Read The Label: The Hydra Entertainment Story

The independent hip-hop resurgence of the mid-90’s seems great in retrospect, but in the days before widespread internets access it was often a case of pot-luck when ordering the latest batch of vinyl via fax from Beat Street or Mr Bongos. While most artists were releasing one-shot singles on their own imprints, there soon emerged a handful of reliable indy labels that were able to maintain a level of quality control amidst the glut of wax dropping every week. Stretch and Bobitto, having championed the best in underground rap for years on their cult radio show, both tried their hands at the label game with mixed results via the Dolo and Fondle ‘Em imprints, while Guesswyld, Tru Criminal, Raw Shack and Tape Kingz also released a few winners.

Easily the most high profile record company to emerge from this movement was Rawkus, who started off slowly but went on to become the flagship label for the era, thanks to their involvement with influential projects such as Company Flow and Black Star. With the help of some shrewd marketing and strong financial backing, they were able to rack-up consistent sales and garner major coverage in the press, as both HHC and Stress magazine ran cover features on the “Rawkus Movement”. But before all the hype, a small operation out of Queens had begun to service the streets with quality hardcore records that found an audience without the benefit of marketing or even picture sleeves. Hydra Entertainment was primarily home to both Screwball and Godfather Don, but also released one-off records from Prince Po, High & Mighty and The Beatnuts, in addition to 14 volumes of the excellent Hydra Beats instrumental series. With little previously known about Hydra, founders Jerry Famolari and Mike Heron (with a little help from Screwball front-man Blaq Poet) broke-down the history of the label that dubbed itself “The Home of The Streets”.

SET IT OFF

Jerry: “In ‘88, I used to live in this place called Lefrak City where a lot of kids used to rap, so I would finance their sessions. From ‘88 till about ‘90 I was financing different people, like V.I.C. from The Beatnuts and some other guys that he was doing, and then in ‘90 I opened up my own label – which was predominantly a House label – called Sneak Tip Records. So we started with that in August of ‘90, and then in ‘94 we opened up Hydra. Mike and I go back since Junior High school. He used to just do beats, and he told me there was a location where he used to live that was for rent – I used to work out of my apartment back then – so we took the space and he came in as my partner. He started doing promotion actually, and he didn’t know anything about it, so he got some lists and used to make the calls, and little by little we started building our mailing list and stuff like that. I used to do the retail and the distribution, and I used to handle all the House stuff. We started mixing everything together somehow, we started employing friends of ours, and little by little it just got bigger. We reached out to Godfather Don, and started with Don, then we were looking for Poet – who was from right there in Queensbridge, because the office was in Long Island City which is about ten blocks from the actual projects. When we found Poet he was working with Kamakazee and Hostyle, and they had a group called Screwball. So we ended up signing them in ‘94 or ‘95.”

Mike: “At the time, when we first started, there wasn’t anybody really putting out good hip-hop twelve inches. We got lucky, timing-wise, because right when we started everyone else was doing it. There was a lot of good underground records at that time – during and after we started doing it – so the timing was really good, on our part.”

SCREWED-UP

Mike: “Poet had done a record for Tuff City – he was in PHD with Hot Day. I used to try to get at the A&R dude from Tuff City, sending him beats and stuff. I had been wanting to get with Poet and them back then. Poet had the idea [for Screwball], and when I heard the other guys, I was like ‘Hell yeah’, especially Hostyle, he was amazing…and Kyron too – Solo. And the other two guys – Solo and KL – they were in a group called Kamakazee, that Marley Marl had. It was like a super-group.”

Poet: “Screwball is…that’s my man Louie Lou – Louis Chandler. That was his nickname, my man was tight. He got killed and I just made up the group in honor of his name.”

‘ON THE REAL’

Jerry: “That originally had Nas and there was a little bit of a situation where Nas wanted a certain amount of money, so they took him off and they put Havoc and Cormega on there.”

Poet: “Marley had the DAT at his crib and Nas came up there one day and laid down shit first, to the beat. Then KL and Solo went up there and Marley was like “Yo, I got some shit with Nas. Y’all cool with Nas, right?” “Oh yeah! Nas is our man.” They jumped on the track, then Marley played it and motherfuckers was loving it. So when it was time to put the shit out, Nas was acting funny like he didn’t wanna put it out, so we was like ‘Fuck it. He don’t wanna get on it, he don’t gotta get on it.’”

‘WHO SHOT RUDY?’

Mike: ”Kyron was locked-up for some bullshit – I think he was smoking weed or something, and he had a warrant. He was locked-up when he wrote it, and when he came home he was telling me about the idea, and I made a beat for it that same night. He just had the rhyme, so me and Hostyle wrote the chorus. He had got locked-up and he was pissed-off because Giuliani was on some damn-near Nazi shit, arresting people for any little bullshit. That was on the news for like a week. This publicist for Tommy Boy gave it to [XXL’s] Elliot Wilson, Elliot gave it to someone at the [New York] Post, and that person was writing a story about groups that were against Giuliani’s new crackdown on black youth. They wrote it up, and they were all over the news. Tommy Boy initially distanced themselves from the group, and when they realized that people thought it was cool that these guys were anti-Giuliani, they jumped on the bandwagon. But too little, too late. They should have put out the album that following week. They waited three months after everything went away.”

Poet: “Coulda dropped that shit and went platinum if they woulda dropped it at the right time, when we had all that free publicity off the ‘Who Shot Rudy?’ shit. We was all on the news, in the newspapers and all of that, but they don’t roll with it ’cause they were scared of Time-Warner, and Rudy Guilliani at the time had ties with Time-Warner, who were the distributor for Tommy Boy, so they slowed down with dropping that.”

LOYALTY

Jerry: “When we were on Tommy Boy, there were situations that created an uneasiness within the group. Tommy Boy was basically trying to divide and conquer. We had a Screwball package and our thing was we’re gonna do Screwball as the group, then there would be Poet’s solo album, Hostyle’s solo album, Kamakazee – which was KL and Kyron – and then there would be Kyron’s solo album and KL’s solo album. We were looking to get the most out of the group. The first guy we started working on was Hostyle. So we had about four records and we were trying to get additional money so we went and started showing Hostyle’s demo. Tommy Boy had the first look, we played them ‘H.O.S.T.Y.L.E.’ and they went crazy for that record, so they wanted to make it the single for the Screwball album. There was another record that we didn’t put on there because of that, so we took that off and it started creating a little uneasiness within the group. Every group has a front-runner, but it was tough because we put him up front for our first video. Tommy Boy saw what we saw in Hostyle. They were trying to talk to him behind our backs, certain things weren’t working out…Kyron got arrested, and things were falling apart. He went and did some management deal with some girl, and KL and the group and I went crazy.”

GODFATHER DON

Jerry: “I have at least a hundred unreleased beats of Don. I’m not even exaggerating. We made a pact that he would come every week with at least ten to twelve beats, and he’s the type of guy that can knock out five beats in a day. He’d say ‘Get a producer who you think is a real good producer, and I’ll let him pick his records and then let him give me the ones that he doesn’t want, and I’ll show you what I can do.’ Don also plays bass, he plays guitar… he’s just multi-talented, this guy. He hasn’t rapped in two or three years, but he stays producing. For his era, he was one of the greatest emcees for that generation. There’s a place called Sound Library – some of Don’s records are there for thirty bucks! It’s weird to see a record that we put out selling for thirty dollars. It’s an honor.”

Mike: “Do you want to know what his story is, man? Don is a fuckin’ eccentric motherfucker – I’m choosing my words carefully. He’s a weird dude, man. But he’s a talented motherfucker. The guy’s a genius. This nigga’s using an MPC-60 to make some beats – shit sounds like an orchestra, man. And it’s some shit with limited sample time, dog. That nigga kills that machine, he destroys that machine. I love Don, B. He’s sick. He’s crazy, man. In more ways than one.”

BONUS BEATS

Jerry: “K-Fanat was signed to A Kid Called Roots and he moved to Baltimore, so he just stopped doing hip-hop I guess. Slade Savage was another guy who moved. These were all neighbourhood guys, basically, who were good. Slade went to school with us, he was just another guy who stopped rhyming and started working. Big Meal’s still doing his thing. He’s still trying to make records. We’ve also done a lot of white labels that might not have said Hydra or anybody on them. We’ve done singles for Cormega, I’ve done a lot of releases for a mixtape deejay called J-Love. We’ve done a ton of break-beats…’Sack of Soul’, ‘Jackin’ The Beats’, ‘Rare Joints’, ‘Soul Drums’, we have a huge catalog of sample records.”

THE START OF YOUR ENDING

Mike: “I went over to – and worked at – Rawkus. They hired me because of the Screwball thing, because they wanted a hard album for [Kool] G Rap, and then afterwards when G Rap got there – they didn’t want a hard album anymore! Rawkus were like the kids in high school that buy everybody ice-cream. “We’re having a pizza party guys!” They tried to sit at the cool table, and motherfuckers sent them to go get sodas and shit. They weren’t at the cool table and they tried desperately to sit at the cool table, and motherfuckers weren’t havin’ it. It’s as simple as that.”

Jerry: “Our first 12-inch, we shipped five thousand – which was Powerule. That was the first Hydra single. The second one was Triflicts, and that did eight or nine thousand – I think it was 8,900. Then “Screwed Up” did in the same range – about five thousand – but then they started sloping, started going into the three’s, 3,500 and 3,200, and little by little the sales went down. I think the problem as being that not only the market got saturated, it was also the problem that radio got saturated, and the majors took over. There was no room.”

Mike: “There was a lot of stuff after a while. Shit started getting flooded, ’cause everybody wanted to put out a twelve inch. Nowadays you’ll be lucky if you can break a thousand, 500 [copies], because the market got flooded, man. No one would do a twelve inch back then – you had to pay niggas money to do it. Now motherfuckers do a twelve inch for $500!”

Jerry: “There’s not many independent shows anymore, and the street mix shows that are in New York or whatever, there’s so many good records…when you have a machine like a Def Jam releasing twenty records or ten records a month, they have so many exclusives that they give to deejays that there’s no room for a Screwball or guys who are of a lower caliber. Unless you have great record that you can build-up on your own on the street, and little by little build it up, build it up to the point where they have to play it. It’s also become a finance issue. A lot of these guys get taken care of, or they have relationships with these guys and you can’t get in. A lot of these deejays get hired by these companies. They become A&Rs, or they become marketing guys or whatever the case is.”

Mike: “It’s capitalism, and the price went down. You can’t put too much of something out there, man. What started happening – and what I think is still happening – is people are putting out the stuff that won’t make their album. For instance – it may not be their favorite cut in the album – they already paid the producer, “Fuck it, let’s twelve inch it”. Finding the right beat, finding the right chorus, and really putting work into a twelve inch? Niggas don’t do that shit anymore man. That’s a dead issue. The kids know when you’re giving them bullshit.”

Five Essential Hydra Singles

1. ‘Snakes’/’Spread It (RMX)’ – Kamakazee

Marley Marl delivers a scorcher for Kyron and KL to vent over, complete with rattling serpents in the background for those who cram to understand.

2. ‘Piece of the Action’/‘Seed of Hate’ – Godfather Don

Both tracks are worlds apart in terms of mood but equally adept at showcasing Donny Brasco at the height of his powers.

3. ‘It’s Royal Flush’ – Royal Flush

One of the later releases from the label, this underrated Flushing resident shines over a searing church-organ beat from God Don.

4. ‘Genuine’/’Don’t Make Me Try’ – Triflicts

The short-lived trio of Gab Gacha, Creature and Buc Live made a little noise with this record thanks to a couple of top-shelf Beatnuts tracks.

5. ‘Screwed Up’/’They Wanna Know Why’ – Screwball

The first official shot from the QB super-group gave the world a glimpse of what they had in store.

Originally published in ‘Hip Hop Connection’ magazine, 2007.