** PATREON: www.patreon.com/HardPathofRhythm **

The Hard Path of Rhythm is a content channel and production company created by Wax Poetics cofounder Brian DiGenti and longtime WP writer Mark McCord that produces narrative, episodic music stories, primarily in the form of visual docuseries.

"The Hip-Hop Shangri-La" is the channel’s inaugural docuseries, based on McCord’s article by the same name originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 1/Vol. 2 in 2021. It tells the story of a mysterious gangster named “Fat Jack” Taylor who created the club Harlem World where the first rap record was born; and the music producer Sylvia Robinson who captured lightning in a bottle and changed the course of popular music history.

Future series include a little-known tale of Marvin Gaye’s late-’70s existential crisis on the beaches (and recording studios) of Hawaii, and a murky story of an African American music exec/bodyguard whose close ties to the Italian mob come back to haunt him.