We recently connected with JCO and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, JCO thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the best boss, mentor, or leader you’ve ever worked with.

The best boss I’ve ever had, has been myself.

Let me explain my righteousness and state that this isn’t to slight any prior jobs, supervisors, co-workers or peers I’ve ever had. I decided at a fairly young age that I was going to have a career I actually wanted to pursue. And I figured out quite shortly after that, that having a boss wasn’t exactly my preference. With that mindset drilling deeper throughout my adolescence, I’m partly humbled and another part embarrassed to say I haven’t had many bosses or normal jobs in the work field – which naturally narrows down my choices.

By no means have I made millions, or traveled all seven continents off of my music or visual creativity… yet. But the reasoning behind being my own best boss is that no other boss in the world has given me the privilege of free will. Now, I’ve had wonderful leaders and teammates at jobs give me space to perform a task in my own manner, but not one that has paid me to stop coming in, and instead chase after my own goals. My first actual job was at a smaller branch of a much larger Kansas City library, but I’d be lying if I told you my life goal was to make sure those books and DVDs were shelved in systematic orders. Just like everyone else, I couldn’t wait to clock out and get home to watch my favorite show, eating my favorite dinner. Not my supervisor’s.

Being an independent artist has taken many tolls on my health, both psychical and mental, my relationships, and so many other aspects of life. But, I can (typically) set my alarms when I want, take lunch when I want. While I might be more prone to accidentally going all day without eating, it’s at least due to performing tasks I actually care to see finished.

In truth, I’m grateful for all my bosses and jobs in the past, as I really did learn a good amount on various subjects from various people. But the thing is, they revealed the potential I didn’t know I had. Looking back, the best message I could have ever taken from every one of them collectively, was that if they could be the boss of me, so could I.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is JCO (Jay-see-oh). I’m a rapper, producer and engineer, primarily in rap & hip-hop. I’m currently 22-years-old, living in Kansas City, Missouri.

Since I could stand up, I was walking, talking and breathing sports. The whole family thought I was taking baseball and basketball all the way. I’ve been fortunate to play with some of the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman stadium during competitions. I participated in the Junior Olympics at the age of 8, and earned myself a legitimate silver medal for basketball. I’d even declined campus tours and scholarships from Duke University and other well-known schools when I was in middle school, simply because I had made my first song during an arm injury the same year.

Fighting my undying fear of sounding cliché, that’s when everything changed. It started with one song, then two. And before I knew it, I was 14, burning copies of my first mixtape on Christmas Eve to release the next day. 22-year-old JCO disapproves of the lack of any marketing for that mixtape, but it sparked whatever flame it needed to in order to get me here today. High school wasn’t a real preference of mine either, so I became home-schooled 3 days into my Freshman year. That year came in went before I realized I wasn’t caged in by the same school’s walls anymore. I restructured my curriculum from the many options I now had, and got my diploma within the next year and half. That hit me hard as well, as probably 105% of the student body joked about me dropping out to be a “rapper”. The way I see it, I waved from a distance at my former class of 2018, as I graduated at semester in December of 2016. I’m incredibly proud of that.

Since then, I’d met a couple of friends that were producers, one was more toward my style, the other an EDM DJ. The craziest part of it to me was that we were creating cool stuff. I had no idea what it would all turn into. I’ll admit, I got kind of annoyed with my friend’s jobs. Not that it was my place, but from a selfish standpoint, I couldn’t go over and make beats while they were at work. Over time I decided to just go for it. I had a copy of FL Studio from a homie, just none of the keyboards, monitors and other fancy equipment that my guys had. After long enough, I said I didn’t care enough for that excuse, and used my mouse and computer keyboard to make my first beat entirely on my own. That beat ended up making track 4 on my first full project. Creating that first beat turned me into an officially self-produced artist. 15 more tracks down the line, I dropped my first album ‘REAL’ in August of 2017. From there… oh boy.

My first show was a week after I dropped ‘REAL’, and I was on the bill to headline a rock band’s album release show – with a 45 minute set. It had less people than I always imagined when I closed my eyes, but it went better than I ever anticipated. Following that, I pushed forward to getting onto more of my first local shows and connecting with local artists. Pretty quickly I gained some very inspiring attention from some areas of Kansas City’s own, Strange Music. I’ve since been fortunate enough to work with several of their artists on shows, photos, even getting to engineer some features on beats I’ve produced. I had a release in 2018 titled ‘Nighttime’ that was never my flashiest. To my surprise over this summer (2022), that same track almost gave me a heart attack when I saw it has now amassed over 1.4 million plays across the board. That’s stuff that middle-school JCO only dreamed of.

Fast forward, I’ve been making music for a while now, but I’m still learning every day how to run a business. We’re certainly not where we started anymore, and for that I’m most grateful. When I wrote my first song at twelve, I had no notion of keeping business records or noting tax write-offs. To say and see what I’ve done over the past while only accelerates my drive to do bigger and better things in the future. I’m currently blessed and excited to not only create my own music, but to be able to produce, engineer, design and overall work with friends and clients. Of course a big goal here is to grow, grow, grow. Everything that’s happening, scale it up. But what I want to target specifically is the rate of that growth. Some say they just want to grow ‘quickly’ or ‘blow up overnight’. One of those is vague, the other is unrealistic – in that order. But I want to grow exponentially. Take what I’m working with now and make it double ten times over. That doesn’t all just come from thin air because I started off wanting to rap.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Ironically enough, all my talk about preference has landed me this answer here. I had to unlearn my own preference in a game where people care immensely about their own. That’s the double-edged sword that is being a self-produced artist. While I am my own artist and have my own selfish agenda, the business side of my work isn’t allowed to put that on display. When I’m making a beat that I know isn’t going to end up mine, why would I make a beat directly tailored for me, when it’s the other artist’s feeling toward the song that matters?

I had to stop making my favorite kind of music all the time. Not to say I dislike what I’ve worked on with other artists, but it pushes me to make quality content in places I might not normally be passing through. My favorite artist is not the most popular artist in the world, and the beat or mood of my next song isn’t the beat that every rapper on Earth is out to get. I still have my struggles with it here and there, but once I realized that you have to sell a product that others are searching for too, that exponential growth kicked me and my business mindset up a level.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think the dedication and credibility of many of us is often overlooked or misconstrued. My high school, for example. I had people I’d never heard of, people I’d never talked to, and even a few of my very best friends in life were throwing shade, publicly or otherwise. While they were all hootin’ and hollerin’ about their pal, the dropout – they very much overlooked and misconstrued the hard work I put in after their final school bell had rung. The hard work that handed me my diploma a grade and a year and a half ahead of them.

But aside from myself, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have like-minded friends around me. Of course I have my people that aren’t necessarily music oriented, but the ones that surprise me sometimes are the people I can call at 6 AM and run an idea by, because they’re on the same wave of surviving the following day on 3 hours of sleep. I understand working a part or full-time job, a 9-5, a Monday-through-Friday isn’t easy and is definitely not always a pleasure. Especially when it’s not something you even really want to do. That’s why I got out of them. But money and life call, so us artists who quit their jobs or ‘dropped out’ of high school have to sometimes work Monday through Monday, or 9-9 to make up for not having a paycheck every 2 weeks. We have to overcome and accept the fact that a lot of times our results aren’t measured by the hour on a set schedule, sometimes we have to work some insane overtime, and that sometimes our worst performance to ourselves could be the best thing ever to somebody else. It can wear you down, and it’s not as easy as one might think.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/JCO816
• Other: All links and socials are attached in the URL above.

Image Credits
Photos by Dakota Zugelder, Dyllon Maddox, Billie Hughes and Sam Stepney. Photos edited by JCO, Dyllon Maddox and Billie Hughes.