Rapper Prince Harvey recorded his entire album inside an Apple Store in New York. The project is cleverly entitled PHATASS, which stands for Prince Harvey At The Apple Store: SoHo. The rapper said his computer crashed, and he didn’t have the means to replace it. Harvey said saving enough money to buy a new computer would be time consuming, and so he devised a plan to secretly record his album in the Apple Store in SoHo (Manhattan). “It wasn’t my plan to record this at the Apple Store. First my computer died, and then my external hard drive died. New York is expensive- I couldn’t just buy another laptop,” Harvey told The Daily Beast. His plan to record an album in the store proved to be easier said then done; the rapper had to continuously dodge the store’s security and Apple employees who may become suspicious of what he was doing. Harvey didn’t know the computers in the store are on a routine memory wipe at night, until after his files were deleted. The rapper realized in order to avoid having his music erased from the hard drive, he would have to hide his files in the computer’s trash bin.
Harvey would also email his files when he finished recording, or he would put the recordings on a flash drive. Again, the task of saving his work proved to be a difficult task. “One time there was a fire drill and I was trying to save my work, and this lady came over and disconnected the thumb drive [or flash drive] while it was saving,” he said. It would take Harvey 16 weeks (working 5 days a week) to complete his album, which he recorded using just his voice and a microphone. While some people may say Harvey used “a poor man’s” method of recording, the rapper beliefs are the complete opposite. “I don’t think I’m poor. Poor is a mentality. I can be broke- no money in my pocket, but I have never been poor. I’ve been rich my whole life,” Harvey told The Daily Beast. PHATASS will be released later this month on July 26th. The rapper is hopeful this project will help build his popularity as a hip-hop artist. His story is making its rounds on the Internet, and the rapper’s Soundcloud page has received a lot of attention. One of his songs “Sometimes” has already gained over 100,000 plays on Soundcloud.