The Perfect ScoreSATS: 1600. Harvard graduate: age 19. Ryan Leslie: hip-hop’s unlikely new star-maker.
* By Seth Stevenson
* Published Nov 13, 2006
http://nymag.com/news/features/24094/ H ey, hey, superstar!”
L.A. Reid, chairman of the Island Def Jam Music Group, shouts to Ryan Leslie, as a man with a video camera trails behind them.
Everywhere he goes, Leslie is filmed. This is because he pays someone to film him.
Leslie—wearing metal-studded sunglasses and a thicket of gold chains—struts into Reid’s cavernous midtown office. Reid’s assistant shuts the door behind them with a polite smile, which leaves me waiting in his anteroom with Leslie’s full-time videographer (a do-rag-wearing 22-year-old named Daytona, who films every waking moment of Leslie’s life) and his publicist (an unpaid teenager named Brandon, who wears sunglasses that look a lot like Leslie’s but are clearly much, much less expensive).
Holding out the camera, Daytona hits rewind. “Can you hear where L.A. says, ‘Hey, hey, superstar’?” he asks Brandon. Daytona then presses his face back to the eyepiece and begins to review the other shots he’s captured this afternoon. At the end of the day, Leslie usually edits down Daytona’s footage into a highlight reel that he posts on his Website. (It’s not clear to me what today’s highlights will look like—in the course of the hour-plus I’ve spent with them so far, Daytona has filmed five separate elevator rides.)
Leslie flew back just last night from two weeks in Europe. He’d been guiding Cassie, his breakout R&B creation, through a whirlwind promotional tour. (Relevant Cassie facts: She is 20 years old; she is a former fashion model; she is of mixed Mexican, African-American, West Indian, and Filipina ethnicity; she is atomically sexy.) Leslie met Cassie at Marquee last year, and soon after adopted her as a pet musical project. He wrote several songs for her and produced them on his own. He did all the recording himself, with a few keyboards and a desktop Macintosh, in the living room of his Harlem apartment.
This past August, more than a year after it was recorded, and to the shock of the music industry, Cassie’s “Me & U” went to No. 3 on Billboard’s singles chart. It reached No. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop singles chart. And so—because Cassie’s success came out of nowhere, owed very little to a voice the Washington Post called “Janet-Jackson-after-20-flights-of-stairs thin,” and was the product of not just Leslie’s musical vision but also a masterful MySpace campaign he orchestrated (with no corporate backing, until Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom Leslie had previously produced songs for, spotted the burgeoning hit and offered a distribution deal)—music executives’ fevered hope is that Leslie might re-create this Svengali-like miracle. “The label CEOs all want an audience,” he says. “They’re courting me. It’s insane.” Today is also Leslie’s 28th birthday.
At this point, I’ll ask you to rewind back through half of Ryan Leslie’s life span. Erase from your mind the current incarnation of Leslie (a.k.a. “R-Les”), in those oversize shades, gold chains, and leather jacket with epaulets. Instead, envision R-Les at 14 years old, attending public high school in Stockton, California. His parents, Salvation Army officers who frequently relocate for work, are planning to move again. Rather than switch to his fifth high school, Leslie decides he’ll start college after his sophomore year.
He takes the SATs—and gets a perfect 1600 score. He writes letters to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other universities, explaining his unique situation, and is accepted everywhere (save for Stanford, which was concerned that he wasn’t socially mature enough). In the fall of 1994, at the tender age of 15, Leslie begins his freshman year at Harvard. He intends to go premed.
Leslie has a musical background, playing cornet as a child in the Salvation Army band. (He later switched to piano because his overbite made it difficult to get proper embouchure on a brass instrument.) At Harvard, he quickly joins the Krokodiloes, an a cappella group. But it’s when a friend plays him a Stevie Wonder CD freshman year that Leslie suddenly saw a new future for himself.
“I became obsessed with him,” he says. “I wanted to chase that man’s career.” And thus began the transition from premed Poindexter to R&B Romeo.
Leslie becomes a constant presence at the on-campus recording studio. Fellow student Chiqui Matthew remembers Leslie making beats at every free moment. “He was on a different level of intensity. Most of us were pretty realistic—we’re Harvard students; this music stuff is fun, but this isn’t the future,” says Matthew, who now works with credit derivatives at Goldman Sachs. “But Ryan always had a ten-year plan about how he was going to take over the music industry.”
While still a student, Leslie begins producing tracks for local Boston artists. Meanwhile, R-Les was beginning to mold his own image, too. “He had this pseudo-sexual, thugged-out Lothario thing,” says Matthew. “I never really bought it. He seemed more like a music nerd to me.”
Leslie graduates in 1998, at 19 years old. He delivers the prestigious Harvard Oration at the commencement ceremony, looking extremely clean cut in a blazer, tie, and one tasteful earring. The speech is a rather hammy affair, complete with preacher cadences and an interlude of soulful a cappella crooning. Leslie proudly announces his plan to pursue a career in “the arts.” There is a video clip of this speech on Leslie’s Website.
A few years later, after bouncing around the Boston music scene for a while, ultimately moving back home with his parents (then living in Phoenix), he wangles a music internship in New York and comes under the tutelage of Combs. A few years after that, “Me & U” became a sensation. And now R-Les is one of the hottest record producers in the world.
Even as Ivy Leaguers invade and occupy all sorts of new realms, from the waves of Harvard Lampoon veterans who make our lowbrow comedies to the laptop-wielding sabermetricians who’ve taken over baseball’s front offices, hip-hop remained one of the few industries immune to the beguiling powers of an elite degree.
At the same time, there’s always been a striving element to the classic hip-hop success story. Guys like Jay-Z, Pharrell, and Diddy are endlessly bragging about how hard they work. How many entrepreneurial projects they’re juggling. And what could be more striving than a 15-year-old with perfect SAT scores begging to start university early? What on this earth could exhibit more hustle than a high-schooler with eyes on Harvard?
Given how seamlessly the hip-hop and Harvard mentalities entwine, it’s almost surprising it hasn’t happened before. But Ryan Leslie represents a new archetype: the Harvard hip-hop hustler.
From the waiting room, which contains a piano, an acoustic guitar, and a six-foot-tall plaque of Mariah Carey astride a pile of platinum records, we can hear Leslie playing “Ditto”—a forthcoming, insanely catchy Cassie single—over the sound system in L.A. Reid’s office. When it’s done, Leslie plays Reid “Like That,” a track he recently produced for the 15-year-old singer JoJo with the refrain “Do me like that.”
This is all part of an audition for a producer gig for Island Def Jam. Ever since the Cassie record blew up, Reid (Jay-Z’s boss and a legend in music circles) has been eager to meet the man behind the megahit. He’s even told Leslie that “Me & U” is his “favorite song right now.” Before Cassie, it seemed possible that Leslie was destined to live out his career as a mid-tier beat-maker—languishing on various record-label payrolls, producing forgettable hip-hop songs for forgettable artists. (New Edition’s non-comeback single “Hot 2nite”? That was Leslie.) But a hit changes everything.
Across Reid’s waiting room, Leslie’s intern, Brandon, furiously thumbs his BlackBerry. Brandon first became aware of Ryan Leslie on MySpace, where he kept seeing Leslie’s avatar cropping up as a “friend” on the pages of various fans. Brandon became intrigued by the jet-setting, celebrity-schmoozing, hip-hop-mogul lifestyle Leslie’s own MySpace page portrayed.
“He impressed me,” says Brandon. “I thought, This guy’s a really good entrepreneur.” One night this spring, at about three in the morning, Brandon sent a MySpace message to Leslie asking for an internship. Leslie immediately replied with his cell-phone number, and they had a conversation right there in the wee hours. Brandon’s been Leslie’s unpaid publicist ever since. “It’s weird, if you think about it,” he says.
Leslie’s thoroughly modern marketing theory is that by providing fans with a daily behind-the-scenes look at his life (full of self-promotion and name-dropping, of course—video clips on Leslie’s Website show him mingling with Diddy, Snoop, Usher, and Quincy Jones), he can make them feel they’re riding shotgun on his fabulous hip-hop dreamquest. “The secret is that I pay them some attention,” says Leslie. His is a nerdy, diligent kind of stardom.
He has clearly mastered the art of MySpace viral promotion. Three weeks after he posted “Me & U” to the site in November last year, 60,000 people had made Cassie’s song their MySpace background music. Then it snowballed. “He had 10 million in audience before the Atlantic promotions people [from Diddy’s parent label] even got involved,” says music executive Tommy Mottola, the former president of Columbia Records (who launched his former wife, Mariah Carey, to megastardom).
Never before had the MySpace hordes been so skillfully manipulated. Leslie parlayed all those kids’ asking Cassie for an “add” into a label deal and a national radio hit. Though most artists are savvy to MySpace these days, the nowhere-to-No. 1 ascent of “Me & U” was unprecedented.
“This is not just some kid making beats,” says Mottola, whom Leslie acquired as a mentor after he came to New York. “When you add into the mix that Ryan is a Harvard graduate, I think he’ll become an entrepreneur on a different level. Something very big. Probably having to do with the Internet.”
(cont)
