Love Renaissance (LVRN) is a progressive record label, management team and multi-media company based in Atlanta. They have an ever-growing roster of chart-topping hip hop and R&B talent, including 6lack, DRAM and Summer Walker. They recently took the innovative step to add mental health coaching to the services they offer their artists. In this episode of My Rhythm and My Blues, we sit in on a free-flowing conversation between LVRN Co-founders Sean Famoso McNichols, Tunde Balogun, and Carlon Ramong. Learn how they got started, what it means to be a Black leader in the music business and how they hope to create a legacy. Take a look:
Carlon Ramong: Love Renaissance is, at heart, a family. Professionally a record label and creative management company based out of Atlanta, Georgia.
Sean Famoso McNichols: We all met each other in various parts of our lives. Tunde and myself have known each other since high school. After getting to college, we met Carlon, Justice, Junia. We just kinda rose through the ranks and learned a lot as we started to get new talent, Raury being the first, DRAM, then 6lack, Summer Walker. We slowly found our way into having enough success to link a partnership with Interscope and have been trying to kill it ever since.
Carlon: Love Renaissance, the name kinda stemmed from when we were creating our company we felt that it was just a lack of love and attention to women in general within music that we wanted to bring back. The Atlanta sound is known for just trap music and money, strip club, drugs and I think as much as that does represent where we come from, we also wanna just kinda shine a light on another left side of Atlanta. That kinda just came from who we personally are as first generation immigrants. My family's from Trinidad, Sean is Jamaican, Tunde is Nigerian and then Junia and Justice are Ghanaian.
The idea of Renaissance was having a movement that expands past general demographics or race or anything. It was just like a human movement.
COVID changed everything about the nature of the work in our process.
Sean: Just kinda seeing how close we all are to all of our artists to the point that we can just throw around quick ideas inside of a group chat and then give them to the world. Literally just pitch an idea to your artist real quick who may just be chilling at the house with a couple of songs ready to go and his birthday is around the corner. The hot sauce concept in general was just super fun because one, if you're a 6lack fan, you know chicken wings are his favorite food and being from Atlanta, hot sauce is important and chicken wings are important. Being able, again, to blend something that people can take away from the music and just give them an environment to listen to the music I think is what we did really well. We've gotten to the point where corporate partners trust us to do cool shit. Back in the day we had to go find all the money in the world to do it ourselves, but now it's really dope to have people know that they can just trust you with the reins.
Tunde Balogun: People don't realize the benefit of actually having the people that are in the culture make sure the people behind the music or what's going on are actually reflective of the people making it and putting it out.
From a cultural view, being able to be vocal, especially in our position about what's right, who should be getting these jobs and also pushing away the old system.
Carlon: Being a Black executive is just a very important role. I think that within the Black community, it's often hard to come together because the system has often put us at odds with one another, so I think that when you do have a collective of Black people that can come together, it's a beautiful thing, it's an amazing thing. I think the music industry benefits a lot off of Black music and there haven't been a lot of high-level Black executives to oversee and protect the nurturing of that. It's our job to open the doors for other Black executives because rap and hip-hop and R&B is the number one genre in the world right now.
Sean: It's so evident that there are certain things that are cancerous within the industry that have, for generations, taken some of our favorite artists away, some of our favorite executives away. It's hard for us to just naturally watch that, it's hard for us to have an artist that we know is going through something but just continue to throw them on stage.
The idea of mental health, especially in the Black community, there isn't a natural education around it because a lot of people are just worried about where their next meal is coming from that the idea of mental health is a luxury. It's not genius, it's responsible. It's what's supposed to have been happening.
Tunde: Work, in some way, form or fashion, will be always your butcher. Helping your mind won't if you don't take care of it. We know even as partners, we have group sessions also just to do things, so I think it's about being intentional about keeping your mental and your health well. There are many issues that plague us as a Black community and many things we want to address. The Black Music Action Coalition, it's a way for us to come together, point out everything we wanna address in alliance. Some things are now, some things are for the future.
I tell people it's a marathon, not a sprint.
Carlon: Love Renaissance, LVRN as a whole I would love to just go down as an amazing Black-owned company that set the standard and set a new base for Black entrepreneurs in general.
Sean: For us, what could be really important is creating a legacy for a time period that we were at the forefront of making sure that people that look like us, think like us, and that just needed an opportunity that we provided for.
Tunde: I would love for us to one day be in Fast Company's best places to work for, to be honest. We literally go out of our way to make sure we have an environment to have that. We have very big aspirations. It helps us help everybody else. The more things we have going on globally, the more opportunities that we can provide also.
Carlon: Just using our power to help other Black creatives.
