Recording a rap album is tough, expensive work. Sure, you can bust out a crappy demo on computer if you can’t afford studio sessions, but when Brooklyn rapper Prince Harvey’s laptop got stolen, he found the next best thing to busting out beats at the library: The Apple Store in SoHo.
After Prince’s second computer failure left him without a way to record his album, a report from the Daily Beast claims the rapper spent the next four months inside the Apple Store, laying down vocals and creating backing instrumentals.
Everyday for four months, Price rapped, hummed, and spat fire into an iMac on display at the SoHo Apple Store. By befriending a pair of employees, and learning a few tricks to save his work, Prince made the store his home, visiting it every weekday to finish his masterpiece aptly titled PHATASS — an acronym for Prince Harvey At The Apple Store: SoHo.
“It wasn’t my plan to record this at the Apple Store,” Prince Harvey told the Daily Beast. “First, my computer died. Then my external [hard drive] died,” he says. “New York is expensive. I couldn’t just buy another laptop. I just thought, ‘I’m going to die before anyone knows I’m hot.’”
To save his work from getting deleted by the store’s memory wipe every night, Prince discovered he could hide files in the trash and come back to work on them the next day. He also could email them or put them on a thumb drive, but unforeseen obstacles like fire drills caused some of his work to get lost in the process.
“I’m just a creator,” says Prince. “I want to inspire other people to create—show them that you don’t need all these things to be successful.”
His album all about his hard, fastpaced lifestyle in Brooklyn is set to be released on July 26th. Here’s a little sampling of his beats and flow:
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