Two years later, Pee approached Nando with this new rap trio. “I’m not going to take your money if it ain’t nothing I could make them dance to,” Nando had said. So when Pee approached Nando with a $1,500 offer, he was shocked to see the DJ run to his car to hear the music first.
He’d pay DJs to play music by his artists, only to hear from dancers that they weren’t-that they lied. In 2010, Pierre “Pee” Thomas was co-running the label Dirty Dolla Entertainment. Some people don’t get that second chance.” But sometimes people want to be told that it’s not, so they can go back to work. “If you’re an artist, you don't want anybody telling you that your shit ain’t hot. I can play that at the end of the night when the lights go on, but not on primetime.’ Come back,’ or, ‘I can try with that one. I need to know what can go in the club right now.’ Nando would sit and have his little face: ‘Not that one.’ They’d be like, ‘Man I like that one.’ 'No, it’s not going to work.’ He be like, ‘We can't use none of those. They say, ‘I need you to pick out a record. “ Akon would call him,” says Abdul “AB” Muhammad, Nando's close friend and business partner in Charge Nation Records. But Nando was very protective of his brand.” “Somebody got upset and ran up on him-that was the rumor. “When he first got killed, the first thing that a lot of people said was, ‘Man, Nando ain’t play somebody’s record,” says Nick Love, who managed Coalition until earlier this year. Even Jeezy got the real talk: “Sometimes I’d put out songs, and he’d be like, ‘Man, why didn't you call me first?’ I'd be like, ‘Nando, I just sold a million records-what are you talking about?’ ‘It’s cool, but it ain’t street,’ he’d say.” But sometimes he rejected his part of the payment-which climbed from $30 a song to about $300 to, eventually, several thousand-because he thought the music could be better. Artists still meet with this conglomerate in hopes of hearing their songs played at the clubs that Nando called home (Magic, Kamal’s 21, Onyx). In 2008, DJ Big X asked him to join Coalition DJs, along with veteran DJ Funky and DJ X-Rated, with whom Nando had a friendly rivalry.
It was the best way to build relationships.”īut Nando sometimes refused to network like other strip club DJs. “People like Nando and Greg Street, they were out there in the culture. “It wasn't like you could post to SoundCloud and a thousand people would hear it,” Williams says. These aspiring artists all knew to see Nando first because of Jeezy’s success. Noah Williams, marketing director at Street Execs, used to visit friends at Morehouse College. He was making slow street music work for the club.” “At the time I was coming out, it was Lil Jon. As for Jeezy’s Def Jam debut, 2005's Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101: It went platinum within its first month. “For those who don’t know, this is Jeezy’s motherfucking city,” he declared.
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