Sunday Music: E-40 Tiny Desk (Celebrate The Small, Make A Scene, And Tell A Story)

Quick note before we dive in: RIP Sly Stone. Earl Stevens, aka E-40, and Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone, are both from Vallejo, California. Maybe there’s something in the water. Or, at a minimum, there’s something in the air there. A broader musical awareness, maybe stemming from a love for the diversity within the community, and a self-shouldered responsibility to broadcast that love not just across town, but around the world.

E-40 showing up on NPR’s Tiny Desk made me realize how many people don’t know the story of how he once convinced a major label to pay him $1 million per album NOT to need them. You can talk about Jay-Z’s business acumen all day, and that’s worth studying too, but to leave Earl Stevens out of that conversation, is to miss not just the business brilliance, but how he leveraged it to build a regional scene that's still influencing music today.

Earl Stevens was a Vallejo, California kid who played drums in the school band and decided to start rapping after hearing “Rapper’s Delight.” He adopted the name E-40 (yes, it’s a drinking reference), formed a group with some friends, and they started self-producing and selling tapes and later CDs.

And, when their albums started to sell, they didn’t just sell a little bit either. By the early 90s, they were selling 100k units on their own. Of course the labels came knocking.

Barry Weiss, at Jive, called E-40 and his business-savvy uncle, Saint Charles Thurman, out to New York to make a deal in 1994. E-40 and Thurman already communicated to every other offer who came knocking that there was no reason for them to trade the promise of more distribution for $1 or $2 per unit for them. They were already moving 100k+ units on their own at $7-$8 each. Weiss would have to beat that to get them to sign.

Jive was smart. Not to mention, E-40 and Thurman were brilliant. The deal they cut was for Jive to pay $1 million for every album E-40 delivered to them, up front. Then, Jive would distribute the record nationally, and E-40’s company would get more money on additional sales, via this uniquely structured distribution deal. At the time, nobody had seen anything quite like it.

As Dan Charnas explains it in The Big Payback, “Essentially, Weiss was paying E-40 not to distribute his own record but to give Jive the privilege instead.” Everybody talks about Jay-Z’s business acumen, but this is one of the most incredible deals that everybody should know about. E-40 sold out without selling out, he’s a real business, man.

E-40 took the money and redirected back at their hometown scene of the Bay Area. A few hits and a growing awareness of their weird + cool scene brought more and more attention on artists in the area. That money and distribution was as much a magnet as it was a magnifying glass. When you bring business home, you bring opportunity home, and the Bay Area’s potential capitalized on it, big time.

The hyphy scene (say it like,“hae-phee”) that emerged is still one of the coolest regional scene examples of the past 25 years. Prior to the early 2000s, hyphy was a sort of slang for hyperactive, and not good hyperactive, more like dangerous hyperactive. But, as kids can often do, and kind of like “not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good,” the phrase came to represent a style and an energy unique to the area.

Much like the crunk sound coming out of the south at the same time, hyphy was distinct to the local players, and there were a ton of local talents who made it happen at all sorts of levels. It inspired its own forms of dance, fashion, and culture - beyond music.

And, if E-40 doesn’t first make the music that puts his local scene on the radar, and then cut the deal that broadens the distribution, while retaining his economic influence, and pulls all the attention back on the Bay…

A scene takes multiple players, and the Bay had them in spades. Between E-40 and Too Short and Mac Dre - and I could keep going - they balanced artistic integrity with local pride. People succeeded on their own, and the community benefitted from succeeding together.

Beyond music too. Earl didn’t just feature and celebrate other musical acts. In the Tiny Desk, that’s his wine he’s drinking (Earl Stevens Selections). He’s got a local food company (a Filipino one at that, Lumpia) and other food related stuff ( see Goon with the Spoon).

The world needs more people like Earl Stevens. That’s all I’m trying to say. People who have an impact on their otherwise unknown communities, the mid-tier cities that populate the world - like what John Waters did for Baltimore with his movies, or Richard Linklater did for Austin - that’s what Earl Stevens did for the Bay Area and music.

Celebrate the small. Make a scene. Tell its story.

Seeing him absolutely own a Tiny Desk concert in 2025 - there’s a reason artists like Kendrick are still name-checking him and building on his musical and commercial brilliance.

I love this one (especially for the Digable Planets sample - this is probably a good gateway drug to really getting people to want to explore E-40’s style and dig into the sounds of producer Rick Rock)

Then, you can’t deny this energy, it’s punk AF, The Federation’s classic, “Hyphy”

And of course, the inescapably catchy way most of us found E-40 in the first place…

Oh, you know where “I’m feelin’ myself” comes from, right?

OK I’ll stop, but one more:

OK, ONE MORE.

And, here’s a great Breakfast Club interview of E-40 talking the businesses (PLURAL) too: