Tha League Goes Pro, Records Music Video

At worst, the scene could have looked like something out of American Movie, a documentary in which amateur filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his listless Midwestern friends try to make a full length feature with no budget, no cast and no prospects for getting a hold of either.

It could have been a sad landscape indeed, but Harvard rap group Tha League made sure that the set of their first music video was not crowded with lukewarm Milwaukee beers and broken typewriters, but $60,000 Arriflex-SR3 16mm cameras, professional lighting and state of the art sound equipment.

The music video, filmed in support of “Stop Stop,” a song recorded for the upcoming Veritas Records compilation, had been in the making for six weeks before the band finally began filming last Friday.

With a seemingly inexhaustible budget, the boys of Tha League—Nicholas H. Barnes ’05, Dominique C. Deleon ’04, Kwame Owusu-Kesse ’06 and Brandon M. Terry ’05—hired an extensive team of professional filmmakers to work on the video, a project that executive producer Jonathan R. Ardrey ’05 calls a “career launching, independent project for everyone involved.”

The band hopes to get the video played on MTV, BET and the Fuse Network after they release it on DVD later this spring, and though their lack of major label support may hurt their chances, the song would fit the rotation with Deleon’s “Wanksta”-reminiscent beat and the group’s Sean Paulish vocal delivery.

According to Deleon, the video follows three people—each played by a member of Tha League—as they separately try to find their way to a mansion party that Barnes’ character has invited them to.

“We’re all trying to leave our respective places where we are and get to this party, sort of like being at Harvard on the weekends,” he says. “I’m working at a grocery store, and a girl comes in, and I see her with her boyfriend, who’s extra big and extra thugged out. I’m trying to rap to her while her boyfriend’s there, and at the end she gives me her number and I try to leave with her and go to the party. The boyfriend of course comes after me because it’s his girlfriend and everything, so I have to transform into Rick James and smack him.”

The video ends with a real party scene, filmed on location near the Harvard campus, where the protagonists win over the girls and a good time is had by all.

“There’s a theme running through it, but it’s a four minute medium, so the storyline can only be so deep,” says Deleon.

Despite its short running time, the video’s plot called for several disparate locales, and by the second day of filming, when the 40 person cast and crew descended upon the Broadway Market in Cambridge, the team had already been to South Boston, Waltham and a private board room at Weston Copley Place.

On Location With Tha League and B2K

At 10 p.m. on Saturday night, the third in a grueling weekend of 19-hour work schedules, Deleon makes his way through the aisles of the grocery store, observing the work of the direction team and making sure things are running smoothly.

“Yesterday was a fiasco, man. I got up mad early and came up to South Station, and the police apparently came down and busted them up in because we didn’t have a permit,” he says. “But you know, that’s part of making a music video.”

Ardrey, the video’s executive producer, paces around a nearby salad bar arranging impromptu choreography for a group of eleven year-olds who have been hired to spoof popular R&B group B2K.

“It’s a line in the song,” explains Deleon. “I go, ‘So say what you gotta say, cuz you just going through the motions like B2K.’”

The three lively youngsters—Chanci Nixon, Terrell Reese and Kenneth Wiggins— are led by Ian Powell, an aspiring actor who studies at the Boston Arts Academy. Since League member Nicholas Barnes is MIA with his dance troupe Expressions, Ian has to pick up the slack and think of some moves for the kids to pull during their seven-second cameo.

“Can you do the worm?” he asks Kenneth, who, along with his two sidekicks, wears a silver whistle around his neck under an Ecko Unlimited jumpsuit that he’ll get to take home at the end of the night.

“After the video, it’s all you can eat,” says Aaron S. Byrd ’05, the self-proclaimed gopher to Ardrey on Saturday night’s set.

“Candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy!” shouts Kenneth before showing off an impeccable worm step followed by a stutter legged “tick move.”

After Ian, who is significantly older, Kenneth is the clear leader of the bunch, bantering with his mother and shooting jovial instructions at his fellow B2K-ers.

“Can someone turn the beat back on?” he calls, and five minutes later, “Stop Stop” comes on and the four boys try out their routine, bouncing their shoulders back and forth as they emerge from behind a cereal shelf.

Richard Sabonjin, owner of Broadway Market, watches and listens by the front door, which in mere hours has transformed his grocery into a teeming hip hop powerhouse.

“I think this is a great endeavor,” he says. “The guys have got a real passion for it. You can see it in their faces, you can see it in their eyes.”

Origins and Goals

The idea to make the music video came from Ardrey and Joshua Clark, one of the directors, who met each other last summer interning at Ridley Scott Associates in Los Angeles.

“We sort of became friends and hung out all summer, and I came back to New York and he came back to Boston,” says Clark. “We kept in contact, and I told him we were thinking of shooting this video. We got a demo reel, and we looked at all these different kinds of bands, and we never really found anything we liked.”

“I listened to months and months of cheesy indie rock music, because Josh wanted to do an indie rock video, because that’s what was in New York,” says Ardrey. “I sent him one of Nick’s solo songs, and he loved it. But I wanted to bring everybody along as opposed to just Nick.”

Clark and Aaron Weber, both currently enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York, came up to Cambridge a few weeks later to meet with Tha League and hear them play.

Ardrey hooked up with a producer from Black Dog Films, the music video division of Ridley Scott, who has been an informal advisor to the team since the beginning of the process. Clark and Weber hope to use their MTV connections at the School of Visual Arts to secure airtime for the final product.

Deleon, who produced “Stop Stop” using professional editing and drum software, says that the past year has gotten him more excited about being an artist rather than a producer. Writing the treatment for the video’s script and acting in it, he says, made him realize that he could be successful at both.

Although a September interview found Deleon unsure about Tha League’s future, he now sounds confident in the group’s goals and their chances for popular success.

“The year just brought more opportunities,” he says. “In general, as a group, it’s a consensus that we’re gonna stay together as long as possible because it’s working out for everyone right now.”

Deleon, in the midst of a post-graduation job hunt, says he wants to go into music or television, doing something that allows him to stay creative and get paid for it.

“Life’s too short,” he says. “I can’t go the investment banking route. I have to do what I enjoy, and that’s what my passion is.”

Tha League will likely wrap up the 2004 spring term with six concerts under their belt, including past shows at the Quincy Collective and The Advocate, a headlining spot at “The Takeover” festival in Loker Commons and a Habitat for Humanity benefit in the Science Center. Before year’s end, they will also open for Busta Rhymes at Springfest and play a set at the Roxy for Veritas Records’ compilation release party.

—Staff Writer Leon Neyfakh can be neached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.