Sweet Revenge As Warner Forced To Finance Rapper’s Ph.D
Written by enigmax on August 24, 2009After failing to keep up with royalty payments, Warner Music has been forced to honor a clause in a rapper’s contract which said the music giant would pay for her education for life. Congratulations go out to the now Dr. Roxanne Shanté, the hip-hop talent behind the 1984 groundbreaker, Roxanne’s Revenge.
Back in 1984, mentored by R&B group Full Force, hip-hop outfit U.T.F.O (Untouchable Force Organization) released a track entitled “Hanging Out” which didn’t enjoy much success at all. However, on the B-side of the single was a track called “Roxanne, Roxanne” which became a hip-hop classic.
“Roxanne, Roxanne” inspired several of what are known as ‘answer records’. Made popular in early blues and R&B tracks, ‘answer records’ respond to the reference track, and in hip-hop these ‘answers’ were often part of a dispute.
The dispute over “Roxanne, Roxanne” arose after U.F.T.O failed to appear at a radio promotional show. A then 14-year-old Lolita Shanté Gooden overhead a conversation between a record producer and a DJ about the no-show and offered to make an ‘answer record’ to get back at them. The classic hip-hop track “Roxanne’s Revenge” was born.
But now, 25 years after the first queen of hip-made her world debut selling 250,000 copies but getting sold short on the royalties, Roxanne really has gotten her revenge on record label Warner Music.
In a brilliant article chronicling an amazing journey, Shanté explains how a quarter of a century on, Warner has had to dig deep to honor a clause in her original contract – to finance her education for life.
At 25 and married with a son and daughter, Shanté left the music business to become a psychologist and, thanks to the long forgotten clause (by Warner at least), she didn’t have to put her hand in her own pocket to find the $217,000 it took to achieve her dreams. But of course, it wasn’t straight forward.
“They [Warner] kept stumbling over their words, and they didn’t have an exact reason why they were telling me no,” Shanté said. But in the end, her persistence paid off.
Dr. Roxanne Shanté earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell and after a long battle in which she threatened to go public, finally got Warner to honor their obligations and hand over the cash.
Good to see Warner being forced to look after their artists, even if it is through gritted teeth.
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47 Responses
Someone got owned.
Well, this is good i guess.
So, not only artists don’t read their contract :)
Damn! Continue studying lady… and keep giving them the bill!
Dont stop, there is a world to learn out there… and I wish you the utmost success!
Hope you become the first graduate in computer science, law school, medical school, rocket science and so on ;D
Wow, good Job Shanté, I actually remember that record.
If it was me and I had education free for life, I would go get another degree on the said and work part time…My Grandmother and Great aunt took Graduate and PHD classes until they were in their late 70’s and early 80’s….I wonder what another 40 years of education costs. :)
Good Job Shanté…I am glad you read your contract.
Fail to see how this releates to bit torrent? Just some young girl who got lucky.
absolutely, study everything, become a master at law, medecine, business, ecconomics, then sue them as the final insult.
LOL. Lucky her, She is now a doctor!
Funny… first thing I did was search YouTube and all her stuff is their…then Torrent….not much except as compilations…
Wonder where you can get her old stuff…digitally…I probably have the records somewhere in the attic….brings back memories :)
@by Carefully watching – “Fail to see how this releates to bit torrent? Just some young girl who got lucky.”
I aggree, but sometimes nice news is alright also…maybe they should have put an offtopic, but it seems that anything to do with bashing the music industry is here so why not.
Funny, I didn’t remember how good she was back then…she took on the lot of the “top names” and she was just a kid doing the first recording between folding laundry…wow..glad she made something of herself instead of ending up like a britney or lohan…
Also, I wonder…since she isn’t getting paid…does downloading her material hurt the artist anymore???
Actually a search on the torrent index sites don’t show he stuff…so….I guess it is forever lost…….
Pwnt.
@ old timer.
Actually a quick search on my private tracker shows a lot by her.
sh%t like this is EXACTLY why i will NEVER buy another CD again………….EVER!
The music video sucks badly, good thing she got some culture out of that deal.
wait so she didnt try go to a million colleges at once and force them to pay for all of them? dumbass lol…
That sums up why no one should ever pay for music ever again.
The labels dont want to pay the artist, they want to keep all the money themselves.
Download the music, support the artists by going to concerts. The fans and artists win, the parasites lose.
Just trying to imagine what that encounter with Warner must have been like is brilliant, just them trying to say no to something they can’t refuse :o
@6
It relates because record labels are corrupt and always trying to fuck over artists as much as they can by squeezing them for everything and then not being fair at all to them.
It’s nice that this one got something back.
Guess what? Record labels also attack p2p technology all the time so they can continue in their ways of oppressing their artists and charging too much money for some packaging to people.
Use some common sense for crying out loud.
but companies like Ticketmaster and Livenation are now screwing artists at the box office too.
But Torrentfreak is going to report on anything that is a loss for the RIAA and so on
Dont they get the booking fee and the venue and artist split the ticket fee?
I dont care about this anyway, if you pay for music you suck and that is all.
Amazing article, I love this shit. Fuck Warner, ya’ll bitches got served!!!”
good for her ;)
Gee, where’s Reasoned Douche on this? How interesting that he ALWAYS keeps quiet when his side gets f*cked…
*points at warner* HA-HA!
If nothing else it is refreshing to see other news even if it is not related to bittorrent besides TPB “headlines”.
On other news how about P2P antivirus?
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23293/?a=f
Well it is not P2P yet but it give ideas for the future, imagine when machines acts like trees that send pheromones when they are being attacked could PCs send alerts to other PCs stating that something got wrong after a download file or visited website? So automatically all other computers will block the site or app?
This would be close to an immune defense system LoL
FTW !
MAFIAA got own’d AND pwn’d !!!
After reading and hearing the stuff…I think it is more about how she came about….she was a nobody that entered into a male dominated area in 1980’s. Even though she was young she proved herself. Since at the time she wasn’t signed by a big label and the only option for release was throught the Majors, she signed with them…well…if you look at her music and a lot of the others at that time…”sharing” of rifts was common…you could not copy but you can critisize to put a counterpoint on the track….Back then people knew when they took it too far…
Capyright need to adapt or just go awat as anything that now is copywritted (unless you are Tolen or something) has no selling power after 2 years….patent and inovation is great and I think you should have to show your contribution to warrent monopolistic protection…period.
Ain’t that the girl from “Sharp as a knife”?
Well done!
lol niggers in the video
happy to see the music industry pay!
but I gotta say she has a very annoying voice arghh…
at #10, might not have much to do with torrent,
but isn’t torrent about pissing the big companies(like warner) off, and i believe our beloved shante just did that.
And to shante, hope u get much more degrees in whatever u think is unnecessary!!! and let them pay for it!
you should go to harvard, their really expensive
I’d like to see what Neostyles and Reasoned Mind have to say about this. This is why I don’t buy music from huge labels: even if I do buy it, the artist gets paid a pittance. Who’s the thieves now?
Support indie artists, buy music directly from them and leave the RIAA/BPI labels to die.
@my above comment: TorrentFreak, PLEASE sort out your comment moderation system. Many replies are being censored unnecessarily. My above reply contained nothing that could be seen as offensive.
Roxanne’s a bad sister
Heh, failed to abide by their own rules. Amusing.
nice story
Am i the only person who thinks that clip what shite?
I mean… was it done all in one take or something? wtf. I know it’s old but i’m sorry – this girl is terrible at hip-hop :P
Well done girl!! Go for it, Study. So much to learn. Once in a lifetime.
Hot cougars? Sensual milfs?
“Cougar Central”? “San Carlos” ? or “San Francisco”?
*** kisscougar. c o m *** is the real place that is packed with them… be patient to fill your profile …must be older than 22years old
That song’s a piece of shit. But I congratulate her on the Warner funded P.H.D. That’s the sort of stuff they should be doing for their artists anyway (though I’ll be damned if that isn’t an expensive education).
pwned….
See this is why you don’t buy music as all your doing if you do is lining the pockets of these extremely corrupt & dishonest people.
GREAT piece of news. I didn’t see it covered in any of the ’so-called’ hip hop or music sites. THANK YOU, TF!!
Oops, the whole story is a fraud:
http://www.slate.com/id/2227090/
Nice going. Post a retraction?
JUST coming to post this! LOL!!
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