Music

Andre Harrell, Uptown Records, and the Revolutionary Act of Crossing Over

In the 1980s and ’90s, the late label boss had a wildly successful vision for selling R&B and rap acts like Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, and Heavy D to the mainstream. As his friend and one-time biographer remembers, it helped pave the way for almost everything that has followed.
Andre Harrell and Sean 'Diddy' Combs at a party in New York City in 1995.
Andre Harrell and Sean 'Diddy' Combs at a party in New York City in 1995.By Catherine McGann/Getty Images.

Alonzo Brown was Uptown Records founder Andre Harrell’s childhood friend—his fellow emcee in the ’80s rap duo Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, film production partner, and confidant. So when, in the early hours of Friday morning, I saw “Andre Harrell” trending on Twitter, Alonzo was my first text.

Alonzo didn’t text me back. He called me. When I asked if the story was true, he took a moment, choking back tears.

“It’s true, Barry. Andre is dead. His cousin O’Neal found him on the floor of his apartment. I can’t believe this shit. My best friend is gone,” Alonzo said, the grief grinding the words in his throat like shrapnel.

Andre Harrell was dead. I still couldn’t come to grips with this reality. However, it was true: Wendy Credle—his ex-wife and the mother of his son, Gianni—confirmed to the New York Times that Andre’s death was the result of heart failure. Andre had cardiac issues for most of his adult life, but it didn’t stop his joie de vivre for making music, television, and films. Andre’s construct of Uptown Records allowed R&B to embrace hip-hop, and vice versa. In the Reagan era, that was almost unimaginable. R&B was safe and respectable. It was Whitney Houston, it was Anita Baker, it was Freddie Jackson. Hip-hop was frightening and troublesome. It was—LL Cool J and Run-DMC and Philadelphia’s gangster rapper Schoolly D. Hip-hop was gold chains, Fila tracksuits, and dopeboys posting up on the street corner in a B-boy stance. Andre Harrell’s Uptown Records proved that both ideals could coexist, because they were not mutually exclusive

Before TikTok became the land of a million cornball dances, before Facebook became a rabbit hole for the morbidly bored, before Twitter became the hashtagged kangaroo court of the “canceled,” and before Instagram trapped us in a lurid You-seum of curated narcissism, Andre Harrell was the original Influencer. Mr. “Champagne & Bubbles,” per his self-appointed moniker. I call him Frankie Faucet, whose blue diamond drip game was on floss-it. Uptown Records was more than just the label that introduced us to new jack swing, hip-hop soul, Mary J. Blige, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Heavy D, Jodeci, Al B. Sure!, Jeff Redd, and Father MC. Uptown Records was a lifestyle. Uptown Records was a movement. If Jim Crow produced the activism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the civil rights movement, then the crack-cocaine epoch created Andre Harrell’s advocacy of R&B-tinged hip-hop. He passionately believed that where you came from, should never define who you are.

I knew Andre for more than 30 years. I worked with him on his 2008 unpublished memoir, Andre Harrell: Notes on a Revolution of Nu America, and for a brief time, an Uptown–BET miniseries in the works. Andre is one of the most fascinating, comical, inscrutable, visionary, discerning, mysterious, and exuberant human beings I have ever met.

Alonzo and I were silent for a few seconds, which felt like hours. We talked for a few more minutes, but the moment was too overwhelming. We said we would catch up in a few days, and then we hung up. I sat in front of my MacBook, as its screen powered down; my dark bedroom awash in the iridium blue rinse of a thousand memories. Here are a few.

September 1987. The writers room on the third floor of the Village Voice on Broadway and 13th Street in the East Village. I had been assigned by the senior editor/music critic Bob Christgau and editor Doug Simmons to do a profile on Harlem’s musical wunderkind Teddy Riley. There was a rumor going around the streets of New York that Teddy’s manager, former drug dealer and karate enthusiast Gene Griffin, had smacked Andre in the conference of MCA Records in Midtown Manhattan. Journalist and author Nelson George, gave me Andre’s telephone number, so I could confirm the story. I called Andre and identified myself, and asked him about the confrontation with Griffin. I also asked him about the story of two of his Uptown Record executives—Jimmy “Luv” Jenkins and George Harrell (no relation), two of the most respected street dudes from the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx, and 116th Street in Harlem, respectively—giving him a .45 automatic to keep for protection. Andre tried to place the gun in the back of his waistband. However, the .45 slipped through and down his pants, and landed on the floor of the elevator. Andre, Jimmy, and George jumped back, but the gun didn’t discharge. Andre didn’t respond for almost a minute, and then said to me, “Who are you supposed to be? Ed Bradley? Things happen.” We cracked up laughing, and became fast friends after that.

May 1990. Sitting in the darkness of one of the screening rooms at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Productions compound, Andre Harrell, the late film producer George Jackson, and myself are watching the dailies of the Warner Bros. film New Jack City. It was a week before the film wrapped in June, and George specifically wanted to gauge Andre’s reaction to the film that would help launch the careers of Wesley Snipes, Allen Payne, Mario Van Peebles, Chris Rock, and Ice-T. We were watching the scene of Snipes, Payne, and the late Bill Nunn—in character as Nino Brown, Gee Money, and Duh Duh Duh Man—riding down Lenox Avenue and 135th Street in the Jeep Wrangler. After Nino listens to Gee Money’s pitch of them making crack the bedrock of their narcotics sales, and asking if crack is going to change the world, Gee Money responds, “I don’t know about all of that ‘change the world’ shit, but what I do know, they be going crazy over this, I’m telling you! And the bitches?!” Gee Money stands up in the Jeep—“The bitches?! They do anything for this, man!” At that moment, the lights went up, and Andre jumped up out of his seat, like his pants were on fire. He looked at George, and then looked at me. “Yo, that’s the Black Godfather! The Black Godfather! This movie is going to be outta-outta here! Y’all won!” George looked at me, and smiled and said, “If Andre says it, then it’s going to come true.” And it did.

Alonzo Brown and Harrell of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde performing in London, 1986.By David Corio/Redferns.

June 1990. Poolside at the Mondrian in West Hollywood. Al Green flashed his magnetically maniacal Colgate smile, singing to himself, on his way to breakfast with friends near the back of the lounge area. I was sitting at a table with Russell Simmons and the prolific director Stan Lathan ordering breakfast and waiting for Andre Harrell. Just then, a window flew upward on the fourth floor. It was Andre. Shirtless and a towel tied around his waist. He looked at me, Russell, and Stan with that gummy and toothy grin, as he shouted down to us:

“Yo! Order me a plate of two scrambled cheese eggs, buttered wheat toast, and some chicken sausage. No pork. Chicken sausage. I ain’t eatin’ no heart attacks today. I’ll be down in a few!” I looked at Russell and Stan, and we shook our heads with a smile. Andre hired me to write a script called Private Times, a movie he wanted to accompany Al B. Sure!’s sophomore album, after his 1988 breakout, In Effect Mode. When Andre joined us 15 minutes later, he was amped. I remember saying to him, “You yelled downstairs like you were in the Bronxville,” the name of the housing projects where he was raised. Andre laughed. “My mom used to ball up money in a paper towel with a rubber band around it, and throw it downstairs to me, when she needed something from the store. No matter where I go, the Bronxville is coming with me.”

October 2004. A small park overlooking the FDR Drive adjacent to the United Nations and Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Andre Harrell scooched behind me, trying to light a thin “pin joint” of weed, ducking the wind and a few cops walking around. “Stand still, nigga, I’m trying to light this joint!” he said, using some matches. “Hurry up, man!” I said to him. Finally, he found ignition, and blasted off with a few deep tokes. I stood away, not trying to get a contact: I stopped smoking cheeba in October 1980. Andre laughed: “I see you, B.”

It was a good day, because Andre would disappear on me for months at a time, scheduling an interview for his memoir, and then canceling at the last minute. “It’s hard for me to talk about myself, man. I don’t like to play the mirrors” he once told me. I agreed with him. “Playing the mirrors”—the hood vernacular for looking at the rearview mirror while driving, especially when trying to elude the undercovers and/or stickup kids—means that the past is an object that is painfully closer than it seems.

But Andre was in a particularly good and candid mood on this gusty fall day. I asked him about the long-standing record-business folklore, of him and Alonzo Brown sneaking out of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills in linen-covered food carts on the service elevator, when Suge Knight and a few of his Death Row crew came to talk to him about the contracts of Mary J. Blige and Jodeci. Andre looked at me and smiled, and said, “Next question.” I asked him, was Uptown his mission statement, and if so, what was Andre Harrell trying to tell us? Andre took two more deep drags from his joint. Held it in his lungs, and then stubbed out the joint under the heel of his Prada sneakers.

“Synchronicity,” Andre said. “I wanted to connect Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Berry Gordy, Motown, Philadelphia International, Shaft, and Super Fly, with Def Jam, Russell Simmons, and Run-DMC. I wanted a world that could coexist with both LL Cool J and Luther Vandross. In the ’60s and ’70s, soul music made us free. In the ’80s, hip-hop made us fearless. Uptown Records was the realization we could have both: freedom and fearlessness.”

He spoke of admiring the street dudes who hung out at the Rooftop, the notorious Harlem roller-skating rink where early hip-hop records broke and drug dealers like Alpo, Rich Porter, and Azie held meetings. He wanted to be fly like those guys, he said. He just didn’t want to go to jail doing it. Uptown was his off-ramp from New Jack City, where he deliberately married professional respectability to the street’s edge. Uptown was about inspiration and aspiration. Like a great film director, he had a role for each of his artists to play on the cultural stage.

Heavy D was modeled after Jackie Gleason, Andre insisted—not the “Bang! Zoom!” bus driver Jackie Gleason, but the “tanned, fly, tuxedoed Miami Beach Jackie Gleason of The Jackie Gleason Show.Teddy Riley and Guy and new jack swing: “the street version of Prince and Michael Jackson.” Al B. Sure!: Smokey Robinson. “Puff was like my young Francis Ford Coppola,” he said. “He is focused, fierce, and unrelenting. Puff worked three times as hard as anybody I have known, and he understood my vision for what became Ghetto Fabulous.” Mary J. Blige was his Diana Ross, and his Barbra Streisand, and his Audrey Hepburn. The first “‘ride or die’ chick.” What’s the 411? was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My Life was The Way We Were. Jodeci was his Temptations and his Rolling Stones. Jeff Redd, the Uptown labelmate who discovered Mary J. Blige, was his Marvin Gaye. Father MC: his hip-hop Billy Paul.

He reflected on getting his $50 million MCA deal in 1993 and his push into the mainstream—a move he described in revolutionary terms. He wanted to create a multimedia company by way of “I Have a Dream” and “By Any Means Necessary.” Freedom and fearlessness.

“I wasn’t trying to cross over into a white pop market,” he said. “I was trying to stay true to the lane I was in, and show black folks that we should always strive for something better. Where you come from doesn’t define who you are.”

Andre Harrell, that ambitious kid from the Bronxville Houses in the South Bronx, wanted to set the world on fire with his dreams of cultural connectivity. Looking back in 2020 it’s not an understatement to think of Uptown Records as the Proxima Centauri of so much that would follow it: Bad Boy, Roc-A-Fella, Roc Nation, Murder Inc., Ruff Ryders, as the satellites bathing in its heat. Mission accomplished. Exeunt, my dear brother.

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