STANDING ON BUSINESS HOW TO SUCCEED IN HARLEM WITHOUT REALLY FLEXING (MUCH).
- Nico Cipher
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Disclosure, rendered in the spirit of the fine print it deserves: the undersigned magazine hereby acknowledges a pre-existing relationship with the artist known as BUSINESS, said relationship encompassing friendship, prior editorial contribution, and photography by a party also employed by this publication. Void where prohibited. Terms subject to change without notice, much like the artist's own choruses.
By Nico Cipher, Photos by Trudy Giordano
"The real trick BUSINESS pulls off isn't insisting on his seat at the table, it's building the table himself, quietly, then acting surprised you noticed."
Origin Story
He wasn’t born into New York bravado; he moved into it. Originally from Amsterdam, BUSINESS (also known as BUSINESS NYC or Kevin Gray, per his own official bio page) picked up the gold chain the way some people pick up a work ethic: not handed down, earned one show at a time. That’s the entire premise of Standing On Business, his five-track EP, out now on every platform your algorithm already knows you use.
BUSINESS relocated to New York in the wake of the pandemic and has since kept a schedule that looks less like a rap career and more like a small logistics company: 150-plus shows across Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, Queens, and Coney Island, plus runs through New Jersey, Connecticut, and Georgia, a sold-out night opening for The Lox, and a slot at SXSW. Standing On Business doesn’t play like a debut. It plays like someone finally invoicing for work he’s already done.
Self-Sufficiency & Influences
Every credit on this record says the same thing: written, performed, produced by BUSINESS, drums included. In an era where half of SoundCloud is built on the same twelve purchased loops, that’s not a flex; it’s just accurate. His stated influences, Cash Cobain and Pop Smoke’s drill lineage sitting next to Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, tell you he did his homework before he started handing out homework of his own.
Track-by-Track: Flex, Fantasy, and Reality
Opener “Shady AF” comes in already sure of itself, no warm-up, no apology. “Where My Money At” and “7 Figure Deal” hold down the record’s aspirational center, less fantasy than itemized invoice. Both tracks also carry more political weight than their hooks let on; current events surface more than once, though it’s “Temu Troopers” that goes furthest with it.
Politics and Satire: "Temu Troopers (Fuck ICE)"
Standing On Business doesn’t announce itself as protest music, which is exactly why “Temu Troopers (Fuck ICE)” hits as hard as it does. The setup is pure dread: drones, masks, unmarked SUVs, the specific modern horror of not being able to tell whether the people watching you are cops, ICE, or just guys with a badge from the same catalog as everyone’s Halloween costume this year. That’s the joke buried in “Temu troopers,” discount tactical gear playing dress-up as legitimate authority, and it’s a genuinely funny way to make a genuinely unfunny point: half these operations look like cosplay right up until they don’t.
Naming Alligator Alcatraz kills the joke on purpose. That’s a real facility, in the news, right now, and the song wants you to feel the whiplash of going from “ha, knockoff soldiers” to “oh, this is actually happening to people.” The closing argument, that enforcement gets carried out by folks with nothing to gain from it, on behalf of billionaires who’ll never see the ground level, isn’t subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a hook built for a room to yell back, not a think piece, and it works exactly as well live as it reads on paper.
Comedy, Reflection, and the "New Ferrari"
The record earns its right to go back to jokes because it just proved it’s not afraid to drop them. “New Ferrari” closes things out, and it’s smarter than its title suggests, less brag than comedy sketch: a dealership scene thick with unwanted flirtation, a car that rides worse than expected, a narrator who spends the whole song quietly admitting the flex isn’t hitting the way it’s supposed to, even while he’s performing it. Jersey Turnpike traffic and torn-up Manhattan asphalt do the real work here, puncturing the fantasy the second the car actually has to be driven somewhere. It’s the track that got its own video, shot on Meserole Street in collaboration with Kevin Webb of Takeover Republic, and on reflection it plays like the whole EP’s thesis: the gap between looking like you made it and actually making it.
One more thing worth clocking: the cover art, also shot on Meserole Street, has him standing on one of the low, weathered barrier boxes scattered along the block, the kind of unglamorous municipal furniture whose entire job is to stop something. He’s using it as a pedestal instead. Given the title of the record, that’s not an accident.
Process & Philosophy
None of this got built in a lab. In a 2025 sit-down with Hot97’s DJ Drewski, BUSINESS admitted “New Ferrari” wasn’t so much written as workshopped, rebuilt after nearly every show, four different choruses deep by the time it locked in, tuned by the simplest method there is: watching what actually makes a room react. The same patience shows up in how he releases music: no album to have an album, every song treated like it has to earn the listener’s attention on its own. The video came together the same unglamorous way, one introduction leading to the next, a promoter here, an interested party there, exactly the grinding the title of this EP seems to be quietly recommending as a life philosophy.
Concise Statement
At eleven minutes and thirty-six seconds, Standing On Business doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t need to. It’s a mission statement delivered at a normal volume: an artist telling you exactly where he’s standing, then daring you to check his math.
Context: Beyond the Record
The record makes more sense once you know the rest of what he’s been doing. Consider:
Reporting from Within
BUSINESS has done the actual reporting on this world himself. In 2024, he filed a long piece for this magazine on New York’s underground hip-hop showcase circuit, the unlicensed venues, the pay-to-play open mics, the pat-downs at the door, the haze you walk through to get to the stage, all the unglamorous machinery underneath the rap-game fantasy. That wasn’t opinion; it was reporting, the kind only available to someone who’s actually stood in a hundred and fifty of those rooms. Read next to that piece, Standing On Business stops looking like a vanity project and starts looking like the next chapter from someone who understands, better than any outside critic could, exactly what getting out of that circuit actually costs.
Performance and Persona
"You're a movie, bro." / "Yeah, I am weird, so I'm always a character."
Near the end of that same Drewski conversation, the host leaned in. "You're a movie, bro," he said, the kind of line that reads as a compliment and a diagnosis at once. "Yeah, I am weird, so I'm always a character," BUSINESS shot back, not missing a beat. Worth sitting with: Business, Businessman, Boss Man, the names stack up like a guy with more than one desk. Standing On Business plays like the soundtrack to whichever one's currently running the meeting. By his own account, the line between the performance and the person was never that clean to begin with.
He has the rare ability to make rap look like a quiet profession. Soft-spoken, composed, and always a step ahead, he carries himself less like someone chasing attention and more like someone who already knows where he's headed. His energy says "handle business first, celebrate later," the kind of rapper who'd rather build an empire than win an argument. Even when the conversation slows down, his confidence never does; it's understated, deliberate, and almost suspiciously well-adjusted for the genre.
Final Point & Release Info
The real trick BUSINESS pulls off isn’t insisting on his seat at the table; it’s building the table himself, quietly, then acting surprised you noticed. Performer and person aren’t really separate here; the hustle is real, and the funniest part might be how effortless he makes all of it look. BUSINESS NYC’s “Standing On Business” EP is out now on all major streaming platforms, the culmination of everything he’s put in so far, and by the sound of it, just a preview of what’s next.
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