The Coolest Hood Has Free Admission, But It Comes With A Price to the Artist.

Stunta "IMMA HARDHEAD" feat. Sho Stoppa and Yung Kleva Music Video from G Films on Vimeo.

What did The Joker say in the flick The Dark Knight? "If you're good at something, never do it for free." It's what we were taught by our entrepreneurial mentors growing up. It's simple enough to understand. It makes sense.

But there's a business term that contradicts that phrase and it, too, can have a monetary payoff - later. It's called "sweat equity." It's when you put skin in the game to get long-term, substantial capital gains down the road versus immediate, small ones. Essentially, you work for free, temporarily, until your efforts pay-off big. Let's take it out of the college classroom and bring it to life through hip-hop terms.

Ben Westhoff recently wrote a piece on Chamillionare in the Houston Press, which mentioned that the artist cracked Forbes's list of top-earning rap stars of 2008 at No. 14 with an estimated $10 million. But think of the countless hours Chamillionare spent in the studio, the time it took to guerrilla-market his music to build an awareness, the number of bars spit that were never heard and the countless mixtapes that eventually led to a reputation, that led to a following, that led to low-paying road shows, that led to slowly building a Houston household brand-name, that led to a major-label deal, that finally turned into $10 million.

DJ Nawfy

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Everything before those seven zeroes was Chamillionaire's sweat equity. He didn't get paid to hustle, but when he wiped his brow after all that hard work, it wasn't clear sweat drops in the palm of his hand. It was money.

There are obvious pros to living in a city so welcoming of independent, out-the-trunk-selling artists where "the hustle" is a normality, but there has to be some cons to it, too, right?

A Rosenberg rapper called us last night, named Lee-Coc, who was out in Los Angeles shopping his demo and he tells us it's a place where the Houston hustle is a rarity, not a normality, so he stands out more and that does wonders for him. That's his differentiator. What does that tell us? In Houston, the game is saturated with hustling rappers and it's hard to stand out. Even if you're good, it's hard to stand out. That's a sentiment that we've heard in all our interviews.

So what's the one dynamic that can always rise above the crowded, packed-like-sardines Houston rap scene? One word, actually.

Free.

Give something away for free and it'll stand out. When's the last time you turned down some orange chicken on a toothpick when walking through a crowded Galleria food court?