Daily Lobo 4/28/08

/24/08 The Daily Lobo www.dailylobo.com

The real side of the music business
Marcella Ortega
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Culture

For Janale Harris, the music business is not all fun and games.

"You turn on MTV, you turn on BET and you see all these shows," he said. "It's no disrespect to any of these shows, because there's a market for it, and that's what happens. But you have a whole generation of aspiring artists that come up and think that that's the business, and it's not the business. The business is sometimes you got to sleep two hours a day. Sometimes, you're going to sleep on somebody's floor. Sometimes, you're going to wake up, and you're going to hustle."

Harris, who's known as the hip-hop artist Quanstar, will release "Do It!: A Documentary" on Friday. The film will be played at The Stove on Saturday as part of the Hip-Hop Film Festival presented by New Mexico Hip-Hop Congress.

The documentary follows Harris for six months. Throughout the film, he works two jobs, records the soundtrack to the documentary and goes on his annual "Bring Your 'A' Game Tour."

"It's really like an honest-to-God look at my life," he said. "It deals a lot with me having two jobs. It talks about me being a father. There is a huge segment on me and my son, and it happens around his birthday, and my family flies out. We interview my mother, my sister and my son's mother. It has us going on tour."

Harris said the documentary doesn't just capture the good part of the six months.

"There's no glamour to it," he said. "There are things that go wrong. My house got foreclosed during this movie. So, this is the real deal."

Harris said he had to learn different approaches to making money in the music business.

"I've been in the game professionally since 2001," he said. "But all my life, people at school or something like that. I'd walk around with, like, $50 and battle somebody for 50. That's how I'd pay rent a long time ago."

Harris said making a documentary along with an album gives the audience a visual effect.

"They get to see even more in-depth what we talk about our experience is," he said. "It gives them a more personal effect of who Quanstar is. Quanstar is a real dude. Quanstar is a person that wakes up and has to go through the things that everyone else does and sometimes doesn't get as much out of it as someone might in their everyday job. But I get up. I work. I come home just like everybody else."

Harris he would like to make more documentaries like "Do It!"

"We live in a multimedia society, and I think it's a natural progression for all media to go towards mixed media," he said. "Pretty much every album that I drop from now on will be paired with a documentary."