Call it a Comeback: Hip Hop Bling King Damon Dash does Beijing

With both the Midi and Strawberry festivals going down this past weekend, hip hop impresario Damon Dash was spotted out and about town taking in Beijing's music scene.

Renowned for being Jay-Z's first producer and launching the careers of Kanye West, Beanie Sigel and Cam’ron, among others, Dash rose from rough and tumble beginnings in Harlem and amassed an empire that included "a record label, five clothing and shoe companies, a Swiss watch company, a top-shelf vodka company, a television production house, and a movie production company ... worth an estimated USD 50 million," according to the Atlanta Post.

But his fortunes fell in 2004 after a very public falling out with his former protege, Jay-Z (read all about it here). With his marriage, houses and business interests on the rocks, the 38-year-old has been working on rebuilding his empire with a host of creative music, art and business related projects - among them DD172, a four-story art salon-cum-music space in Tribeca, Creative Control (an online TV station) and the BlackRoc project that has paired Ohio blues rock wunderkinds The Black Keys with a who's-who of MCs, including Mos Def, Raekwon, Black Thought, The RZA and more.

We ran into Dash Sunday night in Nanluoguxiang's Jiang Hu Bar where he was meeting up with China concert promoters Split Works, Beijing's own DJ Wordy and Sexy Beijing's Su Fei to talk business prospects. Sporting black hipster frames and a new iPad, Dash had spent the weekend checking out both Midi and Strawberry, as well as a bit of Beijing nightlife, including D-22 in Haidian.

Looking a bit worn out (Dash and his entourage had previously toured Hong Kong and Shanghai), he wearily explained how he wasn't here to "just check out the hip hop scene, just looking for good music," but came a bit more to life when showing unreleased studio footage of his latest BlackRoc 2 project (featuring Mos Def, Scully and Jay Electronica). Accompanying him was videographer Coodie Simons, who is perhaps now best known for shooting Erykah Badu's controversial "Window Seat" video in which the singer strips butt naked while walking around Dallas's Dealy Plaza, site of the JFK assasination.

Of course time will tell if anything comes of this (maybe a Carsick Cars cameo in Blackroc 3?), and Dash is certainly not the first well-known celebrity producer to come to town looking for talent (Industrial music pioneer and Einstuerzende Neubauten co-founder Blixa Bargeld; PiL, Pigface, Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails producer Martin Atkins, and Public Enemy producer and bassist Brian Hardgroove have all come knocking before him), but for a hip hop fanboy like me (no pics, unfortunately, I was a bit too soused), there was something sublimely surreal about standing around a Beijing hutong talking up the merits of yangrou chuan'r with Mr Bling himself.