. For the sake of professionalism, I resist an eyeroll.
Like his peers, Miller has a heavy artillery of songs that objectify women. And like Wiz, Mac has an affinity for rapping about pot. But the artist says that his message is all about being positive.
“I try to be as relatable as possible and try to make my music for as many people as possible: old, young, white, black, rich, poor,” Miller says. “The message is to just be positive. That’s the main thing, and I feel like that’s such a huge movement. You can have all different kinds of kids in one room and have kids that have been so sheltered their whole childhood and have not come out of their comfort zone. And they could come to a concert, and it can just be all about positivity.”
Miller’s album, Best Day Ever, is slated for release early this month. He’s still got a lot of work to do, which also means a lot of work for Grinberg and Dan. But the Pittsburghers are used to the grind. “I’m the cleaning lady, I’m the producer, I’m the mix engineer,” Dan says. “Running the studio is a pretty tough business to begin with, especially if it’s a smaller studio. You know, we can’t get, like, orchestras in here, and we can’t get, like, QED to come down and do live bands and stuff like that. We really try hard to carve out an edge.”
Dan’s mastery for the niche comes from his years performing in the hip-hop crew Strict Flow, whose album Without Further Ado went national in 2003, putting the group on stage to open for 50 Cent, Ja Rule, and Nelly. It was around the same time that Grinberg was launching Rostrum, though he never intended for it to be a Pittsburgh label.
“I always wanted to find great talent from Pittsburgh, but I knew it would go beyond that,” he says. “I think there have always been talented people in Pittsburgh, but they lack the expertise or the infrastructure.”
The nurturing that Grinberg and Dan have shown Khalifa and Miller has generated buzz citywide. Local rappers seem to be coming out of the woodwork for a chance to record in Lawrenceville.
“At least four or five times a week, people will bang on that door, assuming they can just come in and do something,” Dan says. “But it’s like, you have to schedule something. We need time to work with these people. We have always tried to stay a little low key.”
But with the fame of the studio and its artists, a low profile has been difficult. “During the summer, when we were working on Wiz’s album — you know, he had gotten his [Dodge] Challenger, which is bright yellow, and he was Tweeting about it. And it was parked right out front.”
The siren of the car may as well be chart-climbing single or a sold-out tour schedule. Hip-hop is surging in our city, and the
Pittsburgh sound is being heard around the world. If Wiz Khalifa was the next Snoop Dog, then Mac Miller is our rising Eminem.
Dan shakes his head in disbelief. “I feel like we’ve been really lucky to find one person with that level of talent and to now add another one — it’s kind of like winning the lottery twice.”
ID Labs, idlabsmusic.com. Rostrum Records, rostrumrecords.com. Mac Miller, macmillerhq.com.
