Music Business student Stephen Prevost, the graphic designer and chief financial officer for H.E.R. Hip-Hop, LLC, wants to set the record straight. Hip-hop isn’t dead — it’s just not getting played on the airwaves.

“You have to expand beyond the radio if you want to hear hip-hop,” Prevost said.

H.E.R Hip-Hop became a reality when creators decided to take a music business project to the next level by booking recording artists. Photo by: Laura McCranie

The 2010 H.E.R. Showcase at New Earth Music Hall tonight will allow University students to do just that. Including artists such as Dead Prez and Donnis, the performing acts in the upcoming showcase are more likely to rap about social ills than ill rides.

Founders Prevost, Elizabeth Schenck and Rebekah Baldwin were inspired to organize an Athens hip-hop event when they attended the A3C Festival in October 2009.

A3C, an acronym for “all three coasts,” provides an opportunity for up-and-coming hip-hop artists to take the stage and gain a larger fan base.

For Schenck, H.E.R.’s CEO, A3C provided a valuable opportunity to make contacts with many of the artists who would eventually be featured in her company’s showcase.

“I met and befriended Kidz In the Hall, WrittenHouse and Stanza at the A3C Hip-Hop Festival in Atlanta this past October while I was getting coverage of the festival for Digital College Network,” Schenck said.

Indeed, academic responsibility has played a vital role in the development of H.E.R. All three of H.E.R.’s founders are enrolled in the University’s music business program. In January, when the trio was assigned to create a business plan, they decided to form an actual company.

“It’s really not that hard to form a company in Georgia,” Baldwin noted. “And [Schenck] figured since we were doing all the work to make a plan, we might as well go for it.”

Baldwin, the H.E.R.’s chief operating officer, credited Prevost with naming the company. Despite frequent misconceptions pertaining to gender, H.E.R. is actually an acronym borrowed from hip-hop artist Common that stands for “hip-hop in its essence — real.”

By naming the company H.E.R., the trio makes an allusion to Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” a song which chronicles the origin, commercialization and subsequent corruption of hip-hop via personification.

“A lot of people associate hip-hop with no deeper meaning, and it’s a shame,” Baldwin said.

Prevost noted that the terms “rap” and “hip-hop,” while often used interchangeably, are not the same thing.

“Rap is something anyone can do — it’s like speaking over a beat. Hip-hop is more of a cohesive art form that comes from the heart and a way of life. Take Lil’ Wayne — he is a great rapper, but he’s not hip-hop.”

H.E.R. also recognizes that big names equal big publicity. The company used its music industry contacts to secure Dead Prez, a dynamic, socially-conscious hip-hop duo that debuted in 1996 and was featured in the film “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party”.

“Their music pretty much epitomizes everything we’re trying to promote,” Schenck said.

However, securing Dead Prez and the other artists turned out to be one of the easier parts of putting the showcase together.

Although they’ve been planning the showcase since November 2009, neither Schenck, Baldwin nor Prevost had any experience with building a music event from the ground up. The process was arduous, to say the least, they said.

“None of us thought it would be this much work,” Prevost said. “We’ve had to learn how to draft contracts, negotiate rates, work with the venue and coordinate scheduling.”

For Baldwin, wooing local sponsors such as Which Wich? and Casa Mia was particularly difficult.

“Sponsorship, for me, has probably been the hardest thing,” she said. “I’m not a born salesperson and no one has any money right now.”

The trio reached out to Keelan Knox, the director/co-founder of BOOM Foundry, LLC, for help setting up the event. Knox, who performs under the stage name Fresh, said he was delighted when H.E.R.’s founders asked him to perform at their showcase.

“I’ve done quite a few shows since last July and they have been primarily at New Earth,” Knox said. “I look at it as though it’s the NBA Finals and I have home court advantage.”

Jamison Johnson, a member of the Athens-based group WildKard, also has a strong connection to the venue where he and his band mates will be performing Friday.

“The owner, Adrian, kind of took us in under his wing. We’ve performed most of our shows there,” he said.

Schenck also sought advice from her music business professors and enlisted the aid of other classmates to run a street team that helps with promotion.

Although this year’s H.E.R. showcase will be a one night event — extending the event to Saturday would coincide with the University’s annual Pajama Jam — Schenck looks forward to making the H.E.R. showcase a bigger event in the coming years.

“This event has been a great source of stress, but it has a huge deal of meaning to me and has been really rewarding all along. I can’t wait to do it all again and better next year, and then each year after that.”