10,000 HOURS

Professional networks, tight-knit scenes, and informal underground subcultures are invaluable to creative development, giving artists and musicians a forum to find their voice, and workshop creative ideas before joining the glut of the broader market. 

You’re probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand hour rule. In his 2008 book, Outliers, the social theorist argues that ten thousand hours of dedicated practice is a prerequisite for the sort of success we associate with creative genius and game-changing innovation. The Beatles’ Hamburg years, wherein the Lads from Liverpool found their rhythm performing six shows a day (seven days a week!) is one case study. When it comes to music—and most other creative disciplines, too—there’s another component that I’d argue is just as crucial as talent and diligent practice, though: community.

In this issue, we explore the ten thousand hours that preceded the professional breakthroughs of some truly iconic figures—the work before the work, if you will— and the role that community played in facilitating those breakthroughs. We start with Mariah Carey and Tupac Shakur—some might say the definitive recording artists of the 1990s—and a pair of circa-’88 demo tapes that have come to light as part of our Wax Poetics Collections.

Raised on the North Shore of suburban Long Island, Mariah looked to New York City found her people on the New York City studio scene, where she gained invaluable experience shadowing folks like Gavin Christopher and Cindy Mizelle, talented artists in their own right who nevertheless found their most consistent work behind the scenes. 

The 1988 demo Mariah recorded with musicians Ben Margulies and Chris Toland would be a game changer. But it was only when Brenda K. Starr, for whom Mariah was then singing backup, handed a copy to executive Tommy Mottola that things started moving. If you’ve followed Mariah’s career at all, you know how the rest of that story goes. It’s the story behind the tape—and Mariah’s early days on the studio scene hunting for that break—that really speaks to where she took things once she gained her freedom and stepped out from Mottola’s shadow. WW

Tupac’s early recordings with his high-school group Born Busy, meanwhile, didn’t circulate until after his death. Some still haven’t been heard. His ’88 demo wasn’t meant to solicit interest from record labels; it consists of a capella rhymes he recorded expressly for Gerald Young, the group’s DJ and producer, to craft beats around. Nearly forty years later, however, the recordings on this tape—and a series of photos and ephemera from this same period shared by Young, better known today as GE-OLOGY—offer a revealing window into a moment when ’Pac was finding himself amidst the theater freaks and hip-hop geeks at Baltimore School for the Arts. 

As the in-house producer for Cash Money Records, Mannie Fresh led New Orleans to the pinnacle of hip-hop in the late 1990s. But, as NOLA native Martie Bowser shares in her profile on Mannie, he was grinding at project block parties, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, and pizza parlor teen nights for a whole fifteen years before then, marinating the sound that would later make Cash Money one of the most successful independent record labels ever. Like so many New Orleans kids, Mannie was born into a musical community—he ran the streets with his DJ dad, Sabu, and interned at Allan Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Studios—but he’d also expand his horizons in Chicago and L.A., soaking up game from Steve “Silk” Hurley and Ice-T. When it came time for his moment, he was more than ready. Mannie Fresh had put in the work.  

Across the Atlantic in West Yorkshire, George Evelyn had also been in the trenches for years before his big breakthrough with 1995’s chill-out masterpiece Smokers Delight. In his feature “Rewind and Come Again,” writer Andy Thomas takes us on a deep dive into the origins of Evelyn’s Nightmares on Wax project, from the sound system circuit in Evelyn’s native Leeds during the 1980s to the post-rave afterparties where Evelyn workshopped his downtempo collages for an audience of friends. 

This year marks twenty-five years of Wax Poetics (more on that soon), and to mark the occasion we’re digging into our editorial crates to dust off some classics and catch up with some old friends. Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn appeared in Wax Poetics Issue 3, way back in 2002. We reconnected with Charlie revisiting photos he shot before, during, and after the production of Wild Style in the early 80s, turning Super 8 images of people like Busy Bee and Dot-A-Rock into bold paintings that capture the vibrancy of early hip-hop and New York’s street scene in all its gritty, grimy glory. 

When Oliver Wang interviewed boogaloo bad boy Joe Bataan for Issue 19’s cover story in 2006, “Subway Joe” was in the early stages of a career revival after two decades away from music. Twenty more years have passed and Bataan, now in his mid-eighties, is still on the road. In a follow-up to our original story—which we’ve also reprinted here, alongside the new one—Wang reconnected with Bataan for a discussion on enduring status as one of New York music’s truest musical O.G.s. 

One of my favorite anecdotes in this issue comes from Brooklyn house music DJ and producer Victor Simonelli. Recalling late nights cutting tape for an endless roll of remixes while apprenticing under Arthur Baker at Shakedown Sound studios in the late ’80s, Simonelli shares the story of how he woke up one night on his subway ride home, and imagined he’d been sucked into one of Shakedown’s tape machines. Shakedown was the ultimate networking spot for aspiring producers, and Simonelli got all he could from it, hallucinations included. When it came time to start dropping his own records a few years later, he had his formula down pat. He’d found his community, and put in the work.

By Jesse Serwer

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