Many people know David Banner as a talented lyricist and equally talented producer responsible for hits such as ‘Like A Pimp,’ ‘Get Like Me,’ and ‘Cadillac on ’22s.’
But what’s equally admirable is what he’s done in addition to the hip hop culture that he’s kind of been quiet about.
“What happens with me is I think it is very important, for you to become a success first,” David Banner told me on Scoop B Radio.
“I think sometimes that black people in general, we run our mouth before, you know; we seem to put the carriage before the horse. What I wanted to do was, I wanted to be successful in a sector where there were not a lot of black people.”
Banner believes that diversifying portfolios is the only way to get ahead in the economy as an entrepreneur:
“I own a multimedia company. People don’t know I did the music for Gatorade, for the World Cup, Mercedes Benz. I did like a whole season for Pepsi, all the music for Pepsi for the NFL season besides the Super Bowl. I scored video games, I scored movies, I done 12 major brands and the bad thing about it is, most of that money went from paying back taxes, for not knowing about it, you know, as a rapper. But, I just wanted to gain power, real power. I wanted to get to a point where nobody could stop me, you know. And what people don’t understand, as a leader, as a pan Africanist, one thing that I learned is one of the reasons why children don’t wanna be revolutionaries, because all the ones we loom up to were broke, lonely, crackhead or something. Malcolm died with $300 to his name, that’s what he left his family with.”
Banner broke it down further:
“After all the stuff that he gave, you know to people all over the world; globally, you know people don’t talk about the fact that Harry Belefonte and his friends were funding Martin Luther King. So why do the people who give the most that are black die broke? When you know revolutionaries from other countries and other walks of life they go down in history and their family live good and they live to be 80 and 90 years old and we die at 26 and 34. I just said that I wanted to be sure that I’m able to truly stand for the people and I think the only way you do that is to have success and then make a sacrifice.”