BW Online | July 13, 2000 | A Fresh Beat in Boston

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JULY 13, 2000

ENTREPRENEUR PROFILES

A Fresh Beat in Boston
Anthony Kirkland is the city's preeminent hip-hopreneur

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Boston is to hip hop as St. Louis is to the seashore. Nowhere, in short. That didn't stop Anthony Kirkland. True, he landed in Boston to be closer to his family, but, with 10 years experience producing music, he thought he saw a unique opportunity: No competition. "I looked in the Yellow Pages," Kirkland says. "There were no studios just doing hip hop."

In two years, the 26-year-old Atlanta native has set himself up as Beantown's arbiter of urban music, successfully luring the city's underground rappers to lay down tracks at his Mass Sound Recording studio in Dudley Square, and getting them to sign with his fledgling label, United Kingdom. Mass Sound brought in about $105,000 in studio fees during the first quarter of this year, compared with $203,000 in all of 1999, and Kirkland expects to gross about $500,000 in 2000. "A lot of studios are dealing with hip-hop music, but they don't know anything about hip-hop," says Crush One, a Boston rapper who recently signed with United Kingdom.

But Kirkland has no intention of remaining a mere producer. He and his staff of five are pushing to transform United Kingdom into a player, arranging tours for artists and scrambling for more exposure on college radio stations and in nightclubs. In the world of underground hip-hop, an album doesn't have to sell millions to make a splash. While no United Kingdom artists have hit the charts yet, Mass Sound clients Uno The Prophet and Twisted Angles have become minor hip-hop celebrities selling just 25,000 CDs each. And if an act does reach the mainstream, anything is possible. "My feeling is he's going to be huge," says Eugene McDaniels, one of Mass Sound's board members and a veteran producer best known for Roberta Flack's 1974 hit, Feel Like Makin' Love. Kirkland is more focused on the next line of Flack's smash: "I feel like making dreams come true."