Rapper-singer Mars Jackson: ‘This is what Pittsburgh did for me’
“For me, it was like, ‘Stop self-sabotaging your talent — make the music you want to make,’ instead of being like, ‘OK, this person’s doing that’ or ‘This person’s on trap beats’ or ‘Man, this person’s got his buzz over there, maybe I should try to jump in that lane.’ I realized I just want to be a better songwriter, and I want people to know me not as ‘Mars the rapper’ but ‘Mars the artist’ and that’s when I just really sat down and honed my craft. It was hard.”
The breaks began in late 2015 by being in the right place. In September 2015, he opened for The Internet at Mr. Smalls.
“DJ Afterthought was also on the bill,” he says, “and after I got off, he said, ‘I got a surprise for you.’ I come off all sweatin’ and Wiz is sittin’ in the back, in the green room — he’s always got those white glasses — and he goes, ‘Yo, good set. Just give ’em more energy.’ I was like, ‘Wow.’”
At that point, Mars didn’t have a producer, so he was getting beats from SoundCloud and hitting up various people for rights. A month later, he was back at Mr. Smalls to open for Big K.R.I.T., and in attendance was Nice Rec, a producer at ID Labs he had previously met in passing.
Impressed by the set, he promised Mars some beats.
“He didn’t send them right away,” he says, “but there was a beat I was rapping over that he had sent to Wiz Khalifa, and he said, ‘Aw, man, that’s taken.’ So, he sent me like 17 beats one day — just amazing production.”
A few months after Big K.R.I.T., in January 2016, Mars was interviewed by local station WESA (90.5 FM), which caught the attention of Jeff Betten, the Pittsburgh-based general manager of Misra Records (Great Lake Swimmers, Destroyer). He made Mars Jackson the label’s first hip-hop signing.
“That radio segment compelled me to check out his SoundCloud page,” Mr. Betten says, “and I thought it sounded better than anything else I’d heard anyone around town doing. So I reached out and