ANDRE HARRELL: GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

The MC, Uptown Records founder and my good friend would have been 63 today

ANDRE HARRELL September 26, 1960 - May 7, 2020

Uptown Records’ first office was in a Brooklyn duplex in Brooklyn, a work space/social club/temporary housing for the young staff. One night in 1990 Andre Harrell, Uptown Records founder, retired rapper, and party animal, threw a house party with people dancing all over the duplex space. In attendance was Beverly Bond, who’d become famous in our circle for her uninhibited, aggressive dancing. So much so that the chant “Go Beverly!” followed her around when she got down. A nerdy friend of ours had taken on the challenge of dancing with Beverly, which tickled Andre, me, and others. Someone mentions what a wild love story it would be the two of them dated. From that passing moment the germ of an idea blossoms into a screenplay that I co-wrote.

Within a year the film ‘Strictly Business’ (originally titled ‘Go Beverly!’) is filmed with comic Tommy Davidson, playing an ambitious mail room clerk, guides an uptight buppie through New York nightlife in pursuit of a gorgeous “it” girl played by Halle Berry. While the character Davidson portrayed wasn’t named Andre, it was his drive and humor we that provided the motivation for that defiantly aspirational character. Moreover, the soundtrack album proves very significant in that Mary J. Blige, a singer Andre thinks is destined for stardom, has “Remind Me,” her first release on that album.

For me getting that credit on ‘Strictly Business’ confirmed I had done the right thing quitting Billboard in 1989. I had been at the music trade publishing as a staffer since 1982. I’d been “inside the building,” where the security of writing for the industry’s leading trade publication had helped me write three books on music history and built a reputation as expert on black culture’s evolution. But, as some old R&B wise men once told me, I’d have to make a decision about where my future lie and it was definitely “outside the building.” I was writing novels, continuing to write for the Village Voice and now I was a professional screenwriter – though truthfully I didn’t really understand the craft as well as I should have. Nevertheless, here I was with my name on screen in big letters, and Andre’s hustle and salesmanship had taken my career to a new level, something he had done, and would do, for many more people.

On first meeting Andre back in ‘86 I figured he was in the Nation of Islam since he wore suits and white shirts in an era when unlaced sneakers, backwards baseball caps and lettermen jackets were the new normal. That was because in the early ‘80s Andre was living several lives: he sold airtime on local radio stations, worked at Simmons’ growing Rush Management, and rhymed in the rap group Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde. Eventually Andre pulled all these threads together, but back then he was still finding the right balance. Jeckyll & Hyde opened for Run-DMC at a mid-80s show at Madison Square Garden. After the duo’s short set there was a car waiting to take them to perform at after parties in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx that Andre was promoting. From the beginning Andre’s hustle was relentless.

There was something absolutely infectious about Andre, a man with several voices that he employed to express joy, relay advice, or bask in the details of an experience. His joyous voice said life was a circus, he was the ring master, and the music you were partying to was the best you’d ever dance to, and the people you were with the planet’s best party people. That voice was the sound of satisfaction. You were where you should be – where everyone should be – if they wanted to feel celebration in their bones. That was a great voice to have, but it wasn’t the voice that bonded me to Andre.

He had an analytical voice that was slower paced, conversational, and calm. That was the voice of understanding and building talent. I viewed Andre as much a cultural critic as a music executive. Though Andre, he never wrote a line of prose, he was one of the most insightful and effective interpreters of cultural shifts I’ve ever known. Aside from founding Uptown Records in 1986, grooming an inexperienced young Sean Combs to be an executive, signing the iconic Mary J. Blige as a recording artist, and releasing the first records made in the “new jack swing” and “hip hop soul” styles, Andre broke down trends with the nuance of a sociologist. He was the proof that to be a truly great cultural gate keeper, whether as a record executive, book editor, or film producer, you must possess a refined aesthetic that guided who you signed and how you cultivated their talent.

The cyberpunk futurist William Gibson wrote a novel, ‘Pattern Recognition,’ about a “cool hunter” hired by brands to advice on new trends before they broke. You could define this as the science of analyzing peoples’ actions, shifts in society, and in ourselves. Well, decades before Gibson’s novel, Andre was already manifesting pattern recognition in the sound, styling, and promotion of the aesthetic of his Uptown Records. But it wasn’t just a professional skill. Through the clothes, your language, and your bearing, Andre was prophetic in telling you, not who you where, but what you should be doing and who you should be doing it with.

Part of Andre’s charm was that he was constantly of making up words and phrases, some of them comical, many of them unexpectantly brilliant, all of them driven by desire to interpret of the world on his terms. At a gathering of old school MCs in the ‘90s he was impressed because they were acting “grown man-ish.” “Butter wavy” was his designation for the cute, middle class girls hood dudes sought out as co-conspirators in their upwardly mobile dreams. I lived in a community of black artists in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Andre, amused by pretension and impressed by our drive, called us “crazy Brooklyn bohemes.” So, in 2011, when I made a documentary on the area the title had to be ‘Brooklyn Boheme.’

I’m not sure if Andre came up with the phrase “Ghetto fabulous” or heard it in the street, but he embraced it as it spoke to an attitude that connected uptown ambition with high fashion elitism. For Andre the phrase connected Dapper Dan’s Harlem based reinvention of designer brands with his friend international supermodel Naomi Campbell, a woman who would rock a runway and then pull out a bottle of hot sauce at the afterparty. To him ghetto fabulous wasn’t just a slick marketing phrase, but the definition of a lifestyle he lived. Though Andre started as an MC playing in Bronx schoolyards, Andre had a deep respect for R&B elegance of the Temptations, Sam Cooke and pre-hip hop black elegance. If you Google images of Andre you’ll find very few where doesn’t look, in his words, “suit & tie fly.”

While Sean Combs is Andre’s most famous acolyte, he had mentored scores of executives, writers, DJs, publicists, promoters and other non-bold face names. In the wake of Andre’s death, you’ll find social media testimonials to Andre’s mentorship from ex-interns, people he met in clubs, fashionista’s, hood dudes, folks from high and low. Andre was a talker, a dreamer and, perhaps most crucially, a teacher. Though Andre is rightfully viewed as a champion of black culture, his mentorship wasn’t race based -- he championed white soul man Robin Thicke and celebrity DJ Cassidy Podell, because he believed both were committed to extending black culture’s reach.

To get a taste of prime Andre you must hear his view of black America as a market, which he divided into four kinds of black people. “The first,” he told Vanity Fair, “are ghetto niggers, who come from poverty stricken environments and have the minimum society has to offer. Ghetto niggers have a natural sense of edge. Then there are lower-middle-class black people, who conform to what they think white people like in order to get ahead. You call these people colored folks. Then you have people who are on the upper echelons of the black community. They are second-generation, educated, suburban, upper-middle-class, probably elitist intellectual negroes. And then the best of all these situations, from ghetto to color to elitist intellectuals, is to be black — when you can be who you truly are in any situation and feel good about yourself. If you don’t feel like you have to conform in your dress or your attitudes, you become a black person. You cross all boundaries. And that is the idea behind Uptown. It’s a lifestyle.”

There’s a lot more to say about Andre and his legacy, but three years after his passing, I just wanted to acknowledge his time on this planet.