Hustle & Woe

Baby's momma/Bring me drama

Illustration by Graham Smith

Keegan Hamilton

Selah, shown performing at Contour Lounge, played college football with former Seahawk quarterback Jon Kitna.

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VIDEO: Shyan Selah Performs "Hustla" at The Contour Lounge

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More About

• Jimmy Williams
• Shyan Selah
• Don Bazemore
• College Soccer
• Hip-Hop and Rap

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But I ain't actin'/I'm just laughin'

Life is sport/I'm the captain

Of the team/Love to dream

Then my actions/Bring the cream

—Shyan Selah, "Hustla"

Shyan Selah strides onto the stage of Pioneer Square's Contour Lounge and smiles. He wears a black designer baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, obscuring all but the lower half of his face—a broad grin that radiates charisma and confidence. It's a Michael Jordan smile, the kind that can sell a pair of sneakers.

Once a talented athlete himself, Selah clasps the microphone stand and pauses to survey the crowd of roughly 30 people scattered throughout the small, dimly lit club. It's just a regular Wednesday-night performance in front of a few loyal fans, but those pearly whites say life at this moment is particularly sweet.

Selah celebrated his 36th birthday the day before the show, and he shares with the audience a recent bit of good news. His talk-radio program, LIFE: The Shyan Selah Show, which debuted in November on Seattle's KKNW 1150 AM, has been selected for worldwide syndication as part of the Transformational Talk Radio network. What's more, Selah says he's putting the finishing touches on a deal to publish a book about his outlook on life and his ideas about incorporating community outreach into his rap career.

"People I work with in this music business and outreach, they just come on and we talk about life and so forth," Selah says, describing his show for the Contour Lounge crowd. "I had a crazy dream a long time ago to do something cool and different."

Different is certainly one way to describe Selah's approach to the music business. In addition to his foray into talk radio, he considers himself an activist, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. According to his website, he is the creator of an "entertainment conglomerate" called Brave New World, with entities devoted to music, promotions, publishing, media, and youth. But for all his moneymaking endeavors, Selah says his true passion is community service and youth mentoring, which he performs under the auspices of The Brave Foundation, a charitable spinoff of the record label.

"I'm in the business of inspiration," Selah says a week before the show during an interview at his home in Federal Way. "It's about choosing to get the most out of my life in the most positive way I can. That's really what my book is going to be about, and it's what my radio show is about."

Back onstage at the Contour Lounge, Selah and his band, The Republic of Sound, launch into a song titled "Love." The lyrics are a mishmash of rap braggadocio and calls for enlightenment: "The flow priceless, they comparing me to Christ it's/Time to change, MCs in the game need a license/No more writing raps if they ain't categorized as timeless/You can no longer walk the street ignorant and mindless."

The hook has a soulful feel, but the band—two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, a DJ, and a backup singer—tends more toward rock than hip-hop. A wailing guitar solo and Selah's gravelly singing voice complete the genre-meld. After a few more songs, including an out-of-left-field cover of Kansas' "Dust in the Wind," Selah surrenders the stage for an hour to a handful of guest acts. When he returns, he sheds his leather jacket, revealing a chiseled frame and tattoos of the ankh and infinity symbols on the insides of his forearms. He introduces a new song by saying it was "birthed out of controversy," and, borrowing a phrase from Malcolm X, he adds, "Either you stand for something or you fall for everything."

Appropriately enough, the singer's life has been beset by controversy in recent months, due to an irate group of former associates who say Selah got them to fall for quite a few things. The group—which includes former Brave New World investors, a Jimi Hendrix-related charity with which Selah was once affiliated, Selah's daughter's grandfather, and the scorned mother of another of his children—claims Selah has hoodwinked them in order to obtain several hundred thousand dollars over the past decade.

Along the way, Selah has racked up nearly $50,000 in unpaid child support; had his company's Hummer repossessed; been evicted twice; played a part in a bungled multimillion-dollar real-estate development; and been dropped from a record-distribution deal less than a month after the contract was signed. In short, Selah is accused of being anything but the hip-hop hero with the heart of gold he makes himself out to be.

Selah has countered the group's assault by threatening multimillion-dollar lawsuits and rallying his supporters. In his defense, he says his haters are bitter conspiracy theorists, out to ruin him just as his career is taking off.

"The strange thing about life I'm learning right now," Selah says, "is you got people that smile in your face, they hug you when they see you, it's all love and blah blah blah. Then you get to a place where you end up learning they're somebody completely different. It's mind-blowing."