Roxanne Shanté is very, very, very smart, and I’m not just saying that because of her advanced degrees. The MC—who burst on the scene in 1984 with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” an answer song to the UTFO classic “Roxanne, Roxanne”, which in turn sparked its own flurry of answer records—used her street smarts to help polish her academic bona fides; after a thorough read of her record contract with Warner Music Group, which she signed long ago, she realized that there had been a clause in there where WMG said that it would foot the bill for any and all educational pursuits she decided to embark upon. Score!
She didn’t stop after one degree; Warner footed the bill all the way through her recently acquired Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell. When all was said and done, Dr. Shanté got WMG to fork over $217,000. And she’s a therapist, too, although something tells me that she’ll be getting a lot of requests for legal advice as a result of this story coming to light…
Rapper behind ‘Roxanne’s Revenge’ gets Warner Music to pay for Ph.D [NY Daily News]
The Complete Story Of Roxanne: The Album [Bust The Facts]
Roxanne Shanté: Roxanne’s Revenge [YouTube]
Doing it for Queens, NY!
BADASS. As an attorney, I would die to have a look at this agreement. She must have negotiated for the provision at issue, for obvious reasons. Less obvious is why WMG would agree to it. The only (very cynical) rationale I can conjure is that they OKed it as a sweetener, on the assumption that a young black rapper would not in fact take the initiative to further her education.
(UPDATE – Just read the Daily News Article in full and she appears to agree with me. Guess this comment will be happily redundant.)
Pretty amazing, especially when many musicians doing the major-label tango don’t even keep the rights to their own songs.
However, this post also makes me sad in that it reminds me that there was once a time when there were more than a handful of strong, independent – and commercially successful – female MCs.
Beautiful story.
This story almost made me cry this weekend. I’m so proud of her.