How To Be Rich, Nigga by Gerard D. Spinks
You might say to yourself that you’ve been trying for a long time
and nothing has ever worked and nothing has ever come to you. Here’ s a little story of a come up that I’d like to share. In the mid 1990′s, I decided to start a clothing company called Tribe Zulu Sports. The clothing company featured a line of baseball caps, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and other stuff. I figured that it would be successful because at the time Cross Colors was widely successful and on a very good path to earn up to $50 Million annually.
I launched the company and began contacting a graphics company that could help me develop funky t-shirt designs and not just normal designs. I contacted a company in East Oakland called Underwood Works. The owner was a young brova like myself who was hungry and starting his own company too. Thomas Underwood was his name and he and his brother Tracy started the company and began making Phunky graphic designs for the burgeoning rap music market that was developing in Oakland.
At the time, MC Hammer and Too Short had put Oakland on the map but the rap music industry was going through a lot of change around 1995-1998, similar to today. The music industry felt that rap music was dead and that there was no real money in rap music since there was so much written about East Coast
and West Coast gangsta rap. So, the music industry stopped signing artists and no one could get a music deal from any labels down in Los Angeles, CA.
What this created was the independent rap music scene in Oakland and artists started putting out music themselves. Since I had my clothing company in East Oakland, off of High Street and
Macarthur, I would interact with a lot of these artists who were trying to come up. I decided to give my clothes to the artists during their video shoots and I would get noticed along the way.
We were just all-hungry niggas trying to come up. This story will continue in another post to follow…
