What have you faced that others who look like need to be prepared for?
You do have to harvest and build these relationships because it was tough, man. It was tough. I tell people this all the time. I don’t know if ONE Music Fest would have been able to happen anywhere else but Atlanta. Atlanta is a special city for a lot of different reasons.
Atlanta is kind of set up in a way that anybody that I really, truly need to get to and talk to, once you kind of work your way into certain circles, it’s probably two phone calls away at the most. At the end of the day, all you really have is your name and your word. Integrity gets you into a lot of spaces and doors. Find a mentor.
What are the gifts at ONE Music Fest that people may not see again?
We try to do that each year to kind of create a moment that you’ll never see again. In 2016, it was OutKast. They had their last show. It was five years ago and was on our stage. We had the Dungeon Family Reunion. I mean, [there were] grown men out there crying because they knew they were not gonna see this again. This is it. We had a moment with Wu-Tang’s 25th anniversary. We did Three 6 Mafia’s reunion and they had not performed together for 19 years. They reunited on our stage. So, you know, we try to create cultural moments that people will walk away from and say, “Hey man, I don’t know what that was, but man, it touched me.”
