and Lenox Ave, a block he famously dubbed, “The Danger Zone.” Unlike many who came up on that block, Lamont Coleman used his talents to travel the world and achieve a kind of immortality through his art. He didn't live to celebrate this milestone because he was murdered in an unsolved shooting on the very same block that raised him, 139th St.
This past Friday marked what would have been the 40th birthday of Lamont “Big L” Coleman. But of course the music only tells part of the story. Yet on the strength of these recordings he is consistently mentioned among the greatest of the greats. During his 24-plus years on earth, the Harlem rap prodigy left behind a painfully small body of work: just one album, a handful of singles and freestyles. If L comes up as an afterthought, it's not for lack of skills. You've got your living legends-Jay Z, Nas, Eminem, Cube-and your fallen heroes-Biggie, 2Pac, Big Pun, and almost always at the end, Big L. Who was the greatest rapper of all time? When the never-ending debate resumes-from barber shops and street corners to online chat rooms-the same litany of names comes up again and again. “Take some Big and some ’Pac/And you mix ’em up in a pot/Sprinkle a lil’ Big L on top/What the fuck do you got?” -Eminem, “Patiently Waiting” I think he had the ability to write big records and big choruses.” - Jay Z
I was like there’s no way I can compete if this is what I gotta compete with.” - Nas When I heard that on tape, I was scared to death. “5 slash 3-0 slash 7-4 a lil bro was born with the mind of a psycho” -Big L, “Devil’s Son”
#Big l put it on genius license
“So anyone who has a lyrics display license has to figure out what the lyrics are.In honor of what should have been Lamont Coleman's 40th Birthday, Complex explores one of hip-hop's greatest unfinished legends, Lamont "Big L" Coleman. “When you license lyrics from the music publishers, they don’t actually provide you with official lyrics or anything,” Gross said. Nor did Genius.īen Gross, chief strategy officer at Genius, is quick to admit the business of song lyrics is still pretty messy in some other ways. That company didn’t want to talk about the controversy. “Genius is saying, ‘Google is taking the lyrics from our website, they’re just ripping us off,” said Janko Roettgers, technology writer at Variety. “But then Google on the other hand is saying, ‘We’re not actually doing this, we’re getting it from these third-party companies, from these lyrics aggregators.'”
One of the big lyrics websites, Genius, recently accused Google of ripping off some of its content. If you’ve ever searched Google for lyrics and they’ve popped up so you don’t have to visit another site to get them, chances are they come from LyricFind.īut the intellectual property questions LyricFind wanted to avoid are still around.
Today, LyricFind resells rights to many companies, including Amazon, Pandora, MetroLyrics and Google. “The economies of scale were not there unless you were providing that data and licensing to everybody,” he said. And the new LyricFind relaunched four years later with a very different business model: The company would buy the rights to display lyrics then resell them to other companies. It took them some time to make deals with song publishers. And before the end of the year we had taken everything down to try to get licensing,” he said. Music publishers hadn’t sued, but Ballantyne figured that was coming. “We started it briefly as a consumer-facing site just to make some advertising revenue,” he said.īut Ballantyne and his partners soon figured out the company had an intellectual property problem. Understanding how Ballantyne’s company works helps explain a lot about the business.
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