Naughty By Nature’s Treach & Kay Gee – HuffPost 12.12.11
Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?
Treach: Man, you’ve got to keep your day job until you get a deal. You’ve got to work hard. Don’t think you can get rich and famous overnight. It’s a job way more than a nine to five. Come in knowing that you have to put in work to get anything out of it. If you just come in like, “I’m an artist,” and you say, “I’m not going to do press, or interviews, or be around, and I’m going to be a diva,” it will come back on you. The same people you see coming up, you see them same people when you’re falling down the ladder. Somebody might be seeing you fall down and say, “Man how is he falling, he’s a good dude,” and he’ll help you back up. If not, then you aren’t going to last long in this industry, it’s a lot of people but it’s a small industry.
Kay Gee: I would say definitely stay true to yourself and be original. Right now, like we always say, you go to record companies and you go to try and get a deal, they used to say, “He sounds a little bit too much like…” Nowadays, you go in to a record company and they say, “I want something like…” Just be original, be true to yourself, do “you,” and make sure nobody else that’s working for you or with you wants it more than you. Nobody should have to push you, you should be pushing your team or you should work with a team where everybody is on the same playing field. Make sure they’re just as hungry as you. The record company should not be pushing you to do things because that’s not how you make it in this game.
MR: What do you think about the kids that are watching TV and saying, “All I need to do is be on American Idol and I’ll be set”?
KG: Like I said earlier, talent alone isn’t necessarily going to make it. There are so many people that are out here that are super-talented and aren’t even going to get an opportunity. It’s the extra stuff that we’re talking about now, it’s the work ethic. There’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes that make it work too. You’ve got to have the right teamwork. You can’t do it in this business alone. You have to have a great support team. You can doAmerican Idol and you can have the great talent and that’s one thing. You have to have the right politics, you have to have the right team for it to fully work.
MR: It seems that if you go on American Idol, in general, there’s not a lot of longevity for most of the contestants, as opposed to when you grow a loyal audience over the years.
KG: Yeah, because you’re building it up. With that, it throws you on the pedestal too fast. It gets you the opportunity and you never want to knock the opportunity, but it kind of throws you on top too fast. That’s what I was saying about what I was telling the guys on Twitter yesterday. “You guys can laugh at that old picture all you want, but that shows how much time we’ve put in and that’s why we’re here twenty years later.” You might think “O.P.P” wasAmerican Idol-like, but it wasn’t. It jumped out at the top, but we put in years before that record came in, and that’s why we’re still here.
T: Let me tell you something. You can’t go on American Idol and be upset because you lose because you’ve won so many viewers. I’ve seen so many artists going on American Idol, not winning, getting record contracts, going platinum, and getting their whole career off the board. You want the exposure, but you have to get everything you want out of it. You have to put those calls in, you have to make those moves and have people working for you and you don’t have to win. Jennifer Hudson and people like that didn’t win. Use all of that exposure to your advantage.
MR: Maybe some of them don’t want to go the pop star route, and they build a slow career the rest of their life using that.
T: Some of them might not even perform and some of them might just be writers. They don’t have to do anything but walk to the mailbox and get checks the rest of their life, because they’ve written some of the best songs ever. A lot of the people behind the cameras get more money than the people in front of the cameras.