Heartbreak It ‘Til You Make It

Paul Karsen closes out a hip hop showcase at The Jungle on Sunday, 13 April 2025.

Zazu Noir teams up with CASiMiRx, Voltaire II, and J. Anthony

LED collects the Collective in the opening slot.

Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️

Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️

It was a Heartbreak Records and WEBOOKTHINGS co-presentation to close out the mid-April weekend.

What puts the “co” in “co-presentation”? Each partner booked part of the bill. Paul Karsen represented the label, so presumably WEBOOKTHINGS was responsible for one or more of the opening acts.

Shout out to the bartender, who was putting on her own art show. Looks like the inaugural event in what’s meant to be a series of artist exhibitions at The Jungle.

LED the Collective

LED the Collective

LED the Collective rolled into The Jungle with six emcees and maybe one laptop.

The nice thing about music collectives is that you can enjoy all the benefits of collaboration and mutual support without the stringent strictures of belonging to an “act.” It’s freeing, and lets the outfit pull in all different creative directions. The night was mostly hip hop, but individual members shaded off into RnB and emo pop-flavored one-offs.

And if one member of the collective is running late at work or out of state, no worries. The show will go on. Theoretically, a collective operates as a decentralized unit, with no single contributing artist being the beating heart or cogitating brain without which the organism would die.

In fact, if a collective was an organism, it would be composed entirely of limbs, each of which could be severed without disrupting the life function of the whole. Are there such organisms? I suppose earthworms qualify.

Speaking of which, the collective’s latest release LED vs the WRLD Vol. 2 depicts the planet earth as seen from space by a skeleton floating into a black hole. You got all that? Earth, space, skeleton, black hole. There also seems to be a space war being waged by fighter rockets. In other words, an AI clusterfuck.

Zazu Noir

Zazu Noir

Zazu Noir introduced himself with some brief a capella rhyming. Maybe it was just a throat-clearing, sound-checking, business-as-usual gesture. But it set the tone for the rest of his set, which emphasized hip hop fundamentals and avoided excessive window dressing. Lyricism, beats, articulation, and a direct style of storytelling. He was joined by J. Anthony, Voltaire II, and CASiMiRx, each of whom pushed the sound into various side streets of neo-RnB, trap, alt rap.

Paul Karsen

Paul Karsen

Paul Karsen closed out the showcase. The performer is one half of Pen Pushas, and he recently put out the records Yoye and Karsenic as solo EPs. Under the Heartbreak Records umbrella? Honestly, not sure what constitutes a record label in 2025. 

I’ve been doing some research and conducting some polls trying to determine the critical functions of a record label. What conditions must a record label satisfy in order to be a record label?

Before streaming media the answer was pretty clearcut: a record label has to put out records (or tapes, CDs, whatever) in the sense of physical media. The label might do a lot of other things (promotion, facilitating recording and production, distribution, licensing deals of all types) but the physical manufacture of records was key. But these days so much music lives, thrives, or dies in digital-only formats, it’s difficult to say what the core function of a record label is right now.

In truth, the term “record label” has become an amorphous descriptor that applies to a lot of different outlets, providing a lot of different services, in the industry adjacent to the art of music production. We might live to see the day that the term is retired in favor of a half dozen other terms to more accurately describe the landscape of products and services that gravitate around and support the production of music. 

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