Interview: Hip-Hop Artist Marvalous

I met Marv last week. I was walking up 6th Ave. on my way to a gig and he was standing outside a grocery store near 12th St., trying to get people’s attention as they walked by. I have a soft spot for people trying to talk to strangers – I have enough experience with cold calls and passing out flyers to know that it ain’t an easy thing to do. I had some time to kill before the gig, so I stopped to talk.

Marv, aka “Marvalous”, is a musician selling his CD. I had no idea what his music sounded like, but after talking to Marv for a few minutes I bought his album. I just have to admire a guy that is willing to stand out on a New York City street for hours at a time, facing the early February cold and sustained rejection, in order to give a pitch and a hard sell to one face after another.

And after talking to him awhile, two more things impressed me: 1.) He does this full time. 2.) He makes a living doing this.

I think about my own albums, which I’ve safely stashed in the big, anonymous cloud of iTunes, and I sheepishly push from behind the shield of Facebook and Twitter – giving my hard sell to profile photos and not real faces. Could I stand on the corner and sell my music? I think I could, but it doesn’t matter – I don’t.

As Marv tells it in the interview below, he hit the streets when the music industry machine started to break down. He had used standard music distribution routes before they started to go out of business, and then – not to be stopped – he just walked outside and starting doing it himself.