Shelliano

Industry Tuesdays at Club Flow is a weekly open-mike rap night that tries to do for Philly's rap talent what Black Lily at the Five Spot did for Philly's neo-soul artists. Nearly a year and a half off the ground, Industry Tuesdays now attract crowds a few hundred strong. Label reps and industry folks sometimes swing by to check out the local talent, but the night remains true to its roots: real 'hood and real underground. Larry Larr is the man behind Industry Tuesdays. He's the little dude with the loud voice who keeps the crowd hyped and under control. He smoothes over situations with a politician's grace and makes underground rappers feel like stars. "All right," he'll say, "I like that. I like that last joint," after a decent MC gets no response from the crowd. He builds their confidence. He respects them. "Larry like family," says Mr. Banga, a rapper with 6-Three Entertainment. "There wasn't nothing like this in Philadelphia. He brought this. He's really making things happen for us." Mr. Banga says he's been coming to Flow since the beginning, and thinks Industry Tuesdays will only get bigger. "Soon as one of us crack a biscuit in the head with a big record, we gonna blow up to the ceiling," he says. "I'm banking on this. This is my career. This is my life." Artists come to Flow to build a buzz and get the recognition they need before the industry will acknowledge them. "We got a lot of our street fame from Flow," says Marcus Gram, who manages the Paper Chasas, a crew of five MCs from North Philly who are Flow veterans. Club Flow is home to Philly's very own 8 Mile, where rappers take rhymes worked out on street corners and tracks laid down in basement studios, and test them on the crowd to learn what works and what doesn't. The open mike provides an authentic taste of Philly's underground rap talent--their style, their swagger, their flow. Philly rappers are aggressive. They attack the microphone and get in your face. They're arrogant and charismatic. Their gestures are dramatic, their wordplay slick and their stories real. "They call it gangster rap," says Lavish, one of the Paper Chasas. "It's not gangster rap. It's rap about life. We're not rapping just because it's something to do. We're blessed with the gift to do this, to make music." When a couple hundred rappers from some of the roughest pockets of the city--Erie Avenue, Southwest, the Bottom--roll into a club, all of them hungry to be the next one to land a record deal and become an overnight celebrity, little beefs are bound to spark up here and there. And they often do. (Shelliano's usually at the heart of them.) But more and more each week, the MCs in the house come together and show only love and support for each other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Def Jam label rep Mike Washington occasionally comes to Industry Tuesdays at Flow to scope out the local talent. He says Philly's rap scene is up and coming. But while performing or battling regularly is great experience, Washington says Philly rappers also need to concentrate on promoting themselves. They need to hook up with the right producers who can give them hot beats. They need to get their demos out and find out what works. "Learn the game," he says. "It's called the music business. It's not called just music. Learn the business." Conveniently, local rappers don't even have to leave the city to do just that. Philly's been respected as a music town since the Sound of Philadelphia took root in the '70s right through artists like Jill Scott and Musiq Soulchild. And when Jay-Z added Beanie Sigel to his Roc-A-Fella roster, the South Philly rapper represented for his hometown and came back to carry other local artists like Freeway and the Young Gunz to fame with him. But it's still a tough town for struggling underground artists. Philly doesn't have the big labels or major studios that other cities have, and you won't bump into Damon Dash in a club and get to spit some rhymes for him. Making matters worse, says Larry, Philly's always had the reputation of being like a bucket of crabs: If one rapper's on his way to making it out, the others try to pull him back down. All that's changing, Larry says. He says rappers at Flow are starting to support each other and to collaborate with artists outside their crew. Yet it's still a struggle. In fact, it's this struggle that Philly rappers say sets them apart from their peers in other cities. Everyone in Philly hustles, they say. Everything is difficult in Philly. Everyone in Philly's on the grind--struggling to make money, to feed their kids, to stay out of trouble, to get by legally, to not end up in jail, to not end up dead. Many see rapping as their ticket out of struggle. But what if it doesn't work out for Shelliano, for Banga or for any of them? "I don't believe in what ifs," says Banga. Larry doesn't b