In a new profile on controversial, incarcerated rapper Tekashi 69, the CEO of Tekashi’s label says he tried to get the “Gummo” rapper to move out of New York before it all came crashing down. Elliott Grainge, CEO of 10K Projects, said that after a kidnapping and robbery attempt in 2018, “I don’t think he can be safe in New York City. Not in Bushwick [Brooklyn, Tekashi’s hometown].”
Grainge says he wanted Tekashi to move to Calabasas, the noted Los Angeles County city where Drake and Kanye West made their residences, to avoid the heat that the rainbow-haired rapper drew with his trollish antics. Clearly, Grainge thought that being around the two superstar rappers would make for a good influence, despite them being embroiled in their own beef — at least Drake and Kanye’s feud was with passive-aggressive tweetstorms and interviews, not bullets and kidnappings.
Elsewhere in the profile, Grainge also addresses the controversy and negative comments that Tekashi garnered over his short, speedy rise to fame. “He is the Donald Trump of the music industry,” he said. “We look at the data — 80 percent of the comments are hate. But if we showed you the analytics on who writes the hate comments, they’re the ones who go to the shows and buy the T-shirts!”
With Tekashi currently sitting in a New York detention center awaiting trial on a plethora of charges including racketeering, 10K Projects’ investment may be in very real danger of vanishing. Tekashi has gotten lucky in the past, notably with regard to the sentencing in his sexual misconduct case (he was accused in 2016 of using a minor in a sexual performance after posting a video of an associate having sex with an underage teen girl), his luck may finally be running out. Maybe he should have moved to Calabasas after all.
