We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Coran “BIG CEDRO” Crawford. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Coran “BIG CEDRO” below.
Coran “BIG CEDRO”, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
As far as the music, the whole career journey is a risk. It’s not an easy task to go against the norm so you can pursue a passion, especially in this economy. There’s a lot of distractions out here, whether it’s your own family telling you that your dreams aren’t realistic, or going through life situations that can’t be helped. My biggest goal is to be able to live off my passion, and I feed into this goal daily. It’s not about how much money I can make off of making music, but more so being able to do something that I’m good at, and I enjoy doing it for the rest of my life. With that being said, I take these risks that come with putting myself out there and showing the world who I am, I been in different hoods, and been in different scenarios, and I lost a lot of people in my life, whether it’s just a severed relationship or people that I care about passing away. I always find myself bearing the odds, no matter how mentally or emotionally frustrated I get. This is why I my production label’s logo got the two acronyms. RTAMTA doesn’t just stand for ‘RANTANA MILITIA’ but it also stand for ‘Risk Takes Ambition, Money Takes Action’. You can’t cut your bread unless u go against the grain, For real.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Name’s Coran, but people call me CED. I was born in Oceanside, California, but was raised in Detroit, Michigan between the east and west side. Came from a loving but broken family. Around age 4 my auntie gave me a guitar for my birthday, and I’ve been in love with music ever since. My stepdad was producing music since I was 8 years old, and I picked up on it after he showed me once. I mostly wrote poetry and lyrics to type beats during middle school. When my mother passed away when I was 14, I was doing a lot of stupid stuff like stealing, doing drugs, and drinking throughout high school. I used to help a close friend with his music and it got me back into having a passion for it. I took it serious after I graduated High School in Japan and moved to my auntie’s crib in St. Pete, FL. I bought $150 worth of producer equipment, and I ain’t stopped working on music ever since. I went to college at 20 years old, but I dropped out at 22 because the college’s environment was hostile. And I couldn’t focus. I lived in Tampa, FL for another year until I could get a place for myself. I ended up moving with my girlfriend in ATL when I turned 24, and I’ve been building on my music business and got really active in the music community out here. Ever since I been out here, I’ve been working on my production label RTAMTA, and my goal is to make money off my streams and beat sales. If you ever need a beat, you can contact me through my DMs. I’m currently building a website and my trait rain account so that people can check out my content and buy music all in one place. I am also working on my first project “RANTANA” and it will be coming out soon.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
People have told me personally that the music industry is over saturated and is hard to fit in. Whenever I hear “over saturated” I don’t think about how too many people is in this industry, but instead I think optimistically , and point out that there’s a lot of folks in this industry because there’s money in it. I’ve also heard people say that all artists we’ll eventually sell out and act bougie and different. In my opinion, just because you wanted to switch up your style, celebrate your money, or decides to take a break on music, does not make you a sell out, nor someone that fell off.
First of all, I think a lot of aspiring rappers need to move out of the hood and put more effort in their craft, and bigger artists should do more with helping smaller artists. I also think collabs between two artists should only be royalty based, not paying upfront only for the song to be garbage.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rantanashit?igsh=MXNweGE0d2VsMGp3Ng%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/czke6egMvpfQvOfXQt
Image Credits
Rannulf media
Soul Asylum Studios