Ten days ago Kevin Liles, the executive vice president of the Warner Music Group and one of the most powerful African-Americans in the record business, dropped by a television studio in Midtown Manhattan to visit Lil' Kim, one of his company's artists. She was taping a show for Black Entertainment Television, and he needed to tie up some loose ends before she headed off to prison for a year and a day to fulfill her sentence for perjury.
The two conferred quickly before she shooed him away, reminding him that she didn't have a lot of time to spare. "I can't just be telling you I love you all the time," she called after him as he made his way to the door.
Liles, wearing a Zegna blue blazer and baggy Phat Farm jeans, then strolled from the studio entrance toward his chauffeur-driven black BMW 750, where he was accosted by a nervous teenager who handed him a CD of home-recorded raps.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"It happens all the time," Liles said moments later, sinking into the car's gray leather seats. "That's every day." He told the boy he'd give it a listen, even though what he truly wanted to say was that maybe the kid should consider accounting instead.
While other hip-hop impresarios use their clout and credentials to start clothing lines, movie production divisions and vodka brands, Liles has his sights on a different goal: hip-hop self-help guru. And with his first book, Make It Happen: The Hip-Hop Generation Guide to Success (Atria, 2005), written with Samantha Marshall, a business journalist, he hopes to show readers that there are more routes to success than a record contract.
Drawing equally on the lessons of Anthony Robbins and Ludacris and his own rise from intern to Def Jam president by the age of 30, Liles, now 37, argues that hip-hop can be about more than "get rich or die tryin'" in the words of 50 Cent. He says it is in fact a medium -- a worldview even -- that is replete with valuable lessons about honest hard work, discipline and perseverance.
"We've got to push these kids to be more," he said. "I start my motivational speech off saying: `Look, if you come here to be a rapper, I'm not interested in making you a rapper. I'm interested in you owning the record company the rapper raps for. I'm interested in you owning the studio."'
And hip-hop, he says, can be used to help get them there. "I ask people, `Can you be hip-hop in a suit?"' he said. "The answer is yes. Can you be hip-hop and work for an
accounting firm? The answer is yes. Because hip-hop is a spirit: Anything is possible by any means necessary."
Except for drawing heavily from the world of hip-hop for examples of triumph and success, Make It Happen does not offer much that hasn't been said before in the vast literature of personal empowerment.
Much of the book is autobiography, and Liles tries to make the lessons he learned -- for instance, always get to the office before the boss does -- relevant to kids who would not think to pick up a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the book Liles breaks down the formulas for his own success into 10 rules, including "embrace the struggle" and "flex purpose, not power," and along the way refers to everyone from Dwight D. Eisenhower (playfully identified as a "dead president") to Biggie Smalls and Donald Trump.
Under the heading "Do You," a section about the importance of self-branding, he writes, "`The Donald' understands the hip-hop way of celebrating his own identity. Without that, he would be just another real estate developer."
Seated over a breakfast of an egg-white omelet the other day at his customary table, No. 16, at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South, Liles seems an unlikely guru. Moving with the heavy, ominous gait of a mafia capo, he exudes the easy warmth of a big brother rather than the over-attentiveness and energy of a coach.
Known within the industry as a guy who does not seek the spotlight, he seems uncomfortable being in the position of selling something. What he keeps returning to is the importance of illuminating new routes out of urban US poverty.
"Growing up I idolized the guy on the corner," he recalled. "He had all the girls, all the cars. He had the freshest sweatsuits and everything. The problem was, he wasn't there after five years. So I had to find another corner to get excited about, and that was the corner office."
Liles certainly is not lacking for cars or sweatsuits now. A divorced father of three (the children live with his ex-wife), he lives in a big stone house in Cresskill, New Jersey, is able to indulge his fondness for expensive cars, and vacations in Capri with friends like Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z.
But while Liles clearly advocates wealth as a means to happiness, he is sheepish about his personal excesses and said he is trying to cut down. He avoids flashy jewelry and has reduced his fleet of cars from seven to two. He admits that he never wears a pair of white-on-white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers more than twice, but he said he gives the used shoes to charity. Still, he hopes to send a message that there are better ways to spend your money.
"I'm glad that kids can afford to buy what they want to," he said. "I wish they would buy houses and mutual funds." Growing up in a crime-infested district in Baltimore, Liles was raised by his mother, who put herself through school to become an accountant, and a stepfather who worked as a railroad engineer.
He writes in the book that he used to loan-shark lunch money and "hustle car stereos, whatever could get us a few dollars." But he was generally a good boy (Boy Scouts, high school quarterback) and dreamed of being a rapper like his early heroes Rakim, Chuck D and Run-DMC. He had a slightly bitter taste of success when, at 16 or 17, he wrote "Girl You Know It's True," which later was covered and made famous by Milli Vanilli. Its use by the lip-synching duo was news to him; he said he ended up suing for royalties.
But it was when he got a job at Def Jam that he discovered his real calling: business. After an internship while he was attending Morgan State University part time, he made a name for himself getting Def Jam artists on the radio. After that he accepted every task that came his way.
"I speak quite a bit to audiences, and I use Kevin as my greatest example," said Russell Simmons, a co-founder of Def Jam, who, impressed by Liles' willingness to dig into even the most menial tasks, propelled him from the company's gofer to its president.
"He built himself up," he added. "He was such a great servant that he became a leader.
Liles left Def Jam last year over differences with its chairman, Antonio Reid.
As he moved up the ladder, Liles started realizing he had a knack for motivating people, and he began checking out self-help titles like Jim Collins' Good to Great.
Before long he was combining those lessons with ones picked up at his own particular school of hard knocks, rap records. And he began mentioning them whenever he gave a talk to people at the company or in the industry.
His book, however, puts him dead center in a contentious debate among African-Americans -- sparked in part by Bill Cosby's sharp criticism last year of "people putting their clothes on backwards" -- about the influence of hip-hop values on kids and whether the fashions and attitudes conveyed in the music are holding people back.
"The group that is probably most upset by hip-hop is the group that sees itself most affected," said Greg Carr, an assistant professor of African-American studies at Howard University. "Folks who work hard for a living, can't miss a paycheck, and whose children can be seduced in part because they see the struggle of their parents." Those children, he said, have always been impressed by the "zero-to-60" narratives of success celebrated by hip-hop.
Liles says that people who fear hip-hop's influence are simply not taking away the right lessons. The music, he writes, is about "making success happen for ourselves by being ourselves, only better." It does not matter how you wear your clothes or what work you do. The idea of teenagers shelling out US$24 for a hardback book inspired in part by the wisdom of a bunch of highly paid corporate consultants may seem far-fetched, but Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said the market for such books is there.
"Why shouldn't a self-help book come out of the hip-hop world?" she asked. "As a boldface name in hip-hop," she said, Liles has "a built-in platform, which is what you need these days."
In the meantime, however, Liles will stay hard at work spreading the message, as he has for years, even to his own family. "My brother said, `I can't work for US$5 an hour,'" he said, recalling a family conversation a few years ago. "I said, `You don't have a job.' I don't even understand it. I would work for US$5 an hour, learn that skill, learn that trade and eventually, I would own that company."
"I'm going to get that job by working hard, by not allowing people to tell me what I can't accomplish," he added. "When the boss says to me you're not educated enough, you don't have the right degrees, I'm going to work an extra four years in that same position to learn everything about that company, so the people will have no reason not to give me that job. That's hip-hop."
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