Wax on Being Dropped From Def Jam: “I Was Relieved”

Who needs a label when you have your fans? Especially when you're upstart YouTube star Wax. Originally from the DMV region, where he was the frontman of an indie band called MacGregor, the singer-rapper-guitarist is an early, and extremely successful, adopter to the YouTube music hustle. After doing various odd jobs post college (from flipping mortgages to delivering groceries), Wax successfully locked in a niche, viral audience of diehard fans. A Def Jam deal soon followed, and although it failed to materialize into a happy marriage, Wax isn't worried. In fact, he's much happier. Right after his departure from the label, his self-released video for the single "Rosana" clocked in at one million views in the span of three days, and his latest release, Continue, is still bubbling thanks to his successful touring efforts.

DIY never felt better, and Wax is here to explain why, breaking down his journey from the bottom to the present.  —Jaeki Cho (@JaekiCho)

On His Early Musical Roots:

Wax: “I've been doing music since I was a kid. I was in a band. I played guitar, sang, and rapped. A big thing was the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers. I listened to [Led] Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Nirvana, stuff like that. But at the same time, I loved N.W.A and Too Short and anything with a lot of cussing. Wu-Tang was real big for me. I had a twin brother and we always made music together. He played drums and I played guitar.

“I took guitar lessons from this old Vietnam vet. All the stuff that I play is based on stuff that I learned from him. That being said, we would have a four-track recorder, and we would make beats. It sounded terrible, but we would make beats with a drum set and a guitar and with a bass and then we'd rap over it.”

On MacGregor:

Wax: “You know the MacGregor sporting goods company? They make white soccer cleats. We had a MacGregor cooler down in my parents’ basement. We were high and didn't know what to call our [band], so we named ourselves that. We always thought we were too big to change it. Like, ‘Dude, like ten people know who we are now. We can't change it.’ Looking back on it, we should have definitely changed the name early on.

“The band was six of us—guitar, bass, drummer and a three-piece horn section. We put out three albums. It sounded like hip-hop, funk-rock, like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but maybe a little more '70s, and then a lot of straight rap stuff.

“We did pretty well, but it was six people and it's hard to keep them together. If you get a good job, or a girlfriend, who wants to go on tour all the time?"

On Working as a Mortgage Broker:

Wax: “I went to the University of Maryland. When the band broke up, I had a lot of jobs. I was working as a mortgage broker. It was terrible. You know the housing crisis? My company was the perfect example that made that happen. You'd cold call all day and try to get people to refinance their home loans. They’d send a million mailers out to random people. [The mails] looked like they were from the government. It'd have some fake-ass seal on it and you'd sit there and accept these calls. You'd read the script to try and flip them into refinancing their house. I hated it. It was a crazy, crooked company. People were fighting over customers.

“I had a friend who worked there and was making like $40,000 a month. It's not like that anymore, but that's why all the housing got fucked up.

“I wasn't good at it. I would spend all my time pretending I was doing stuff and just be on the Internet bullshitting. It sucks working for a job that’s commission based. You spend all month working and one deal falls through and you can't pay your rent.”

On Moving to San Diego:

Wax: “My girlfriend got a job through a friend in San Diego working on the set of a TV show doing wardrobe stuff. We drove out to San Diego together, and then while we were out there, the relationship went mad sour.

“At that time, I wasn't thinking at all that I was going to do music for a living. I was thinking I was going to go out there and find some opportunity and live in cool weather. You know, you have the logical side of you, and you hear your parents' voice in your head.”

On YouTube:

Wax: “I didn't start doing the YouTube thing until the relationship was done. I didn't have the girl. [I was working for a] construction company that wasn’t going nowhere. It was a cool company but it didn't have the future that I wanted.

"At that time, I remember somebody called me about this VIBE Magazine contest online called VIBE Verses. You would film yourself rapping, upload it to their website and everyone goes on and vote. I didn't win, but I did really well in the contest and a bunch of people commented saying it was good. So I thought, ‘I should try something with this.’ I put more videos up and got people looking at it and I was like, ‘I'm going to go to L.A.’ I felt like if I went somewhere where I didn't know anybody instead of bullshitting and drinking, I might actually spend more time being productive with my music.

"In L.A., I worked as a driver for a company called Yummy. It’s a grocery delivery company. While I was working at that place, what was cool first of all, it was pretty decent money. Second, you were driving around in a car all day listening to music, so I could listen to beats and write while I'm working. Third, because I had this fan base, I was selling T-shirts online and you get paid for the ads on the YouTube videos. It wasn't quite enough to live yet, but with all that supplemental income, I was doing all right. Eventually, over time, I got to that point and I didn't need a job."

“New Crack”

Wax: "My most popular one was this video called "New Crack." It's me driving around in San Diego. I'm driving a car and my friend, Dave, was filming in the passenger seat and I just rapped for like five minutes to this Stephen Marley beat. It's kind of low budget and it's just like a lot of clever lines and I'm rapping at the same time. I mean not to sound arrogant, but I think its just the cleverness, man. We do some creative stuff, too. Me and my brother have a video called 'Low Budget' where we made a beat out of all these household products and then we rapped over that beat."

On His Small-Town Dreams:

Wax: "I'm from a small town. People that are from L.A. and New York sometimes don't get it. Motherfuckers that are on TV, they might as well be on Pluto. That's impossible, doing shit like that. People don't see how that can happen. People think it's impossible. Maybe it's part of that, maybe it's part of the fact that my parents thought it. Maybe their voice is in my head. Maybe 'cause I do have a college degree. It's not some shit I did to save my ass. I could go get a job if I wanted to—I did it many times. Maybe that's part of it. I don't know. After a while, it just started to be like, ‘Wow, I could actually make a lot more money rapping than I ever could selling mortgages.’"

On Meeting L.A. Reid:

Wax: "Well, I took a lot of meetings and there was some interest with smaller stuff. I definitely got offered some producer deals where they take a lot. But, the person who really fucked with it, where I had this straight-out-of-a-movie meeting in Beverly Hills in a cabana was L.A. Reid. He loved my shit. I played him two songs on a CD and I played him one song on the guitar. When I was done, he said, ‘You got it. You got it.’ I think he pretty much pointed to his assistant and said ‘Give him what he wants,’ and within two or three days, I had a pretty good deal with Def Jam.

"When I walked into the meeting, L.A. Reid was quoting videos that I didn't even know which video he was talking about. You know how you get stuck in the YouTube vortex? He was deep."

On Troubles with the Label:

Wax: “I think everybody there liked me and I think everybody there thought I was good, but it was just hard to figure out what to do with me. If you go to my show, I do a lot of different things. I'm rapping, I'm playing guitar, I'm singing. I'll do a country song about jerking off and I think a lot of people were confused. It's much easier if you're in a box. You can sell somebody in a tweet, you know?

“For me, you kind of got to listen to a couple things first and all that, but at the end of the day, it just became this really grueling process trying to make a hit. The songs that I had that I thought were hits they didn't think were hits. To their credit, the first one, we put it out and it wasn't a fucking hit. The more you try to write from this weird, making-a-hit perspective, the more you start to question all your natural instincts that got you to this place in the first place and it totally fucks your brain up. I was super depressed. The creativity kind of got away from me.”

On Leaving Def Jam:

Wax: “I signed some kind of confidentiality agreement, but long story short, they had the songs, they didn't fuck with them and they dropped me. When they dropped me, I was pretty relieved. I have fans. It's not like they just threw me out and I got to go work at T.G.I Friday's now. I met a lot of cool people through them, including all the people who work there. I didn't meet one person at Def Jam that I didn't like. It's like a relationship where people are just different and they part ways.

“I hope I don't sound bitter, 'cause I'm not bitter. As far as I'm concerned, it was an amicable split. They were probably pissed 'cause they gave me all that money. Somebody probably lost their fucking job over me, I'd imagine, I'm guessing. Probably not, I don't fucking know.”

On Continue:

Wax: “There's probably, I would say maybe 40 percent of the album that's stuff I didn’t finished when I was at the label. Luckily, with the money that I had from the label, I invested in a good home studio, so I got a good setup at my house. So, pretty much, I just did the album by myself, and with people I like and people I work with.

“EOM did four tracks on there, my boy Greg Wells did four tracks on there, Nobody Famous got a track on there and King David. Me and my boy Davey did like four or five of the tracks on there and my friend Lack of Afro from Britain did a track on there.

“It's like, you know how I've been saying throughout this interview that I do a lot of different stuff? I feel like all the songs on this album, instead of me rapping or me singing a country song, each song has all the shit in itself. I feel like the whole thing has a cohesiveness about it and I feel like even if you don't like the music, if you listen to it, you'll get a very good sense of who I am."

On the YouTube Music Scene:

Wax: “If you go back and look at the top-100 subscribed YouTube channels three years ago, it's all dudes like me, dudes like Ray William Johnson. If you go look at that now, it's Eminem Vevo, Rhianna Vevo. YouTube is MTV. You don't say how many times Lady Gaga's video got played on MTV, you say how many views it has on YouTube. It's becoming more difficult for someone like myself to start in this day and age because it's just this huge battleground. Your competition is not only everybody that's on YouTube, but now Eminem is on YouTube.

“Whereas, me and Dumbfoundead for example, were lucky to get in it kind of early. It's all about entertainment value, replay value, share value. I think that game is obviously going nowhere, and even a dude like Macklemore proves that you can make a shit ton of money just by getting yourself out there on that. I'm sure the major labels might be a little scared. The gatekeepers are becoming less and less [necessary].

“It's positive that anybody can do it and it's positive that you can make a living off of it. I mean Jesus Christ, these gamer dudes, they sit at their house and do a five-minute screenshot, and they'll get 30 million views and now they sell t-shirts. They're selling like 5,000 t-shirts a day. When I was a kid, you couldn't say ‘I want to be a millionaire by playing Nintendo.’”