George Watsky is an American rapper and slam poet. He spoke with the Harvard Political Review regarding his artistic influences and the decision to offer his music for free online.
Harvard Political Review: Many of your fans consider you an independent artist, and some of your lyrics allude to your independence. What’s kept you from signing on to a label?
George Watsky: I should say that I’m independent in the sense that I control the creative side of things. I have a relationship with a small label that I have ownership interest in, the Welk Music group. They were the people who put out my album Cardboard Castles and did a lot of the legwork in terms of getting it to iTunes.
I think that the way music has changed has allowed openings for people who don’t fit the mold of what’s traditionally worked at a major label. One of the reasons is that the Internet has allowed us to send our material directly to an audience with no middleman. Now that I have this audience whom I have a direct relationship with through social media, a lot of things that a major label can provide become irrelevant.
To me it’s a question of trying to expand and maybe have a weaker connection with my audience, or keep trying to make work that I really believe in that really speaks to the audience that I’ve developed. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
HPR: You distribute a lot of your music through Bandcamp, giving your fans the choice to name any price for downloads from $0 up. What drove your business model?
GW: It’s an adaptation to the way people absorb music now. There’s so much competition that people need to hear what they’re getting into before they know that they want to support it. What I’ve found is that every time I put out a new project on Bandcamp, even if it’s name-your-own-price, people voluntarily give me more money. I think I made three times as much on Nothing Like the First Time as I did on New Kind of Sexy a year later even though they were both downloaded the same number of times, which meant that I was getting three times as much average contribution [on the second] as I was on the first because I think that people were developing a deeper relationship with my work. You see all of that investment come back because people who support your music want to see you succeed.
HPR: During the earlier part of your career did you ever feel that you had reached a turning point where parts of your vision started to become reality?
GW: A big moment was when the touring started to materialize. I was really nervous before we went on the Nothing Like the First Time tour in 2012 that it would fail and that people wouldn’t show up and that I wouldn’t sell enough tickets to be able to go on a tour ever again. Even though I’d been playing all these college gigs as a spoken word artist, making the leap to being a club act with hard ticketing was no guarantee. So when we got back from the Nothing Like the First Time tour and we’d sold most of the tickets, that was incredibly relieving and really gratifying.
HPR: Part of your most recent album, Cardboard Castles, features a lot of audience involvement: there’s the call-and-repeat on “Strong as an Oak,” the peace sign-deuces riff on “Tiny Glowing Screens Part 1.” Is that a part of your writing process—to try and produce music that will be well received before a live audience?
GW: It is now. It wasn’t really a consideration of mine when I did the Watsky album just because I wasn’t really touring for my music yet. But now I think about that. I think about what songs are going to be great in a live setting, how the energy is going to be. Call and response sections for sure are great, if there are choruses that people can sing. How a song will play live is for sure a consideration because that’s a huge, huge part of what I love to do.
HPR: Your most viewed YouTube video, “Pale Kid Raps Fast Video,” went viral and picked up over 24 million views. You’ve since taken the video off YouTube. Could you explain how your relationship with that video evolved over time?
GW: I’d been struggling with what most content creators struggle with. I felt like my work would resonate with an audience but I hadn’t been able to find my audience. So I said, “How can I acknowledge what is getting shared widely and use the talents that I have to work within that format?”
So I worked really hard on developing this 90 second rap that was immediately engaging, not that challenging in what it presented, but it showed who I was as a person and made people want to check out more due to it being a live performance video and having a grabby title. That’s why we put the video out and it succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. It just blossomed overnight.
Then it became the worry of being too successful. I’m really proud of the video. It worked and achieved exactly what it meant to, but at the same time I’m not hoping to establish myself as the pale kid who raps fast because I’m much more interested in content that actually means something to people. Style is great but that’s just the window dressing.
I took it down because what I was finding was that when I played the Nothing Like the First Time tour and we were getting press, people who weren’t familiar with my work would type my name into YouTube and see a video that had 24 million hits, and that was what they were using to create context. I’m never going to be able to scrub it from history and I would never want to, but I can at least make it so that people who are coming at me for the first time know that’s not necessarily the entry point into what I do.
HPR: To expand on what you do, you’re involved with all sorts of creative media. There’s the Watsky’s Making an Album web series, there’s your poetry that you’ve published, and you’ve spoken at a TedX event. How important do you feel cultivating these other projects is?
GW: I’ve never seen myself as just a rapper or just a video maker. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer and a performer. When I went to school at Emerson that’s what my degree was in. I have an interest in taking what I do and taking this idea of being a writer and performer across any discipline that it can apply to.
I’m really working on the music right now just because it’s one of the things that I love doing that traditionally has the shortest shelf life for artists. I’m trying to get my kicks in as rapper while I can and while I’m young and while I can still tour for it. Definitely down the line I have an interest in being in the traditional publishing world and doing theater pieces and writing screenplays, and I’m sure that I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life just because I think if you work in one form you get sick of it. I’m sure at a certain point I’ll get tired of writing songs and I’ll want to move into doing something else too just to stay creative and stay excited about what I’m doing.
HPR: Recently, YouTube has come out with a playbook for that gives content creators advice on everything from channel construction to video content. What do you think this implies about a formula for finding success on YouTube?
GW:I think what we’re starting to see now that the Internet and social media have been around for a while are these tropes that come back again for successful videos. I’m sure if you go back and look at “The Fox,” and “Gangnam Style,” and “Thrift Shop”—you could find things that they have in common. There’s definitely certain niches you can hit but also I think it’s important to recognize how fast the Internet is changing and that YouTube is changing and that one month from next it’s going to be completely different. I think you have to stay agile, you have to adapt to how everything’s changing and try and get out a little bit ahead of the curve.
I think that YouTube is like every other online source. We can’t expect them to be permanent and be around forever, so just don’t expect any one platform or technology to carry you forever. Diversifying always helps. If you’re successful across multiple platforms then if one of the legs of your table falls out from underneath you, you still have three to support you.
HPR: In addition to this multifaceted approach, what would you say to new artists who are trying to spread their work online?
GW: A lot of the best advice is very cliché, which is work hard, be relentless, use every opportunity as you see it, you have to think on your feet. Don’t be afraid to send your work to people whom you admire, but make sure that it’s good. You have to make sure that you study the craft and art not just aiming to get your work out there but to make it excellent and to really take people’s advice to heart to try and be the best artist you can.
It’s a very competitive world but it’s also a world that’s providing opportunities to young people and to people who don’t necessarily have a lot of money that were never available before. The media is so democratized now, which in some way makes it more competitive, but also provides unparalleled opportunities. And I would say to people be optimistic and be relentless.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Image credit: Gage Skidmore