Feature Article |
Is This Kid About to Be a Star?
By Jessica Pressler
Downtown has also filmed a series of “viral” videos that it plans to broadcast on YouTube this summer, and an employee at Downtown has created an avatar for Kevin on Second Life, a mind-boggling and popular online “world” where a virtual Kevin Michael will perform and sell virtual CDs to other virtual people for actual money. Currently, you can see the actual Kevin, or photographs of him, anyway, wearing Triumvir hoodies on the website for Karmaloop, a Boston-based apparel and tech store that averages 1.5 million unique visitors a month. Downtown is hoping for more modeling tie-ins: Kevin has visited the ad agencies Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Colorado and Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, and a label rep paid a visit on his behalf to the San Francisco offices of Gap. He performed for Cingular and Sprint, who will likely one day offer Kevin Michael ringtones. And to round out the shock-and-awe campaign, a song he did with rapper Saigon may soon be heard on an upcoming episode of Entourage.
It’s heady stuff for a kid from Chester. Well, sort of from Chester. “They tell me Kevin has to claim Chester, because they tell me it gives him street cred,” says his mother, sitting in the cafeteria at Wells Fargo, where she works, down the street from their neat rowhouse. “He lived in a house here. He never hung around the neighborhood.”
“I’m just going to make you a little darker, okay?” says a woman from Atlantic’s marketing department, back at the studio in Brooklyn. She swipes some foundation on Kevin as he waits to be photographed. It could just be the bright light, but sometimes, this new era of music looks a lot like the old one.
"YOU ALL AREN'T feeling me right now,” Kevin says into the mike. He’s right. It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Monday, and the 300 tastemakers Courvoisier, Atlantic Records and 100.3 The Beat have assembled at the World Cafe Live appear indifferent to the kid in the red satin Sergeant Pepper jacket singing the PhillyCars.com song.
He tries a song he wrote called “Too Blessed,” the chorus of which goes I’m too blessed/to be stressed/I’m too fresh/to be pressed. The conversation in the room, lubricated by two hours of free Courvoisier, threatens to overwhelm Akil’s guitar.
The other day in Brooklyn, when discussing his upcoming releases, Kevin expressed doubt about the Kevin Michael Project for the first time since I’d met him. “My worst fear is that people are going to think I’m corny,” he said. “I don’t want them to think it’s cheesy. I don’t want them to be, he’s trying to be this or he’s trying to be ’hood. You only get one chance with the streets. Their first impression is the only impression.” Now, it appears his fear is coming true.
Still, Mr. Cool, Mr. Swagger, perseveres. “You have to rock with me, Philly,” he says, launching into “We All Want the Same Things”:
All my gangsta friends and all my skater friends
We all want the same things
The DJs in the club, Jesus freaks and thugs
We all want the same things
And very slowly, several eyes in the fourth-largest market start moving toward the stage. One man in his 20s sees me taking notes and cocks his head toward the masses that are not yet paying attention.
“These people don’t know good music,” he says. “It’s Philly, it’s a tough crowd. But I know good content when I see it.”
It’s heady stuff for a kid from Chester. Well, sort of from Chester. “They tell me Kevin has to claim Chester, because they tell me it gives him street cred,” says his mother, sitting in the cafeteria at Wells Fargo, where she works, down the street from their neat rowhouse. “He lived in a house here. He never hung around the neighborhood.”
“I’m just going to make you a little darker, okay?” says a woman from Atlantic’s marketing department, back at the studio in Brooklyn. She swipes some foundation on Kevin as he waits to be photographed. It could just be the bright light, but sometimes, this new era of music looks a lot like the old one.
"YOU ALL AREN'T feeling me right now,” Kevin says into the mike. He’s right. It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Monday, and the 300 tastemakers Courvoisier, Atlantic Records and 100.3 The Beat have assembled at the World Cafe Live appear indifferent to the kid in the red satin Sergeant Pepper jacket singing the PhillyCars.com song.
He tries a song he wrote called “Too Blessed,” the chorus of which goes I’m too blessed/to be stressed/I’m too fresh/to be pressed. The conversation in the room, lubricated by two hours of free Courvoisier, threatens to overwhelm Akil’s guitar.
The other day in Brooklyn, when discussing his upcoming releases, Kevin expressed doubt about the Kevin Michael Project for the first time since I’d met him. “My worst fear is that people are going to think I’m corny,” he said. “I don’t want them to think it’s cheesy. I don’t want them to be, he’s trying to be this or he’s trying to be ’hood. You only get one chance with the streets. Their first impression is the only impression.” Now, it appears his fear is coming true.
Still, Mr. Cool, Mr. Swagger, perseveres. “You have to rock with me, Philly,” he says, launching into “We All Want the Same Things”:
All my gangsta friends and all my skater friends
We all want the same things
The DJs in the club, Jesus freaks and thugs
We all want the same things
And very slowly, several eyes in the fourth-largest market start moving toward the stage. One man in his 20s sees me taking notes and cocks his head toward the masses that are not yet paying attention.
“These people don’t know good music,” he says. “It’s Philly, it’s a tough crowd. But I know good content when I see it.”
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, May 2007
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