COME HOME WITH ME.

May 14, 2020

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cam’ron’s come home with me turns 18 today.

a day in harlem with cam’ron & the diplomats
The picture of Cam holding the baby on the Come Home With Me cover, for example, was taken in the same room as the apartment with the couch and matching curtains, then layered into a collage by art director, Kyle Goen. The same with the one of Juelz, Cam, and Jim Jones on the back cover. - Photographer, Eric Johnson
unpopular opinion: SDE is cam’s best album. (via @passionweiss)
Although it features some classic tracks, Come Home has more weak links than S.D.E. Tracks like "Daydreaming," "Boy Boy," and "Tomorrow" are a few that I could've done without. - Angel Diaz

corrections: come home with me
You’ve probably heard the stories about “Oh Boy”: Jay had earmarked the beat for future use, until Cam and Juelz Santana jumped on it, took the rough cut across the street to Hot 97, and insisted they play it now. It probably cost the Harlemites, Just Blaze, and the label hundreds of thousands in royalties—the sample had yet to be cleared—but it was a metaphor for the Dipset modus operandi.

harlem playalistic capitalist muzik
At 20 cents a CD, producing 15,000 copies is going to cost $3,000. For the sake of argument, add another $1000 in expenses for artwork and featured MCs. That's a mixtape costing $4000, which the Diplomats write off as a "promotional expense"—a promotional item then sold secondhand (literally) on 125th Street to internet sites at a minimum of five dollars. Now let's say only 10,000 off the initial run of 15,000 get to retailers, with the other 5,000 copies being out at shows. That's a gross of $50,000, a profit of $46,000 per mixtape. If, as Duke says, bootleggers create an additional run of 15,000 CDs that's an additional $72,000 profit. That's a modest estimate of $122,000 profit per mixtape.