In June, when local MC Mikkey took the stage at the Funky Buddha Lounge to perform his new cut “Liquor Store” for the first time, his career was moving along smoothly: he’d signed a deal with Virgin at the beginning of the year and he had a high-profile slot on Rhymefest’s hotly anticipated debut album, which would be out in a month. Mikkey, aka Mikkel Nance, says the song got a positive reaction at the show and on his MySpace page, where he posted it a week later; to date it’s been played more than 18,000 times.
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You might think such a boycott wouldn’t matter much to an artist whose major-label debut is due in a matter of months. (Mikkey’s Chicago: The Photo Album is currently slated for April.) You’d be wrong. “It’s kinda crazy, because one of the biggest vehicles we had were those stores,” says Mikkey. “They’re in the heart of the hood. They get the biggest traffic. You can’t start thinking national if you lose home. It’s the base.”
“For a signed artist, it’s important to get placement [on mix CDs] because each label has an abundance of new artists and each executive is trying to prove why their new acts are better than others,” says Donna Gryn, a Virgin staffer who promotes label artists to DJs and manages street teams. “There is an entire community of people who disregard radio and TV and go straight to mix tapes for what’s hot.”
But Moezeeq says the song unfairly targets Middle Eastern shop owners. “There are black-owned liquor stores in the hood too,” he says. “You gotta be fair with that. You wanna speak about it, you gotta speak about everybody.”
