No one's smiling in the rest of Ty's pictures, though. Not him, not his partner P-Body Scott, and not Ice Cube, Guru, Coolio, Ladybug or any of the other hip-hop luminaries they're standing with. Instead, everyone's wearing roughly the same stony, ever-so-slightly menacing look on his face.
When New Times photographer Tim Archibald recently tried to get Ty and P-Body to crack their mouths in a photo shoot, they firmly refused. "This is hip-hop," P-Body said. The subtext to his curt explanation was: There will be no shucking and jiving here, nor anything that could be perceived as such. No slip of decorum that some punk could come up and start slinging flak about--"Yo, P-Body, you looked like a Cream of Wheat grinning motherfucker in that New Times thing. All you needed was a chef's hat, bitch." No, there will be none of that.
The unwritten custom in hip-hop culture is that no one smiles for the media, and it was a street-smart move for Ty and P-Body to adhere to that custom. Because right now in the Valley hip-hop scene, to borrow a phrase from the latest 2Pac Shakur album, all eyez are on them--and there are a lot of jealous suckers out there who would be quick to point and yell about them not "keeping it real."
That's because Ty and P-Body are the ones who finally put Phoenix on the hip-hop tour circuit--establishing themselves as national-level players in the process. Working together as TMC Presents, the two promoters have brought 14 no-joke rap acts to Phoenix during the last two years, gradually accelerating to the current pace of one major show a month.
Before TMC, hip-hop shows in the Valley were limited to the occasional Evening Star presentation of an act with heavy crossover appeal, such as Cypress Hill. Which left America's eighth largest urban center a virtually untapped market for hip-hop.
Not anymore.
"All the major promotion organizations moved too little too late," says Carter. "They could have been making a fortune for years, but they didn't know the music and they didn't have the moves. We did, and we were able to sneak in underneath them. And now we have our hip-hop market cornered just fine here."
Carter has been promoting shows in Phoenix for almost five years, starting with illegal warehouse keggers. He has fliers in his scrapbook for several underground parties headlined by the Phunk Junkeez in the early '90s, when the band was just starting out. (The Junkeez, in typical small-time form, have repeatedly credited those warehouse parties with launching their career while neglecting to ever give Carter props for putting them on, claiming instead that the events were Junkeez-organized. The fliers in Carter's scrapbook clearly bear his promotions logo.)
P-Body hooked up with Ty shortly before his first hip-hop event, a Skatefest show in early 1994 that featured the Pharcyde. "I was standing in Zia records, staring at the flier rack, looking for something to do and he came in and gave me a flier for that show," says P-Body. "It was one of those cosmic crux moments--a minute later either way and both our lives would be drastically different right now."
During the next six months, Carter says, the two became "like brothers" and he invited P-Body to join his young company as a partner. It was probably the best move Carter has ever made--P-Body has repeatedly demonstrated a sixth-sense awareness of the hip-hop market, predicting which small-name acts will break big or "blow up" in the near future and which living legends have fizzled out and should be avoided at all costs. He and Carter made a small fortune on their most recent concert, a sold-out show by the Fugees in early April. TMC booked the group shortly before the release of its new album The Score. That recording unexpectedly rocketed to No. 2 on the Billboard charts in three weeks on the streets, and by the time the Fugees came to town, TMC was in the highly enviable position of having booked a Top 5 act at a fraction of the price the Fugees will command from now on.
The dynamics within TMC are yin and yang. "I'm the business man, he's the music man," says Carter. "Together, it's a one-two combo." The two scored their first knockout with a couple of sly maneuvers in early 1995. First, Carter was offered the chance to book the legendary political rap group Public Enemy at a high price. He was ready to make the deal, but P-Body strongly advised against it. "I had a bad feeling about that one," he says. "They were a huge name. It sounded like a slam-dunk when you first thought about it, but, under the surface, it felt like interest in them had quietly fizzled out." TMC took a pass--a tough decision, given the shaky status of the company at the time, because it burned a bridge with an agent and Evening Star picked up the show. Fortunately for TMC, the concert did not go well--Chuck D. did more preaching than rapping, Flavor Flav was probably off sucking the glass dick somewhere, and the house was half-full. "For what they had to pay to get them onstage, they bled deep-red on that one," says Scott.
