No one was more surprised than Lara Lavi when her fledgling label, WIDEawake, beat out the considerably more major Warner Music Group at the bankruptcy auction for Death Row Records in January.
“I honestly wonder what happened there,” Lavi says. “We thought they were going to aggressively outbid us. Maybe they thought the sky was the limit for us.”
After spending $18 million, WIDEawake now has the gangsta rap-pioneering label’s whole catalogue (including classic and unreleased material by Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg) at its disposal, and the limit really is the sky. If they wanted, they could licence those records ad nauseam to anyone and everyone. Thankfully, the new label has no intention of lowering that music’s integrity.
“It’s not going to be a case of us saying let’s make a Barry Manilow-Tupac remix album,” assures WIDEawake’s vice president John Payne, who was a studio engineer during Death Row’s early days.
“Or a Fergie-Tupac record,” Lavi adds.
Which is a relief for the late rapper’s fans, who had to witness Tupac’s legacy watered down by a stream of poor posthumous releases slapped together in the years following his death.
But even if Lavi and Payne changed their tune and decided to bless Fergie with a Tupac ghost vocal, they’d be met with a share of resistance. Ever since the Death Row purchase, WIDEawake’s staff has been inundated with messages from people who care deeply about the catalogue’s fate.
“Everybody has been telling us what and what not to do, kindly, and sometimes forcefully,” says Payne.
And while WIDEawakepromises to move forward respectfully, down to seeking feedback from every artist concerned, obviously there’s tremendous market potential for all the material they now own.
In addition to a storage room in Los Angeles that Lavi compares entering to “walking into the end of the Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” Death Row boasts a seemingly infinite supply of video footage and roughly 4,000 more songs discovered in Michigan.
“The catalogue is far more vast than anyone had realized,” says Payne. “There’s R&B. There’s gospel. There’s things that people wouldn’t assume when they think ‘Death Row.’ So there’s gonna be a lot more surprises, some very very good surprises.”
Naturally, WIDEawake intends to harness the internet’s power to deliver said surprises. Expect an online portal, which will feature a Death Row TV channel to feature artists and exclusive tracks, as well as message boards for interaction among the label’s community of fans.
And it is ultimately all about community for Lavi and Payne, in terms of the stable of artists Death Row had developed over the years as well as potential newcomers to the label. WIDEawake sees the future of Death Row as an opportunity to get past the negativity of gangsta rap turf wars that had overshadowed the label’s original goal — making good music.
Says Payne, “We just want to get back to the original intent.”
