Seville: Hustler’s AmbitionThe CEO of the Rap Illustrated brand isn’t some square in a suit. Hustled in Corpus Christi, Texas, as a youth Seville fell into the trapping of gang life. He’s seen people die, sold dope, been to prison and lived through a lot to always land on his feet. Those that know him know that he is a go getter, a hustler. I sat down with the CEO of Rap Illustrated Magazine to hear his story.Seville: I started off as a rapper. But I really just wasn’t feeling it as a rapper, it just wasn’t me. I knew I needed to be a part of the rap game somehow but being a rapper just wasn’t me. So the very first time I got involved in [the rap game] I was down in Corpus Christi working at a record store as a cashier. I was 16 years old and I had a Buick Regal. At that time the Texas hip-hop scene wasn’t really like that, especially for Latinos, there wasn’t really no Hispanics doing rap music out here. Then finally there was a group that came out called Aggravated. Aggravated was the first Hispanic rap group that I had ever seen that wasn’t like the California style, vato loco type format. These guys were representing Texas. So, when I was in the record store down in Corpus they came into the store trying to push their new record. I think it was their second album. When they came in I was like ‘yo, let me set up some shows for yall’. I’m 16 years old I didn’t know shit about business much less the music game, but they was like yea, go ahead and they gave me their info.
The next day a guy named Johnny Ortiz came into the store. Johnny Ortiz used to do all of the teen shows in Corpus at the time. I told him like, yo I got these dudes that go real hard I’m going to give you some of their music. So I go to his house and we listen to Aggravated’s tracks and he was like yea that’s dope, I want to use this for a commercial. So he put the song on a commercial promoting the club then he put their picture on the flyer and had the whole town crunk about this show. So the night of the concert the guys come down here and the place was packed. It was just the fact that there was a rap concert happening in Corpus Christi, all these fucking kids came out to party. It was like 4,000 kids at the show going crazy. So at the end of the show they shouted me out over the microphone like much love to Seville, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. It was nothing, I just talked to the right person, presented the artist and everybody won. Everybody got what they wanted out of it.
So I just kept fucking with rappers and setting up shows. So one day I just bounced out of Corpus and I went to San Antonio. My network was getting bigger, but I still didn’t feel my place and plus my bread wasn’t right. So I went to school for audio engineering in San Antonio for about a year, thinking I could use the skill and make money. But that didn’t pan out because I felt like they were just hustling. Like they didn’t show you what you really needed to know and I’m steady paying hundreds of dollars and enrolling in different classes while they keep taking my money.
But back down in Corpus my grandmother had bought a house next door to where she stayed. Just to let you know about that neighborhood where my grandmother was at, so many people had died and got killed on that street, my cousin killed himself, my grandma’s friend shot himself in the house she just bought, they hung a girl on the fence with a belt next door to my grandma’s house, there had just been so much death on that block with these four little houses. If you ask people about that block, 10th and Mary, they’ll tell you it ain’t no joke. That ain’t the place you want to be. But still, this was my street, and I wanted to come back to do something out there. So I came back and built a studio in the back of the house my grandma just bought in the back shack of the house. I had all kind of equipment in this little shack. I did it myself with the help of a crack head, I would just give him a little change to help me put this shit together. At the time I was working with the cable company swapping out cable boxes and I used that money to finance my studio. But shit, then all the shit got stolen. I got a call saying all the shit was gone. I didn’t trip because, it was gone. You can’t cry over spilled milk, plus I had insurance so like five days later I had everything back and then some. So it’s like you really can’t hold me down because I always have a back up plan. After all that shit happen I went back in the studio and was fucking around making beats and having sessions. I still felt like it wasn’t really happening for me, so I sold all that shit. I knew I needed to do something different.
My mom had moved to Houston right around that time, so I was like man let me go to Houston and check it out. So me and my friend Elexus from Robstown got on the road on New Year’s Eve and we get to a fork in the road where we could’ve went left to San Antonio or right to Houston and we went right. We partied for New Year’s and we had a real good time. So I was like yea I gotta get out here. So I ended up getting a job out here in Houston working for Citi-bank. I was there for almost a year and I was like the coldest salesperson on the floor. I was working hard for the company, trying to move up and all that. I got so good that they made me train the new workers on how to sell. It was crazy because I wasn’t really doing much but being myself, but to them I was making a killing. So I was like ‘man, maybe I have something really powerful that I don’t really know about’. But one day I guess I sold a customer too much (they think) and they were recording the call so they fired me. But they fired me after I had already got paid so I didn’t have any money coming in and I was broke.
So I was at the house chilling sitting around like ‘fuck what am I going to do’? I didn’t even have enough money to go get up and look for a job. So I’m at the crib looking around like man I got to do something. I know I love music but what can I do? I had tried rapping, I had tried setting up shows, I had built a studio and none of those things worked for me. So I’m looking around and I had posters of rappers on my wall, headphones on the floor, CD’s everywhere, and I looked over to the right, and I had a stack of magazines. Not all of them were rap magazines, they were just magazines. So I start flipping through the magazines and saw that there were more advertisement pages than articles so I was like man they must be making a killing selling these ads. So I was like ‘if I had a cool name and some graphics, I might have something’. So I was like man ‘I need a cool ass name’. So a Sports Illustrated commercial came on the TV and I was like man these guys have been doing it for years and that’s a dope name. So I was like what if I took out the sports and used rap. Rap Illustrated. But it was so good and so simple that I knew somebody had to already have the name. So I went online and went to see if anybody had the name trademarked. Nobody had it. So I sent in my application, it came back and now I was the owner of the name Rap Illustrated.
So now I had the name, what was I going to do with it? So I just went online and started looking up all the record labels, and I found them all. But shit, I don’t have a company. I don’t have no website, no business cards, nothing. How am I going to prove to these big companies that I actually exist? So I said fuck it. I came up with my pitch, made up my price and what I was offering and I started calling. I called a total of 326 companies and all of them told me no because I didn’t have any background or anything stating that I had a legitimate business. I mean I just made the shit up in my bedroom. So then I called 115 more people and 100 of them told me no. That means 15 people said yes. From those 15 people I started getting checks in the mail. Big checks. Bigger than I could ever get from two weeks worth of working and that’s just one check.
When I got that feeling I knew this was going to be it. So once I got their money I had two choices: 1.) I could keep the money because they really didn’t know who I was or 2.) I could really come out with this magazine. So I said fuck it, I went out and found writers, graphic designers and came up with a good concept of how I wanted to do it. Then I added the CD, that way you could actually hear the artist. If anybody tells you it takes money to make money, that’s bullshit. Rap Illustrated started off with absolutely nothing and I generated in over $10,000. So after like two months of being out, the Houston Press voted us the best new magazine in Houston. After being recognized by Houston, the fourth largest market in America, I knew we really had something. But I knew we needed to keep stepping it up. I got up with Mike Frost and saw his work and what he was doing and the people he was working with and told him what I was trying to do and we’ve been working together since the second volume. He really gives us an edge and makes us who we are. Since the beginning we’ve worked with over 226 artists.
Now, Rap Illustrated isn’t just a magazine anymore it’s a lifestyle. The whole magazine thing is boring. You got 100 guys coming up to you telling you to put them in your magazine because they recorded a song in there bedroom, that don’t really do it for me. We market artists and take people to the next level. We were the first mixtape magazine. We came up with the concept to have a mixtape with every issue. Now with volume 5, we added the DVD so you can see the artist. In the future we want to go over seas and have a Rap Illustrated for every culture. So we can highlight other movements going on in the world.
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