20 years of celebrating creativity and offering a platform for artists to express themselves as individuals & at the same time, within a tribe of like-minded artists. I salute Danny Castro & Anthony Marshall for their influence on hip-hop, especially the underground scene in NYC. Over the years, Eternia and myself have worked with Danny Castro, who without hesitation has always supported and maintained the focus on talent, skill and a dope live performance. Eternia has blessed stages with many of hip-hop’s true legends and we give thanks to Danny Castro and Lyricist Lounge for those opportunities. Come through this event & you may very well catch another glimpse lol Check the flyer for all the amazing talent that will be blessing the stage.

The Lyricist Lounge 20th Anniversary will continue next month with a show featuring Ghostface & Camp Lo at Prospect Park. Yeah, Ghostface AND Camp Lo, plus more. Be there…and hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to catch up with Danny Castro one day soon to discuss Lyricist Lounge’s journey over the last 20 years.

My train campaign put me on the map in a major way, in a short amount of time. Basically I was like, “I’m nice, but nobody knows it. How can I get people to know it, and on a budget?” I bought the domain name homeboysandman.com from godaddy, threw up some joints. Not even too many bells and whistles, ‘cause the truth is that my music speaks for itself.

I’m always riding trains where you can always find people just looking up and reading all the ads. So, I figured I’d put up some ads!

Of course, I couldn’t afford the zillions that companies pay to put up those full-car ad campaigns, but I did have enough scratch for colored paper from Staples. My pop has a copy machine in his office…all it took after that was tens, possibly hundreds, of hours taking this full page sheets & sliding them behind the plastic where the MTA ads go.

The first ads were very simple - they’d have the website, and then a legendary MC that would approve of how I get down. Like, “HomeboySandman.com, Black Thought would approve,” or another, “HomeboySandman.com, Big Pun would be proud.”

And we’d do entire trains, car by car; we hit every line in the city, most lines multiple times. At first, people were caught off the jump just from the colorful paper everywhere, but then the caliber of emcees I was shouting out, cats in the know were like, “this kid thinks he’s in the same league with these cats? Maybe I should check him out.” … Tens of thousands of people saw those ads. They worked like a charm. - Excerpt from an ‘09 Interview with Homeboy Sandman by Sav One.