Hustle and Flow....Cash Flow that is

My boy Emil King Im'ed me this article from Fortune today about this cat Terence Bradford, who by day is a sales manager for Citi Mortgage, by night he is Billy Shakes, aspiring rapper who takes Wall Street to the mic. This is a cat who came out of Caste Hill Houses projects up in the Bronx to become first a stock broker and now a sales manager for Citi Mortgage.

I am not posting this article to advance his music per se, because i have not heard it; because it is highly possible he may resort to some of the same trite, commercial, (insert adjective describing the state of popular hip-hop and rap here) "ghettoric" that we have all come to hate. However, the idea using Rap to spread the gospel of financial and economic self-determination or to flip the idea of what wealth really is and to shed another light on perceptions and realities of wealth; is a dope idea. In the same way that my man Gabe is using Rap to as tool for investigating and applying diferent methods to teaching and fostering literacy.

Below is an excerpt from the article.

The Rap on Wall Street
Citigroup banker by day, hip-hop performer by night, Terence Bradford says, "Trust me, it's all the same hustle."
FORTUNE
Tuesday, August 9, 2005
By Julia Boorstin

In an underground hip-hop club on Manhattan's Bowery, a twentysomething crowd grooves to a heavy bass. The emcee introduces the next amateur rapper: "Give it up for Billy Shakes!" A compact 30-year-old in a baggy white T-shirt and oversized jeans takes the stage:

Your coke illegal ever' day of the year.
My Coke I buy legit at $20 a share.
You a gangsta? Then go get your paper.
I'm a paper gangsta getting stock quotes on my pager.
Stocks and drugs both the same in my eyes.
More buyers than the sellers cause the market to rise.

Audience members nod their heads in time to his punchy delivery. "Oh, yeah," says a girl in a Billy Shakes cap.

I know y'all out there really click-clackin' your guns.
Hang wit' me I'll have you stik-stackin mutual funds.
Thousands on a whip [car] don't make you a star.
I'm buying options on the companies that makin' them cars.
Come on! Get stocks and bonds.

This is not a parody of Bentleys-and-bling raps that embrace conspicuous consumption. Billy Shakes is a sincere preacher of personal finance to a demographic he believes needs to hear his message. By day he is Terence Bradford, former stockbroker, now an area sales manager for Citi Mortgage. He travels around New York and Connecticut promoting mortgages and giving financial advice to salespeople for Primerica, a division of Citigroup that focuses on low- and middle-income families. The rest of his time he spends writing lyrics and hanging out at rap clubs, performing a couple of times a month. He recently spent $50,000 recording a demo called "Money Back Guaranteed."

"Trust me, it's all the same hustle. It's just that mine is legal,"

Read the whole story here