Your cart is currently empty!
Block Party: Hip Hop’s 50th Birthday Jam
Aug 11, 2023 @ 12:00 pm
Faith Newman
We continue our feature series during International Women’s History Month. This March, our focus is on one of Hip Hop’s most dedicated and accomplished production queens.
Faith Newman, the Executive Vice President, Artists & Repertoire (A&R) and Catalog Development at Reservoir Media, leads their pursuit of music catalogs and talent. The member of Variety Magazine’s New York Women of Power 2023, Billboard’s 2022 and 2023 Women in Music Top Executives, 2022 R&B/Hip Hop Power List, and 2019’s iStandard Living Legend Award winner began building her – and the industry’s – legacy in 1987. As one of the first five employees at Def Jam Recordings (while still attending NYU), the die was cast early when she created the label’s administrative foundation, which included the A&R and Publishing divisions. While Vice President of A&R, Faith worked with LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and Slick Rick. At Columbia Records, Faith headed the urban music division. Besides working with Big L and The Fugees, giving Capone and NORE their first demo deals, and signing Jamiroquai, she signed Nas to his first record deal, and co-executive produced the artist’s legendary debut album, Illmatic. From there, she led Hip Hop A&R Department at Jive Records. When she transitioned to Verse Music Group to be its Executive Vice President, Faith’s achievements included acquiring the master catalogs of Salsoul Records and West End Records, as well as their affiliated publishing companies.
As a Philadelphia native, Faith’s interest in and awareness of real, soulful music are her birthrights. During her tenure at Reservoir, which began in 2011, she has overseen the acquisition of historic catalog including, and certainly not limited to, Philly Groove Records, Leon Ware, Dallas Austin, The Isley Brothers, Billy Strayhorn, and Verdine White of Earth, Wind, & Fire). Faith signed Killer Mike, Joey Bada$$, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Young Thug, Migos’ Offset and Takeoff, among many others. She is a lead player as Reservoir integrates Tommy Boy Music, she curates new releases, and she supports the legacy acts’ catalogs, including House of Pain, Naughty by Nature, and De La Soul. Recorded music, and the artists who conceive, create, and perform it, are in excellent hands when Faith is on hand.
We met at her New York City office earlier this month to chop things up.
That a woman who, by her own admission, memorized lyrics “in a Rain Man-ish way” while listening to albums on her father’s reel-to-reel would be EVP at the first female-founded and -led publicly traded independent music company in the United States, which today represents more than 140,000 copyrights and 36,000 master recordings, with titles dating since 1900, makes all kinds of sense.
Faith may not have sung, and music was inherent in her from the time she could, I’d wager, turn on the stereo. “I wanted to hear it,” she told me. Hear it she did, from age 13, when she heard “Rapper’s Delight” for the first time. “I thought it was the most amazing thing I ever heard. I was skating at United Skates of America in Philly, and “Funkytown” (by Lipps Inc.!) transitioned to ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ I stopped in my tracks.” Her first dose of Hip Hop, like it is for so many of us, was life-changing.
From there, she knew she needed more. Faith’s memory is vivid; as she told me about the first mixtape she received, it was like we were both in the room. “I knew this kid who knew someone in New York, and he gave me a cassette. On it were Spoonie Gee, Sequence, Funky Four Plus One, and other artists.” I asked her what songs were included, Spoonie Gee and Sequence’s “Monster Jam,” alongside “8th Wonder” by Sugarhill Gang all but leapt from her mouth.
While she may not necessarily cosign, I am confident that Faith has an eidetic memory. The stories and history she shared the afternoon we spoke at Reservoir HQ were thorough, detailed, and inclusive of people, places, and complete experiences. Eidetic or not, this kind of recollection is ideal for someone who oversees and ensures the continued development of music and artists on Chrysalis Records, Tommy Boy, Philly Groove (all labels owned by Reservoir).
Not quite one year later, when Faith was 14, she joined her brother to see her first live concert. This is watershed for anyone who loves music, and in 1980, to see The Cars at The Spectrum in Philadelphia was a defining moment. She recalled, while hearing live the “layered melodic albums, once I settled in my seat, I didn’t like what was happening. I didn’t want to be seated in the audience; I wanted to make this kind of thing happen.”
And make it happen she did, by the time she was 16. She was backstage during The Cars’s Heartbeat City Tour (in 1984). She was backstage at the Mann Music Center while Steel Pulse was playing. There, Faith met Lee Johnson, the production manager at renowned Electric Factory Concerts, and during her internship there, her concert promotion work facilitated her seeing Marvin Gaye during his final tour. The universe shows up when it when we need it to, and this experience was the one that told Faith what she was going to do for her life was working in music.
Whatever the impetus for her career, Faith has been an instigator, and respecter, from the jump. She cold called Willie Mitchell’s son to discuss the acquisition of Al Green’s legendary writer and producer’s catalog. Her appreciation of and respect for R&B and soul music contribute to the “deals that are near and dear to my heart, because I grew up with that music, and now I get to work with these musicians.” These musicians include Leon Ware, Confunkshun’s Michael Cooper, and two members of The Commodores. Her Philly roots helped her to make deals with the children of Norman Harris (the leading arranger for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International Records) and Allen Felder (a legendary R&B songwriter for more than three decades). I don’t know which of us was more excited when Faith shared how Reservoir recently did a deal with Raymond Calhoun, a member of The Gap Band who wrote one of its most renowned songs, “Outstanding.”
When we discussed what it means, literally, to be an independent music company, Faith was clear: this publishing house and record company has grown exponentially, while sustaining its core values, and creating and requiring “an ego-free zone.” The exponential growth has taken the employee count from six, when Faith started there in 2011, to 123 today. In an industry where deals like the $100M for Tommy Boy Records changes as many personalities as it does lives, Reservoir is the place where Faith “came home” and continued to live what she identified before she went to college: “It was either the music business or welfare.”
School was in session when we spoke, as Faith reminded me how Hip Hop allows “the ability to express one’s self through speaking, as opposed to speaking.” We dug into how “you can go back in history to see how people communicated – griots – and know this is not a new way of expressing one’s self.” The way Hip Hop brings you in, which Faith felt when she heard “Rapper’s Delight” while roller-skating, was surely in play when she worked with Nas to make Illmatic. It took two years to complete the album. That would never happen today, in a saturated market with so many ways to hear music. You cannot rush good storytelling and authenticity. While she who keeps more than 1000 vinyl records, alphabetized by album title, in her parents’ basement, she encourages people to “consume all of it” and stream music, while also buying CDs and vinyl.
As a museum Trustee, Faith will see the museum come to fruition while doing “more outreach and more education to make sure Hip Hop is legitimized for all eternity, and to be in the same pantheon as the genres that preceded it.” These goals are completely aligned with her own description of what’s most important to her: “I’m just doing the work, preserving legacies, and ensuring the artists get what they deserve and what they’ve earned.”
Gospel.
Many thanks to Faith and Reservoir Media for, in so many ways for a whole lotta years, demonstrating how music does more than move us. It supports us, it leads us, and it inspires us.
Faith is one of the panel members for THHM’s To the Beat, Y’All: A Conversation on Hip Hop History, Culture, Music, and the Divine Feminine, which is happening on March 29th at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, New York. Keep up with Faith on Instagram, and Reservoir Media always has something, and someone, new to announce.
by Kate Harvie, Contributing Writer for The Hip Hop Museum (originally published March 2023)
"*" indicates required fields
Copyright © 2024 - The Hip Hop Museum | Powered by Growth Skills