The BlackSon And BlackCity Are Generating 'Free Power'

Entrepreneurial Mychael Carney helped his poet-rapper sibling, The BlackSon conceive of music as a business. Their BlackCity collective has grown into a model of community-minded and empowered economic self-sufficiency.

Rapper The BlackSon and his comrades in the BlackCity collective recognized that they're operating in the shadow of the Nashville music industry's consolidated resources, power and influence. So they chose to look elsewhere, searching for a business model more in line with what they're about: self-sufficiency and the building up of a Black cultural community that's been undermined in myriad ways.

The BlackSon, born Sean Smith, and a couple of his friends made the turn from spoken-word poetry to rap in their mid-teens; Smith's older brother Mychael Carney took his sibling's output