There's another entertainment competition show on the block, and this time it's being presented by BET. The network's new series The Next Big Thing is a show hosted by Charlamagne the God and features a handful of young, talented aspiring entertainers who are hoping to become the next chart-topping artist.
The Next Big Thing has their panel of mentors that include hip hop mogul Dame Dash, Vice President of A&R at EMPIRE Tina Davis, and super-producer Zaytoven. There will also be a bevy of recognizable guests who come in to help the artists along their journey including Joe Budden, the late Nipsey Hussle, Remy Ma, and Tamar Braxton.
If you're familiar with Dame, you'll know that he can often be a challenging personality that goes against the tide. He may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the man knows how to make money, make money. His time as one of Roc-a-Fella's leading forces was an era in hip hop that created dozens of hits, but not everyone is just going to let Dame have his way.
"You know, Damon, he has a point to prove, and he's going to make sure that you hear it," Tina Davis told BET. "Everybody is going to hear what Dame feels, and for me, I felt like, not everybody can just, shut it down. He keeps going, and you can't just, shut him down. I'm not saying I shut him down all the time, but I will say that I stood my ground. I'm not going to sit there and just let you talk me to death."
In an interview with TheGrio, Dame shared that he wasn't going to fall in line just because he's on a television show. “I’ve never been one to try to be accepted at another person’s table because I’ve got to live by their rules which usually don’t coincide with mine and they’re usually not in my best interest. They don’t behoove me. As of yet this industry has been built to exploit us for our benefits or for us to get our benefits taken for us not to be able to reap the fruits of them. It’s a different time. We’re aware because of the Internet and that direct-to-consumer relationship and all the information that people have and the different kinds of platforms, there’s really no excusing letting anybody rob you these days,” he explains."
“So this is a day of building your own table if you’re built for that," Dame continued. "If you have a boss mentality, if you’re not running around being controlled by patterns that we’re born into where we don’t have choices. I consider that a slave mentality. Any chance I get on any platform I get, BET other, I’m going to promote this deprogramming the slavery mentality keeping us in line. Us all thinking we have to do the same thing to fit in and all these rules, down to education that we live by today were all implemented by people that had slaves. So why do we listen to rules that we know were made to control our mind because they couldn’t control our physical? It’s illegal to physically enslave somebody but to mentally enslave someone is not illegal. It’s really your choice. So my thing is to make you aware of that slavery mentality that needs to be broken and deprogrammed at all times.”
