Madison Avenue in New York City is one of the world’s most famous thoroughfares. It passes through Midtown, the Upper East Side, Spanish Harlem, and Harlem, so plenty of urban stories fill the avenue. In the middle of it all, at 550 Madison Avenue, is the Sony building skyscraper. In a corner office on the 11th floor, with an impressive view, Geo Bivins works—although teenagers everywhere may question whether what Bivins does is actually work, especially on this day.
While Wall Street stock traders scream their buys and sells, Bivins listens to urban hip-hop music—eyes closed, head bobbing. His mind churns: the lyrics, the beat, the hook, the swagger. Members of Bivins’ music promotions team surround him, and their heads bob, too.
The recording is by “ASAP Rocky,” the 2012 definition of an “undiscovered” musician. The 22-year-old has never released an album, but his three music videos combined have had almost 20 million YouTube views. RCA Records, owned by Sony, signed ASAP to a $3 million record deal a few months ago, which is why Bivins, RCA’s new senior vice president of urban music promotions, is giving a preview of ASAP’s debut single, Goldie, his undivided attention. Why should ASAP care about Bivins’ opinion? For starters, one of his artists, Usher, has sold upwards of 65 million albums worldwide, won seven Grammies, and generated nearly $1 billion in revenue.
The song ends. Bivins opens his eyes. “What do you guys think?” he asks his team. “It’s hot,” says one. “Authentic, New York. He’s flowin’ his butt off,” says another. Bivins agrees: “It sounds like a hit, man, sounds like a hit.”
How can he be so sure? The answer to that question goes back in time.
It’s the 1970s, and the living room of the Bivins family home is constantly filled with the soul-soaked sounds of legendary funk and jazz bands coming from WAMO, Pittsburgh’s urban music station. During one call-in contest for a pair of tickets to an “Earth, Wind & Fire” concert, young George Bivins frantically calls the station every time the DJ announces that the phone lines are open. After he wins his tenth pair, the station staffer tells him that it’s time to give some other listeners a chance.
As a teenager, Bivins is obsessed with music—listening to albums on loop until the lyrics become second-nature and spending weekend nights at community center dances to discover the latest artists and newest songs. His paper-route money usually buys records, and by high school, he mops hospital floors to support his music habit.
The janitorial work doesn’t just help pay for albums and concert tickets; it also pushes him to double down on academics. “I saw so many people who’d been there for 10, 20 years … it didn’t look pleasant. I didn’t want to clean floors for the rest of my life.” But after years of forced piano lessons, he knows he’s not destined to become a musician. Proficient with numbers and fascinated by computers, he hopes to one day become a data analyst. So, after earning his undergraduate degree in business from the University of Pittsburgh, he enrolls in Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College to hone his data-analysis skills. The two-year urban and public affairs program, predicated on using data to tackle public policy issues, captivates him.
Just before he earns his master’s degree in 1983, Mellon Bank offers him a position at its Pittsburgh headquarters. As a graduation present, his parents buy him a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. Plans change as soon as the California sun hits his face. The beaches, the clubs, and the weather are too enticing. His return ticket goes unused.
Master’s degree in hand, he lands full-time work as a data analyst for the City of Los Angeles. In time, though, he realizes the job’s not for him. Over the next few years, he lands several well-paying positions in data analysis, programming, and accounting, but each one proves unfulfilling. He bounces from company to company for almost 10 years until a headhunter contacts him about an auditing and data-security position at the Music Corporation of America (MCA, now NBC Universal).
The job entails programming passwords and auditing inventory data at MCA’s record-distribution plants across Europe over three-month intervals. Bivins doesn’t even own a passport. Is he interested? Hell yeah!
During the three-week hiatus between gigs, he sometimes flies back to LA. On one return home, he finds himself stuck in traffic. Tuning his car radio to urban music station KDAY, he hears what sounds like the seductive horns of Smokey Robinson’s Do Like I Do. But Robinson’s voice is nowhere to be found. Instead, a young, husky-voiced rapper speaks about his life, his neighborhood, and gang violence:
I remember we painted our names on the wall for fun
Now it’s “Rest in Peace” after everyone…
They say “be strong” and you’re tryin’
But how strong can you be when you see your Pops cryin’?
The lyrics of the song, Dead Homiez, by West Coast rapper “Ice Cube,” mesmerize Bivins. Every rap song he ever listened to was about hanging out and sex—party anthems and dance songs. They weren’t … this. “These guys are talking.”
Bivins isn’t the only one listening. It’s a volatile time in America. The recession of the late 1980s has been especially difficult for the lower classes, making the American dream seem out of reach. Although it’s not at the level of the 1960s, racial undertones are undeniable.
Rap music has changed with the nation’s uneasy mood, and songs have graduated from lyrics about poolside lounging to first-person accounts of street life. Many of the rappers are accompanied by the catchy jazz, soul, and R&B songs from their parents’ generation but with far different messages than unrequited love. For Bivins, the music speaks to him in ways that the blues and R&B never had, and he realizes he has found his professional calling. After multiple job interviews and resistance from executives who think he’s too educated—and therefore not “hip” enough to work in the rap business—he finally lands an internship for urban music promotions at MCA. He shortens his name to “Geo,” kicks off his dress shoes, and gets to work.
At its core, music promotions is getting songs heard, which typically means creating heavy radio play by persuading radio DJs to play the songs. The more radio play a song receives, the bigger the album-buying audience. It’s not brain surgery, but the truth is, at the age of 32, Bivins is an old man in an industry rife with younger, hipper promoters. If he wants to make it in the industry, he’ll need to tap into his Western Pennsylvania work ethic.
He takes to the streets, street promotions to be specific, which means increasing a song’s audience from the ground up by getting it heavy play in clubs. Once a song gets hot there, people call radio stations to request plays, magnifying the promoter’s daytime efforts. So, every night, Bivins heads out to clubs armed with cassettes and vinyl records. He passes out as many as he can carry, making sure to hand the club DJ copies, too. He averages three clubs per night, sometimes seven days a week. And whenever he can squeeze in the time, he stops everywhere from hair salons to gyms, dropping off more music.
The effort pays off. Several songs Bivins represents climb the charts simultaneously. Soon, the work is going so well that he and a colleague start a private street-promotions company on the side called “Sammy Van Gogh,” because they’ve “always got an ear to the streets.” Business booms.
In early 1994, an Arista Records executive asks Bivins if he’d like to street-promote the debut single, Juicy, by a new artist known as “The Notorious B.I.G.,” or simply “Biggie.” Biggie is a 21-year-old rapper from New York City with a sizable following on the East Coast. He’s virtually unknown anywhere else. Can Bivins change that?
On his first listen, he knows Biggie is special. The album, Ready to Die, uses almost 50 samples of songs from artists like James Brown, Miles Davis, and The Jackson 5, in tracks that weave autobiographical street poetry into buoyant party beats. What’s unique is that Biggie sings many of the choruses, a concept known as “singing hooks,” unlike other rappers who let the sampled songs or other vocalists perform the choruses. The singing hooks make it “more melodic, more radio friendly,” says Bivins.
Much like the first time he heard Ice Cube on KDAY, Bivins is impressed with Biggie’s lyrics. In Juicy, Biggie relates his dreams of moving out of the New York City housing projects:
Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool
Considered a fool ’cause I dropped out of high school
Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood
And it’s still all good
… We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us
No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us.
It’s up to Bivins to turn Biggie into a West Coast sensation, but it won’t be easy. Not only is Biggie unknown outside New York, but Bivins is trying to break him into the market amid a rivalry between West Coast and East Coast rappers. It sounds senseless that musicians from different coasts would take issue with each other based on geography, but remember that many rappers grew up amid poverty and gang violence. Surviving meant fierce neighborhood loyalty.
Bivins isn’t intimidated. He organizes a two-week promotional tour of the West Coast for Biggie, complete with club performances, lunches with record-store owners, radio interviews, and appearances at skate parks and community centers. At one of those mid-tour afternoon jaunts, a crowd of teenagers eagerly awaits meeting Biggie, but the rapper is holed up inside his van, uneasy about glorifying guns and violence to high-school kids.
“I’m not a role-model, man,” he tells Bivins. “My music is not role-model music.”
“Well …, tell them about what to avoid,” says Bivins.
“OK …, I can do that,” Biggie replies, and he exits the van.
The tour’s days are long—often starting as early as 7 am, when Bivins picks Biggie up at his hotel, and sometimes lasting until nearly dawn when Bivins drops him off. Soon, Juicy becomes as hot in Los Angeles as it was in New York. The album, Ready to Die, receives widespread critical acclaim, gets several Grammy nominations, and achieves quadruple-platinum status (over four million sales). After years of West Coast rap dominance, Biggie has almost single-handedly swung the hip-hop pendulum back to the East Coast.
One night, before an LA concert, Biggie invites Bivins into his trailer. In front of several close friends, the rapper proclaims, “Anybody who said that they broke my record on the West Coast is lying. This is the guy who did it,” he says of Bivins. “You told me it was gonna break. … Thank you.”
With Biggie’s success, Bivins captures the attention of the country’s biggest music labels. He’s soon hired as the West Coast promotions manager for Jive Records, where he promotes some of the most popular urban music artists—among them R. Kelly, KRS-One, and Aaliyah. During Bivins’ tenure, he helps sell nearly 20 million albums.
By 1996, the coastal rap rivalry has escalated, particularly between Biggie and West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur. The bravado and raw emotions of their lyrics turn personal—and public—as the rappers battle each other through their lyrics. In one song, Shakur insinuates that he slept with Biggie’s estranged wife, and when Shakur is shot dead in Las Vegas in late 1996, rumors swirl of Biggie’s involvement.
Just months later, Bivins is named Jive Records’ southeast regional urban music promoter, a position based in Atlanta, Ga. As Bivins arrives in Atlanta after a 2,000-mile drive, his cell phone rings: Biggie, the man Bivins helped launch to superstardom, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. “I really don’t know why it came to that,” Bivins says. “I knew that it was dangerous because I could see it … but I never thought it would come to murder.” Both crimes remain unsolved.
A few years and several top 10 songs and multi-platinum albums later, Bivins is one of the country’s most powerful promoters of urban music; in the early 2000s, Capitol Records—not considered a major player in urban music—hires him to help overhaul its rap and R&B reputation. He works quickly, launching an unknown rapper named “Chingy” and his debut album, Jackpot, to triple-platinum status. In 2004, Capitol releases Chingy’s sophomore album, Powerballin, and awaits a tidal wave of revenue.
It never arrives. Powerballin sells only 40,000 copies its first week, compared to Jackpot’s 300,000 first-week sales. Bivins is stunned. Powerballin’sdebut single has an audience of more than 150 million. What happened? Internet piracy happened. By 2004, Chingy fans—along with millions of music lovers across the country—realized that instead of shelling out nearly $20 for a CD, they could download it for free. Music labels begin losing billions of dollars. Lawsuits against piracy sites abound, staffs are laid off, and the entire business appears on the verge of collapse. Bivins may need to find a new career.
But relief soon arrives. The Web-based store iTunes, launched in spring 2003, starts to take off. By July 2005, it has sold 500 million songs. Additionally, the industry’s lawsuits gain traction in the courts, shutting down the most popular piracy sites.
Along with iTunes, the Internet’s emergence ushers in more good news for Bivins. It gives him the ability to accurately track music sales, radio plays, online video hits, even what songs are playing nationwide in real time. He starts receiving dozens of reports daily on his portfolio of songs. “Nowadays, you can’t just be the guy who can talk the fastest and be the slickest. You’ve got to also be the guy who can sort through the information.”
Because of the data-analysis skills he acquired at Carnegie Mellon, he says, he was well positioned to adapt to the new promotions model: “The Internet was our worst enemy. Now it’s our best friend. It’s the new street.”
Urban music is now a titan in American—and global—culture. Many of its stars have become entrepreneurial moguls, dipping their hands into everything from clothing lines and footwear to restaurants and sports teams. “Hip-hop is everybody now. Kids these days grew up on rap. Commercials include rap. Movies include rap,” Bivins says. “Everything is about hip-hop. It’s music—but it’s also a lifestyle.”
In his latest role at RCA, Bivins has a roster that includes artists like Alicia Keys, Usher, R. Kelly, and Pitbull, who together have won more than a dozen Grammies and sold more than 200 million albums. Urban music and culture will be big business for the foreseeable future—in 2011 alone, it generated nearly $10 billion—which means artists like ASAP Rocky can have quite a payday if they make it. Right now, though, he’s just another young dreamer counting on Bivins to get his music played.
Nicholas Ducassi (A’10) of New York City is an actor, writer, and filmmaker and has been a regular contributor to this magazine since his senior year.
Images by Donnelly Marks (A'80)
