Phil Chang '08 has no such misgivings. Currently one of the most active musicians on campus, he has also branched out beyond Dartmouth by recording with various artists from all over the music map, including famous rappers and indie artists such as Mos Def and The Postal Service. He also manages fellow student artists and runs a management company in New York.
Currently, Chang is managing six acts: Salo (Connor Shepherd, '07), I.V. (Simon Trabelsi '08 and Johnathan Ball '08), Rousseau (Andy Won), DJ Johnny Quest (John Choi), and Chief Justice (Dan Borden). His management company in New York is called FAM Group, which stands for Frescatribe (a name he uses to DJ parties) Artist Management. Additionally Chang is in the process of starting a creative consultation company in New York and Los Angeles, which will facilitate collaborations between companies and urban lifestyle brands. He has staff in both New York and Los Angeles that take care of everything while he is at school.
Chang said that his drive toward music began in middle school, when he spent most of his time staying inside drawing and listening to music. He ultimately began writing his own music, which led to his involvement with several diverse and innovative genres.
Today he is striving to promote a superior quality of sound that he has worked so hard to develop.
Chang has a number of people, both at Dartmouth and elsewhere, with whom he closely works. When Chang entered Dartmouth College in the Fall of 2004, he linked up with Trabelsi at the beginning of their orientation.
"Simon was the first real guy that I was on the same level with, skill-wise. He was a stylistic counterpart. He's from the Bay area, which has a whole different level that I could speak about. I'm from a more eclectic, international background," said Chang about his work with Trabelsi.
At the time Chang was still working with Choi (his best friend) and Borden (whom he met in elementary school), and he was seriously considering creating a management group where he could work with other artists and help them to develop their own sounds. His skill as a manager and an organizer is very visible at Dartmouth, where he has been active in organizing a variety of different projects.
Northern Lights, a hip-hop show that he put together last term, turned out to be a great success. Chang said he was surprised by the number of people that showed up, because "hip-hop is not a big Dartmouth thing."
Chang said that he wanted to show a more approachable side to hip-hop, and to prove "that you don't need the MTV cookie-cutter pigeonhole to be a successful artist."
Cheered by the audience's enthusiastic response at the show, Chang hopes that it will lead to bigger and better things at Dartmouth.
One of the major projects he has worked on outside of Dartmouth is his collaboration with The Postal Service, a group that blends indie rock, techno, pop and hip-hop. When asked about how he created connections with well-known artists, Chang replied that he simply started with the smaller indie bands whose own e-mail addresses were listed instead of their management's. "As long as you have something legitimate, they don't turn you down. The Perceptionists were the first big indie hip-hop group I contacted. Just name-drop a lot and eventually you'll reach the bigger artists," said Chang. The latter includes the likes of Mos Def and Joe Hahn of Linkin Park (with whom Chang worked in high school) and, of course, The Postal Service.
"They were so surprised because they thought that rappers would never want to work with them," Chang said about the band. Other ongoing projects include collaborating with artists from the Garden State soundtrack. Chang is also working on the albums of the artists he's managing. He is trying to market Ball and Trabelsi as a group called I.V.
"The way Phil arranged those performances so quickly, being so new to the campus, made me realize his networking and managing skills are superior," said Trabelsi. "Phil put us in the position to work on an I.V. album to be released and distributed sometime in the third quarter of this year."
He also just finished a song that took him nine months to complete -- a piece he calls "Life in Transit," featuring Chris Lonegro '07 on vocals. "The reason why it took me so long is because I wrote each verse three months after the previous one. Chris really tied it all together," Chang said.
Chang draws much from the experiences garnered during his internship at MTV in Korea. He is currently coordinating an Asian-American artists program for Summer 2006, in which a wide variety of artists will come to Dartmouth including Margaret Cho, Snacky Chan, Jin, Far-East Movement, Ken Oak, Ishle Yi Park (Def Poetry Jam) and graffiti artist David Choe.
