Stream Lose Yourself Freestyle by Tee Slaves on Audiomack and Youtube.
The unsigned female rapper from Los Angeles is an activist turned artist. She has been outspoken about the suppression of conscious based artists in Hip Hop before she even became an artist herself. She was a talent manager for 10 years before recording her first single, 2020, a remix to Lauryn Hill’s That Thing. It started off as a challenge she found on a wellness podcast. She had been a ghostwriter for some of her clients in Los Angeles, working in studios with different producing teams. She even held a session at Westlake Studio, the same place Michael Jackson recorded his infamous Thriller song. She launched her own music career as way to pull her from depression upon moving back to Brooklyn before the pandemic came into all of our lives. She has amassed an independent following with Total Account 119K Plays across her Audiomack page, with an average of 5,000 monthly listeners. Her listener metrics are hard to manage as each streaming platform promotes her sound differently. She distributes under an indie label called Indie Circus to distributors like CD Baby, Tunecore, and United Masters.
She has been outspoken mainly because there is a lack in the white owned Hip Hop mainstream industry where signed artists and major artists cannot speak about the truth. Just last week, Universal Music Group pulled their entire catalog from the content – creation platform TikTok. It included artists like Drake and Taylor Swift. How are new music creators able to find freedom? Is this the end of the origins of Hip Hop music? Has the industry said only naked rap and kill yourself music is allowed from the narrators of the Black community?
Tremg News: You spoke on your Twitter feed about your research on Hip Hop a while ago right?
Tee Slaves: Yes. I use my twitter feed to expose a lot of my research on different topics. I don’t find that enough of us are aggressively outspoken. Jay – Z spoke up after winning an icon award. He never shies away from speaking out. Maybe that’s the quality we have as humans in Brooklyn. I will never just be quiet about stuff that affects more than just me. The censorship comes from me being an activist after Trayvon Martin was killed. Today would have been his 29th birthday. We been on the battlefield for a while.
Tremg News: How does the public respond to your outspokenness?
Tee Slaves: Most Black listeners are apart of the issue. They do not realize they are being programmed to not like the stuff that is good for their mind. I would get into back and forths with randoms who think because my music is conscious, it’s like I work at a fastfood chain. It’s pretty ignorant. I want my community to be enlightened. I’m not sure what we learn from the naked rap, or the let’s kill each other rap, but those artists are the ones being pushed to the very top. I stand in a space that is an anomaly. No one really knows, including other Black artists, where we fit in. We make our own lanes.
Tremg News: Why do you think the Black listener is ignorant to what is happening or are they just powerless?
Tee Slaves: I think as consumers in this country we have always been the bottom feeders. They serve us shit and tell us its gold because the people making the art now has more money than us. I came up in the 1990s. During the height of Biggie and Tupac. I remember how things were. I remember how the radio was. It was such small corridors for our art to make its way. Violence was immediately attached to the 1980s version of our music. Straight Outta Compton highlights why we started being outspoken in the first place. Now, Mister Jeffrey Williams, Young Thug, is facing RICO charges for a rap label. They are attaching crimes to our music and there’s not much to combat it. Last week Nicki and Meg went back and forth calling each other out for crime related bullshit like being married to a rapist or being shot by your man. Either way we slice it, white people laugh at us. If it was just two women rapping then fine. It’s an entire culture tweeting along. Most of the tweets called out the stupidity we keep dealing with like the slap and the elevator. Why do we love to bring each other down publicly? We remain the laughing stock of races in the United States.
Tremg News: It seems to be a plot. How do you foresee changes with your rap music?
Tee Slaves: I mean @theestallion just inked an indie based master owning deal… so there’s that! We totally knew @tiktok was transitioning into a sound based business which is why we emailed our distributors separately, asking @cdbaby@tunecore and @unitedmasters what they plan to do with the new COMMERCIAL USAGE CHANGE, to which they ALL responded, WE HAVE NO ACCESS.
A week later, @teeslaves was asked by tiktok to convert her profile to a “music profile” and we had to submit her @applemusic x @spotify × @youtubemusic profiles. Additionally, Tiktok asked us to submit distribution proof of ownership of the music. We’ve been vocal about people like Lucian for a while. He is so powerful. On @jayz 444, he addresses it on the song, #Moonlight “And my head is scratching cause that shit is backwards, and that shit aint right, Lucian is cool, but Lucian don’t write.”
Tremg News: Do you think industry plants exist as seen in the Kat Williams viral interview last month?
Tee Slaves: Absolutely. I think it’s pretty clear too. I do think that being a plant has its benefits however. I do think it has less to do with talent and more to do with an act, if that makes sense. I think the industry in general needs moneymakers to survive. I worked in corporate for a long time and music is really a corporate job with a creative hat. Creativity is intelligence having fun for me. A lot of the songs that they deem commercial are commercial for a different definition than one might think. Commercial in art means a lot of people are going to make money. Not necessarily what people want to hear or should be listening too. I think of it like a start up investment. The people who started Facebook took the bigger risk so they will always be more rich than anyone who uses Facebook or works at Facebook. The rap community has been apart of the school to prison pipeline found in the communities these artists come from. Both Biggie and Pac discussed growing up poor. Jay-Z’s claim to fame is the ruthlessness of Marcy Projects and the way he was able to, survive it. I’m not mad at the Ice Spices of the world but we have to be clear, what we support is what we defend. The lane Lil Kim created is the most marketable because she is a sex symbol. There is a lot more to offer the hood then just sex now.
Tremg News: What’s coming up next for you?
Tee Slaves: I took some down time creating last year to make sense of what I was doing. I spend a lot to promote myself so I want to make sure I am always working smart and not hard. I found creative ways to spend less of the budget for marketing on social ads then we had to do in the earlier days. I spent time on the streaming platforms so my sound was able to pull metrics that can now be used to help us out analytically. Like I said, it is a lot of corporate thinking then one might think. I spent a lot of time thinking about the types of projects I wanted to create as well. I know I want to have my messaging to be purposeful so I hired new videographers and spent time just connecting fellow creatives with my overall vision. With that, I have 4 music videos coming, one being a dance video. I have a new project coming, that will be the follow up to Disconnected, called Connected. I am doing the cover and promo photo shoots this month so that’s been fun. I spent time finding collaborators essentially. You have to remain a dreamer in this business.
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