Arts & Entertainment

Local Rapper Gains Success, Hopes to Teach Youth

North Shore native Kidd Russell navigates music industry, encourages others to do so too.

There aren’t very many rappers that call Riverwoods home but that’s exactly where  started developing his musical talents. 

“You got to get a job, get a career,” the artist, also known as Kidd Russell,  said his friends at would say about his professional goals but that never stopped him from pursuing his dreams.

Now, the 30-year-old isn’t just making music but he’s also making money from it. 

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“It’s a rare few that learn how to make money in the business,” Russell said about the music industry. “You have to build your own fan base and really control it.”

So, that’s what Russell has been trying to do. After spending time in Los Angeles working at cable television's MTV, he moved back to the area and teamed up with producer Matt Jenkins, who happened to be his next-door neighbor in Lake Bluff as well as a North Shore native.  

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“We sort of built our own island in Chicago,” the alternative, hip-hop rapper said. “We didn’t have to follow anybody, we didn’t have to ride people’s coattails, we’ve been really successful.”

Besides licensing songs to TV, Russell sells his music online using iTunes, performs at shows as well as organizes events. “I do anything from Jack Johnson beach songs, to really run of the mill hip-hop songs, to rock songs,” Russell explained about his style.

Plus, Russell has discovered that he doesn’t need to be represented by a record label to make it big. Instead, he capitalizes on his social media skills and does the work himself. 

“By now it’s like 10,000 e-mail addresses, 2,000 Twitter fans and 4,000 Facebook fans,” he said about his faithful followers. “I can just talk to them and they’ll just buy my stuff.”

That’s how Russell originally got his start. One of his first singles was called "Deer Shooter," which the artist describes as a deep and depressing song about gun violence. He simply posted it online and the song went viral.

“The next day it had 5,000 plays on MySpace,” he recalled.

Russell has gone from posting videos on networking sites such as MySpace to shooting music videos with big names like Cisco Adler. A musician well known for his work with hip-hop artist Shwayze. Now, he’s hoping to help jumpstart the careers of other youth in the area. 

“I want to turn what me and Matt have into a school for kids around here that want to learn the business,” Russell said about his company North Avenue Productions. “I want to teach that to kids because no one taught that to me.”

While Russell has some success now, it wasn't always smooth sailing for the local rapper who said he was booed off the stage during his first performance.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me…and the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said about the experience. “After that I got hungry.”

So while working on his next song called "Pulaski Day," Russell is looking to help other aspiring artists navigate the music industry to avoid some of the bumps he encountered. 


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