No, Big K.R.I.T. isn't charging artists to open for him
by Rob Boffard
October 31, 2014
“Out of all the places, Craigslist is not the place to do this,” K.R.I.T. laughs.
If you happen to see an online ad inviting you to open up for Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T, don’t answer it. It’s a scam.
The ad, which has been circulating on Craigslist, invites artists to pay for opening act spots on K.R.I.T’s Pay Attention tour, currently taking him around North America. But K.R.I.T himself has never heard of the ad, and both he and his management strongly deny that he has anything to do with it.
“Wow. Hell no!” he says, when we show him a printed copy of the ad before his Vancouver show. In fact, he barely made it halfway through the ad before collapsing in hysterics.
“Out of all the places, Craigslist is not the place to do this,” he says. “Not when you have all the booking information out there online.”
K.R.I.T claims never to have heard of the person that the ad gives contact details for, Rob Cohen. We were unable to reach Cohen at the number listed on the ad, which has a Georgia area code.
The ad itself is a badly-spelled jumble of promises for artists willing to pay up. It offers “30 free tickets, five all-access-passes [and] 30 minutes on stage” ahead of K.R.I.T’s show. Cohen, or whoever is behind the deeply strange scheme, is clearly trying to capitalize on the hype K.R.I.T is getting for his upcoming album, Cadillactica.
The record drops November 10. We’ve heard it, and we can confirm that the hype is well-deserved—Cadillactica is a deep, twisted, soulful Southern rap record that owes as much to Parliament and George Clinton as it does to Outkast and UGK.
When he stopped laughing at the inept attempt to sucker people in using his name, K.R.I.T took some time to break down the album for us. In the past, he’s been known for doing all his own production and mixing, so it came as a surprise to find him working closely with other producers on the record, including Terrace Martin, DJ Dahi, and Jim Jonsin.
“I can’t do it all by myself, not with all the touring we do,” he says. “When it came time to do Cadillactica, I wanted to work with producers who understood my music, and help me create a sound that had a little more grit.”
K.R.I.T didn’t rely on samples to create the sound of the record, instead using almost exclusively instrumentation. But what’s truly surprising about the record is that it’s being released on a major label – in this case, Def Jam. Majors aren’t normally keen on records as experimental and trippy as Cadillactica, but K.R.I.T says that they were happy to run with it.
“They let me rock,” he says. “When we played it for them, I mean, they were a little mindblown with what we came back with, but it made sense for them. We didn’t label it, or let anything dictate my sound.”