“It was hard to connect”: Tech N9ne once revealed the key to his failure
Kansas City emcee Tech N9ne is a respected figure in hip-hop and has been around since the 1990s. Raised in Missouri, the artist was part of a group named Regime in the late ’90s. He featured on a track alongside RZA, Eminem, Xzibit, Pharoahe Monch, Jayo Felony, Chino XL, KRS-One, and Kool G. Rap at the turn of the millennium.
The emcee never really crossed into the mainstream and, in the 2000s, had problems with his label JCOR Records. However, he has been featured on a number of highly successful projects, including Lil Wayne’s ninth studio album, Tha Carter IV and Three 6 Mafias’s K.O.D.
Still, despite his various and limited successes, the Missouri native hasn’t had a big commercial banger and hasn’t scaled the heights of the Billboard charts. However, he has attributed this to the way he dressed and his choice to go against the grain concerning fashion.
A rapper’s aesthetic has always been a big part of branding and marketing in the music industry. Fashion is always evolving, but when Tech N9ne was emerging, baggy jeans, Ecko baseball jackets, and Timbalands were the in-thing. Yet, he has never chosen to follow in everyone else’s footsteps.
This is evident from his early ambitions. In an interview, the lyricist revealed that when he first started rapping locally in Kansas City as a nobody, he wanted “to create Tech N9ne to be my favourite MC, you know what I’m sayin’? An MC that can [do] anything—rap, rock, blues, jazz.”
This is ambitious for any emcee, let alone one from Middle America with few connections in the industry. However, unlike many MCs who make it, Tech N9ne indisputably had a creative and sonic vision from the beginning.
That said, one objective reality about the music business that the ‘Riot Maker’ rhymer spotted early is that artists rarely stay in place with their look and music and remain successful. He understood that aesthetics and sounds come in waves, each with its hysteria. However, he was keen to avoid all of it and highlighted how volatile the record industry is.
Detailing the various waves he has outlasted, the rapper told the interviewer, “It’s always a wave of something else. It was a wave of Master P. It was a wave of Soulja Boy. It was a wave of MC Hammer. It was a wave of Eminem. It was wave of Jay-Z.”
However, although the popularity of the MCs he referenced came in a wave, they made global smashes, arrived on-trend, and were able to compete on a record-breaking scale. Artists like Jay-Z and Eminem arrived like tidal waves and, in a happy accident, Tech N9ne didn’t.
Still, the Everready creator admitted to XXL that his delivery, but primarily his fashion choices, closed him off to a vast market. Despite desperately wanting to have his own wave, he confessed it was a significant challenge to maintain the aesthetic he has. Opening up about it, he expressed, “My biggest challenge in my career is not looking or sounding like anybody. When you don’t have anything familiar when it comes to the way you dress, or paint [your] face, spiked red hair, nobody looks like that. It was hard to connect with everybody I would like to connect [with].”
He continued, “Kendrick is relatable. [There are] people who wear their hair like that, people that wear clothes like that. Jay-Z is relatable to hustlers. Tech N9ne, a bishop’s robe, a painted face and red spiked hair, it’s like, ‘Woah. Who looks like that? Who sounds like that?’ So, that’s been the greatest challenge.” Tech N9ne suggested that his perseverance in being outlandish and himself cost him a lot of cultural capital and led to many failures when trying to break through on a broader scale.