Is This Kid About to Be a Star?

Josh Deutsch sees the online audience as especially key to eradicating the color line that has become part of the culture of American music. “We have been really rigidly restricting ourselves because of radio,” he says. “But there’s an audience between those lines. It’s a different era.” Deutsch sees Kevin, whose music blends genres and who is of mixed race, as kind of a personification of this idea, “a pure crossover artist, in the best sense of the word,” he says. “The whole thing about Kevin is that he’s the melting pot.”

To further the idea of Kevin as sort of the Barack Obama of pop music, his albums will be loaded with songs that preach cultural unity. “We All Want the Same Things,” featuring Lupe Fiasco, talks about bridging the gap between different types of music, and “It Don’t Make Any Difference to Me,” a Disney-esque narrative about the American biracial experience, features Wyclef Jean intoning “One love, one love” over its ­reggae-inspired beat.

The presence of the well-respected Jean makes Kevin feel marginally better about the fact that Atlantic has apparently decreed the radio-friendly song — which he wrote, he says, in a “mood” and hoped would “go away” — as the international single. “I just don’t want to come off as a token mixed kid,” he says. “Some artists, they say about being mixed, ‘Oh, it was so hard, I didn’t know what I was.’ I never felt that. I never felt confused. I liked walking into a place and people look at you and wonder what you are.” The lyrics of “We All Want the Same Things” indicate the opposite. He sighs. “It’s just so … poppy. Excuse me for saying this,” he says, because he is extremely polite. “But it’s just so” — he hooks his fingers into ironic air quotes — “white.”

WITH THE SONGS complete and the pre-buzz started, it’s time for the slow and methodical dissemination of Kevin. The acoustic versions of some of his songs — from performances he’s done with local guitarist-beatboxer Akil Dasan — create “an additional tier of content,” Deutsch says, that will be offered exclusively on iTunes, the staff of which Kevin performed for last year in Silicon Valley. While there, he also performed for representatives from YouTube, MySpace, and Doppelganger, an “online nightclub,” in hopes of getting coveted front-page placement on those sites. “I’m going to be The Man of the Internet,” Kevin says. “It’s the wave of the future.”

In addition to the corporate Internet networking, the company is courting independent music blogs, the medium that worked so well for Gnarls, to insinuate Kevin into the fiber of the Internet. These “tastemaker” blogs, as Pontecorvo calls them, are particularly fertile ground for marketers to sow with acts that fall outside of the mainstream, since their readers pride themselves on being sophisticated and varied in their taste. Those readers are also obsessive about keeping up with the new, and the bloggers who cater to them rush to be early on the delivery. As it turns out, even when people know they’ve been manipulated, they don’t mind all that much.

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