What happens when you combine a business degree, a passion for hip hop, and an expert lens on pop culture? Disruptive magic. Music journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy is the author of Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion. After earning her business degree at Michigan Ross, she moved to New York but wasn’t looking for a typical finance job that many in her cohort were after. She was there for the music. Sowmya joins Breaking Schemas hosts Marcus Collins and John Branch to chat about the years she spent paying her dues in mailrooms and interviewing stars like J. Cole and Travis Scott before they were huge, the importance of finding your authentic personal brand, and how to leverage a bricolage kind of disruption. *Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Be yourself in the face of adversity and differences17:00: I do think that for someone like myself and for anybody who is like an immigrant or who grows up in a place where you might not fit in for a variety of reasons, you can either lean into what makes you special or you can try to fit in. And I've always just believed in it. Be yourself. Whatever that is, it is special and unique, and nobody could be like that before.Yourself as your personal brand20:46: In hip hop, a lot of people have street names or nicknames that people have called you, and I was like, no, no, no. This is the brand. I need people to know where I come from— I need people to know that I come from another country. That was important to me, even as a kid. I don't want to come in calling myself something else because that's part of what makes me unique. And in the marketplace, there are people who gravitate towards me specifically because they know that's what I represent.Unlocking your potential in a multi-passionate world30:08: Nowadays, there are so many more opportunities to be a multi-hyphenate. Try things out. I've tried some things, and it's not a fit. I've been to auditions; I've done pilots that went nowhere and never got picked up. They will never see the light of day, but all of those experiences are just bricks in your story.Show Links:Fashion Killa bookSowmya’s website

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