MARCO PAVÉ

Life is a never-ending sequence of forks in the road. Often, the most difficult path to walk is also the most fulfilling one—Memphis artist Marco Pavé is proof.

In 2013, Pavé was a 20-year-old budding rapper and community activist working a demoralizing dead-end security job at Kroger to make ends meet. When his son was born at the end of the year, he made a choice that would change the course of his life: to define success entirely on his own terms and build a wholly independent career in the arts. “Once I made that decision, different things started to open up,” he says. “Choosing my path fully, and not really caring about the outcome, was how I started to develop something bigger than myself.”

 Pavé ’s bet on himself has paid off. Since 2013, he has forged a twin identity as a champion of indie Southern rap and as an educator working to stimulate community activism and entrepreneurship through the lens of hip hop music and culture. During the same period, Pavé blossomed as a recording artist. He opened for Mobb Deep, Waka Flocka Flame, and Young Dolph and worked with GRAMMY Award-winning producers like Carlos Broady. In 2015, “Black Tux,” the Mike Brown-inspired lead single from his EP Perception, aired on Ebro Darden’s Beats 1 Radio show and MTVU, paving the way for press coverage from The Source, The Root, and MTV News. In 2017, he released his debut album Welcome to Grc Lnd, which cast a documentarian lens on Memphis’s grassroots activists who were raising their voices in protest of the city’s endemic racism and poverty. In 2018, he was commissioned to turn the album into Memphis’s first-ever rap opera. 

Earlier this year, his songs “One Hunnid” and “Sell” appeared in Uncorked, the Prentice Penny-directed Netflix film about a young Memphis man who, not unlike Pavé himself, bucks the norm to pursue his passion. He leveraged those film placements into a distribution contract between EMPIRE and his proprietary label Radio Rahim Music. As an independent label owner, Pavé is manifesting his values of self-ownership and self-efficacy by growing a business that enriches the intersection of hip hop, activism, and artist communities.

Born and raised in North Memphis, Pave started rapping seriously to articulate the dangerous day-to-day realities of his neighborhood. ("6th grade, dead body in front of the crib/ Even if I know who did it/ Ain’t gone say who it is," he raps on “One Hunnid.”) He experienced a wake-up call in 10th grade, when him and a friend were playing with a gun; his friend pulled the trigger not knowing it was loaded, but the gun jammed.

Pavé has built an unprecedented career that uses hip hop culture not only as a means of personal expression, but also as an educational tool designed to make an impact on both individuals and systems of power. “My mission is to spread the lesson of creativity, spread the lesson of believing in yourself,” Pavé says. “But in the midst of taking care of yourself, I want people to think about how their story can be told without trying to get to a destination.”