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	The A team A look at the A-Records roster Pritty Boy: Reggae spitfire Pritty Boy (born Ricardo Steele) busts quick-jabbing rhymes in a thick patois that affirms his Jamaican roots. And he’s breaking out in a big way back home. His first single, "Give It Up," featuring white-hot Jamaican DJ Vybz Kartel, is a tangled jungle of pounding polyrhythms and deep dance-hall incantations. "See Me Want It" goes down easy like a Red Stripe and an island sunset. "U’re a Dime," betrays more American influences; with his smooth and syncopated rhymes Pritty sounds a little like a Caribbean Nelly, and that sped-up sample is R. Kelly. "He’s promoting a new style of music," Denoh Grear says of Pritty Boy’s reggae/hip-hop/R&B ratatouille. Says Pritty: "We’re not really on that whole gangsta thing. Our music makes you feel good, wanna dance and move." Nynewest: "I love you one day and then I hate you. Some days you make me wanna just kill you," sings Nynewest on the steamy "Break Up 2 Make Up." Nineteen-year-old Samantha Law knows about the good and the bad of today’s relationships, and she speaks the truth toughly but tenderly. "Oh, baby, you drive me so crazy, is this the price I pay to be a lady? If so, then the price is kinda high." But Nynewest knows how to have fun, and her randy R&B says so straight. "Baby, tell me what you want, tell me how you like it," she rhymes on the feverish, frenetic "Do You Like That?" "You got a hard on, dear, why you trying to hide it?" Top Gun: "The government has got your mind. In due time the revolution will be televised," Top Gun — born Jason Gannon — intones on the swirling, pounding paranoid "Brain Watch." "You need to read between the lines. What you see is what you get — 10 percent of the time." As a white guy, Gannon brings a unique perspective to A-Records. But being politically savvy sure as hell doesn’t preclude getting laid. "With You" is a dizzy, sweaty club track about a man on the hunt. "He’s from the other side of suburbia that people do not see," Grear says. "He talks about the struggles of being a poor white male, the relationships between black and white and Hispanic people. He’s crushing racial stereotypes." Pharaoh Jean: "Cash rules everything around me.... It’s all about the Benjamins." On the busy, weaving "Goin’ to Cali," Pharaoh Jean (Samuel Ramuel) quotes his hip-hop forebears and shows he’s learned his lesson about the allure of filthy lucre. But his arrogance and avarice are rooted in his own quest to rise from Worcester’s mean streets. "He’s from the ’hood. He talks about being poor ... the struggle of the streets," says Grear. "Part Time," on the other hand, pulls a 180. It’s a steamy bedroom ballad, but it doesn’t mince words either. Pharaoh Jean just wants some fun. No more, no less. — MM

After "amen," there’s a brief, reverent hush. "Okay, gentlemen. Have a good day. I hope to see you at 3:30 tomorrow. This ain’t gonna cost me nothing?"

"Just some collard greens and some cornbread!" Appiah laughs, and the room erupts with him.

"Oh, you better stop! I got my girlfriend cooking collard greens ev’ry week! I’m from Mississippi; I’ll bring y’all some fried chicken!"

A few days later, Grear says she did just that. The little girls sang, too, and were, "on a scale of one to 10, maybe a seven." The plan, he says, is to set them up, maybe get them into a studio, help them make a demo tape. Who knows what might happen then. The A-Records guys see something like this as just another part of their obligation to the community. It’s their job.

All the same, a record company doesn’t live on cornbread and collard greens alone. Pritty Boy’s debut album, New Style, is set for a mid-August release, but that will be the label’s first full-length title. (You can find the "Give It Up" single at Newbury Comics.) Each A-Records artist has recorded at least a dozen or so songs, but most are unreleased. The goal at the moment is to concentrate on Pritty Boy, their most bankable commodity, and then use the buzz around him to propel the others. For a 21-year-old Worcesterite, Pritty’s already scored some serious coups, opening for 50 Cent, Mobb Deep, and Sean Paul. On New Style, he collaborates with Philly MC Cassidy.

Still, this is a shoestring operation. Bloh says A-Records sells beats, concocted by in-house producers, to various industry professionals for $20,000 or $30,000 a pop. Grear explains how he funds things like their frequent trips to Jamaica, or to Germany, where the label has a subsidiary office overseen by his brother. "We’ll sell some CDs on the street, put the money back in [to the label]. Go to Jamaica? Put $300 on my credit card. Take out a school loan. A paycheck. Little parties here and there. A lot of people buy beats." Grear says they could’ve cashed out some time ago; several labels, including heavies like Def Jam, have approached A-Records about signing Pritty Boy. "They said, ‘We want Pritty.’ But the money wasn’t enough, the years weren’t enough," he insists. And anyway, that’s not really what they’re about. They’re more a family than a business. "We can’t sell our souls."

Pritty Boy, who’s been with Grear and Bloh from the beginning, feels the same way. "I won’t just leave A-Records. They got me into this, and we been through a lot together, know what I’m saying? I do have other things going on; I got my production/promotion business, Upcomer. But I’ll ride it out with them until the end."

KEEPING IT REAL. It’s one of hip-hop’s most tired catch phrases. This, of course, in a genre where many artists — renting obscenely expensive bling and pimped-out wheels for their video shoots, blowing their advances on Moët & Chandon — are doing anything but.

Lincoln Bloh and Denoh Grear know "real."

When Bloh talks about escaping Liberia after his father, a politician, was killed in the country’s first civil war, he evinces a stoic matter-of-factness that belies the horror he’s seen. "It was brutal out there. I think for a lot of kids, it would’ve affected them, but for me, I took it as a learning experience. Still, for a little kid, that was really graphic. Those beheadings you see on TV? For us, it was nothing. The village I used to hide in with my grandparents, there was a river. There were so many dead bodies in the river that the river stopped flowing. There was no drinking water. That’s how a lot of people died." When his grandparents’ village was ransacked, Bloh and his family were forced to take refuge in a cave. "It was so brutal that I figured if I go through all that, there’s nothing in life you can go through and not survive. It makes you appreciate stuff when you come out here. That’s what makes this country so great. When you come from a place like that, you have a whole different perspective on America. Here, everybody has a chance to do something positive with their life."

"This is life, y’know?" echoes Appiah. "But when something happens, you let it go. And do something better. Me listening to [Grear and Bloh] motivates me to be better."

"If my life story can help somebody else to make their life better, then I feel like I’ve accomplished something," Bloh says. "It’s not the record biz for me. It’s not the travel, it’s not the women, it’s not the cars, it’s not even the money. If my life can make somebody else’s life better, then I’ve accomplished something."

Although he spent most of his early years in Houston, Grear too saw the Liberian war up close. His father emigrated from there — his mother is from war-torn Sierra Leone — and when Grear was younger, "my dad, he said, ‘You’re African. You have to go back to Africa, to where you’re from.’ " So he enrolled in a Catholic school in Monrovia. He loved it — until war broke out. Grear was evacuated, in 1990, making it back safely to the States and moving to Worcester not long after. But he wasn’t done with war.

Six years ago, Grear signed on with the Army National Guard’s 1166th Transportation Company, in Ware, to make money for college. In late 2002, he was plucked from his studies at Worcester State and shipped down to Fort Bragg. "We were told we were only going to Fort Bragg," he says. "But then some orders came up, we got attached to an active-duty unit, and we got sent to Iraq." That was but the first of many falsehoods Grear says he was fed over the next year, as he drove material along supply lines from Kuwait all the way up to Mosul, with stops in Baghdad, Samara, and Tikrit. "In Iraq, it was all lies," he says. "We didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t know anything, either. When we were in the Sunni Triangle, attacks increased. We were getting bombed every night. And basically they didn’t provide any shelter for us. We had to provide our own shelter by digging ditches."