E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mix-tape master (continued)

Sparks’s tapes have netted him production commissions from the Game, Eminem, Clipse, and Joe Buddens among others. And he recently cut a deal with Koch for two CDs: an official debut album, Get Familiar Vol. 1, which isn’t set to drop until February of 2006, and the recently released "teaser" CD Maybe You Been Brainwashed, a to-date best-of compilation with a few new tracks, including "ROC Café," which is getting some heavy radio buzz. Get Familiar is being produced by Sparks, with cameos by a dozen or so hot names in hip-hop, and he intended the compilation to be a street tape on CD. But after Bad Boy P Diddy heard Sparks blend "Run This City" on New York’s Hot 97, he was happy to okay the track sample (it featured an old Diddy a cappella), and Sparks realized he could make a bigger splash with an official release. So he cleared all his samples and a cappellas and Maybe You Been Brainwashed was born.

"There are several reasons we called it Maybe You Been Brainwashed. It’s like, ‘Maybe you been brainwashed on what a real mix tape should sound like.’ And, ‘Maybe you been brainwashed on what a real DJ should sound like.’ And, ‘Maybe you been brainwashed that this is my new album.’ And, ‘Maybe we brainwashed the label to give us a deal.’ I’ve never produced a hit record in my life — I shouldn’t even have a deal. Maybe you been brainwashed to believe I was good enough to have a deal because I had all these bootleg and unofficial records I did with these artists, and half of them was just like freestyles with a new beat. It seemed like all these artists were doing a lot of stuff for me, and now they really are. So there’s quite a bit of brainwashing going on."

Not to be an asshole here, but who really cares about all that? As I listened to Sparks recount his industry accomplishments, his plans for his mixunit.com superstore, and his laundry list of all the people who know him and are gonna be on his full-length, I found myself asking, point-blank, "So what?" Because hip-hop as a business is just fact. It’s not a meritocracy: it’s all about connections and paper pushing, just like any other business, except people believe the product’s more than just product. Sparks admits as much: "It’s a business, we do this to make money."

Great, you make a beat, it makes people dance, you get paid, and everyone knows your name. It’s clear hip-hop has done a shit load for you; what have you done for hip-hop? What good have you made on hip-hop’s artistic and social power? Whose cause are you advancing?

After the "I do it because I love the music, I do it because this is all I know," stuff that everyone falls back on, Sparks started talking about the "hip-hop Sesame Street" show he’s developing for Jerry Bruckheimer, with help from Akrobatik, Talib Kweli, and Common. "The reason I came up with it is I have a one-year-old now, so I’ve been getting up in the morning with him, watching TV with him, watching all these shows that they have for kids, and there’s no hip-hop involved. And then one day me and my wife took him to the doctor, and we asked if it was okay if our son listens to music, and the doctor says, ‘Yeah, he can listen to this, this, this, and this, but no rap.’ When he said that, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, there’s still a whole world of people out here that don’t understand the value of hip-hop. They just look at the negative of hip-hop.’ That’s why I came up with this show, because I wanna try and expose and enlighten them that don’t know that hip-hop is much bigger than guns and gangsters and stuff like that. Hip-hop is a way of life for some people, and it can be a positive influence — it is to a lot of people. There’s a lot of people that’s afraid of it that I wanna expose the good side of it."

That’s not to say Sparks sticks to the clean. Rap, to be dignified as street poetry, needs the tension inherent in making beautiful the ugly, understanding something greater in the most grotesque parts of street culture: crack, misogyny, racism, gang violence. Even passing over all the freedom-of-expression arguments for extreme content, we can expect to find the most powerful hip-hop in the work of artists willing to address that tension. Which means Sparks, who’s lived hard-knock and knows compelling hip-hop, has a problem on his hands: he wants to protect his son from the content of "real" hip-hop while nurturing in him a respect for the æsthetic. It’s yet another tension that hip-hop’s brute ubiquity — of which Sparks is an increasingly important purveyor — creates.

"I plan on being around and teaching my son right from wrong, always being there to be a role model for him. If he was ever to see a program or hear something on a tape, he won’t take things literally. Not that my son will have to go through the bad things that I went through, like living in a truck or robbing houses and being broke and all that type of stuff. But he will have me who has had those experiences to be able to pull from, and I’ll be able to teach him through my stories."

Or, as Sparks puts it more bluntly, "He’s not gonna be an ass and say, ‘Hey, why can’t I see crack?’ "