From Tad Lathrop’s The Business of Global Music Marketing: Global Strategies for Maximizing Your Music’s Popularity and Profits:
However distant the notion of international marketing may have been for you previously, you’ve now come to the point of considering whether and how you can put globalization to work in your music. The “whether” part of your inquiry is relatively easy to answer: With the right product packaging, the right distribution tactics, and the right promotion, virtually any musical product should be saleable somewhere outside its home country.
Falling into a restless slumber beneath a tome of managerial fist-pump-prose, you wake up to imagine a world where GRIME was just a $$$-rich synonym for LONDON RAP and Tinchy joined N Dubz full time. This a dream worth fighting, and Ruff Sqwad are back on hand to nail hard, crisp tunes into Grime’s empty coffin.
“Prince” inverts the Biggie Smalls genre of hip-hop dream sequences, so instead of an expansive fuck you to the neighbours and teachers who couldn’t see any potential, Prince (not you Prince!) shows himself still at school, still grafting, still proud of his East London estate, still affirming Grime’s DIY collective ethos. The track is full of inversions, toying with tropes about hard upbringings, calling for dancefloor passivism, even reversing Flow Dan’s famous nurse/hearse verse from “Skeng” to more hopeful ends. Checking Zelda’s Swords and Bandicoot’s boundless energy, the video moves through a platform game of daily London life, a super-strength comeback of wit and skank.
Prince Rapid releases his new solo EP Turning Point out March 31 via Ruff Sqwad Records. This follows on from 2012’s crucial White Label Classics, a collation of rare Ruff Sqwad instrumentals from the turn of the millennium.
• Prince Rapid: https://www.facebook.com/PrinceRapid
• Ruff Sqwad Records: https://myspace.com/ruffsqwad
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