He's only 17 and there are no gold records on his wall, but Cameron "Wiz Khalifa" Thomaz talks the talk of a rapper who's already platinum.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Wiz Khalifa is a 17-year-old rapper from Allderdice High School. Click photo for larger image.

"Oh, I've got mad songs," Khalifa reports with a self-assured grin, his lanky frame stretched out across a couch at I.D. Labs in Lawrenceville.

"I definitely want to be one of the big icons of music and hope to start a movement that will be well-respected from Pittsburgh."

Any kid can say that, and most do at some point, but Khalifa's got the skills, the looks, the confidence, the drive and the charisma for the job.

He's also got mad hook-up: Benjy Grinberg, an Allderdice graduate who spent three years as L.A. Reid's executive assistant -- that's assistant to the CEO -- at Arista Records before leaving in 2003 to do his own thing as the head of Rostrum Records.

Grinberg, 27, hit the New York City fast track after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where, he says, "I did a bunch of internships, different labels, radio stations, stuff like that. Then, I moved to New York and by being in the right place at the right time found a job as L.A. Reid's executive assistant. Clive Davis had just been let go, and L.A. Reid had been made president of Arista. I stayed with him for three years and during that time, I was basically the gatekeeper. All music kind of went through me to him, and I got more confident in myself and my ear, so to speak."

The first act signed to Rostrum, Nitty, scored a hit in late 2004 with "Nasty Girl," at which point Universal Records signed on to press and distribute the Bronx-based rapper's Rostrum album, "Player's Paradise."

But he's keeping his options open with Khalifa, Rostrum's second signing. Grinberg says he hopes to have Khalifa's record on the streets by early spring, but hasn't settled on a major label to press and distribute it.

"The beauty of my situation," Grinberg says, "is that I can take my records wherever I want. I don't have an exclusive deal with Universal, where I have to give them my records. I obviously have a good relationship with them and I will play them Wiz's stuff. But I feel like he may be more appropriate for other labels. Wiz is a long-term career artist, and if one of his singles happens to not go to No. 1, I don't want a label to lose interest in the project. We're all in this for the long term."

Not that hit singles are out of the question in the short term.

"There are hits," says Grinberg, flashing the smile of a guy who could conquer the world by 30. "That's the thing. It's not necessarily about one song. It's about the full package. But that's not some hidden excuse for 'Oh, we don't have any big records.' We definitely have big records. What I'm saying is it's not necessarily about a single. It's about getting into Wiz as an artist."

And what exactly is it that a kid like Khalifa can bring to the table, artistically speaking, at his age?

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Benjy Grinberg, left, is a 27-year-old Allderdice graduate who was in Pittsburgh recently working with Wiz Khalifa, right, a 17-year-old rapper who's also from Allderdice. Click photo for larger image.

Grinberg smiles and says, "He's 17 years old with the maturity and lyricism of someone who's been rapping for decades. This isn't just like 'Oh, he's gonna have one hit song and people are gonna love him for a second.' It's the kind of thing where people are gonna love him, not just his music, and want to keep hearing what he has to say, much like a Jay-Z or a Nas, who can be, like, 10 albums, and everyone still wants to hear what they have to say. And he writes every day. This is his outlet. I think he'd probably go crazy if he wasn't writing."

Grinberg says he'd been thinking of looking for someone to sign in what was once his own backyard when a friend from Allderdice, Chad Glick of Strict Flow, turned him onto a kid from Regent Square who'd been recording with his former Strict Flow partner, E, or Eric Dan.

"Here's the thing," says Grinberg. "When I started my label, obviously, I was in New York because getting your start in the music industry, you kind of have to be in either New York or L.A. But it was always my dream to sort of come back to Pittsburgh, my hometown, and find an artist to bring to the rest of the world. I knew there were gonna be some hot artists here. And it just so happens that that was in my mind when Chad hit me with 'You need to hear this kid from Pittsburgh!' And I got really excited. I mean, he goes to the high school I used to go to."

Pittsburgh influence

The road to Rostrum Records started for the North Dakota-born Khalifa at the tender age of 9 or 10. That's when he wrote his first rap. He was 13 when he started self-producing rap tracks at his father's studio in Oklahoma.

His parents, Katie Wimbush-Page and Lawrence Thomaz, divorced when Khalifa was 2 or 3 and both were in the military, so he spent his childhood on the move. By 1996, the year he settled in Pittsburgh with his mother, he'd already lived in Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, England and Germany. It was here that he first started rapping, printing out the lyrics of his favorite rappers on computers at the Homewood library and eventually writing his own raps.

Asked if there are rappers he would cite as inspirations, Khalifa responds like a pro.

"I wouldn't say anybody shaped my style because, like, I'm myself," he says. "I'm an individual. But there are people ... who I admire. Definitely Jay-Z is one of my favorites."

By the time he started hanging out at I.D. Labs, buying his own studio time, his individuality was shining through.

"What really grabbed me when I first heard him was the amount of perspective that he had for someone his age," says E. "The insight."

Khalifa was 16 at the time. And while Glick was taken by surprise at first, these days, he just shrugs and says, "He has an old soul."

His talent impressed the guys at I.D. Labs enough that they started supplying Khalifa with free beats and studio time.

It was about 11 months ago, Khalifa says, that Glick, who would become his manager, turned Grinberg on to the songs he'd been cutting with E. And they've been working on the album ever since.

"A fair amount of the beats are actually Eric's songs and DJ Huggy's, who co-owns I.D. Labs with Eric," Grinberg says. "We've also done some tracks with a local producer named Franchise. We're trying to keep it Pittsburgh-centric. We're trying to keep it as homegrown as possible."

And when the local talent's cutting tracks as hot as "Take You There," a richly textured song that brings a modern bounce to old-school gospel-flavored soul, or the eerier "Soldier," there's no need to send out for the Neptunes.

As Glick sizes up the recordings, "Their production is incredible. It's biased for me to say, but they're at least on par and I think better than anybody else producing right now."

In short, Khalifa couldn't ask for stronger tracks as an unproven 17-year-old from Allderdice. But he delivers on the promise of those tracks with some major-league rapping, from club songs to grittier street scenes rife with fast cars, crack and bodies in the trunk.

In "Walk With Me," he name-checks Pittsburgh on a tour of "the slums of my home" and shrugs off the prospect of murder with "What can I say, man? Crime pays and somebody gotta die." In another track, he plays gangsta to wickedly comic effect with "You like movies? I'll give you a clip. And that's it." On "Take You There," he raps about having a "book full of rhymes that'll stain your brain/But I'm more concerned with changing the game."

As Grinberg says, "He's 17 and you might say 'What does a 17-year-old have to offer me? I'm 27. I've lived a third longer than he has.' But it's less of a message like 'Listen to me; I'm telling you the truth,' less preaching, and more a point of view. It's more 'Listen to what I have to say and what I've been through and how my first 17 years have affected me.' And I think from listening to him tell you what he's been through, you can kind of learn a little bit about yourself."

Earning R-E-S-P-E-C-T

One thing Khalifa doesn't have is performing experience. But no one on his team seems too concerned about it.

"It's not that important right now," says Glick. "There's no music available for people to pick up if they hear him. If the opportunity came up where it was gonna benefit him, of course, but I think right now, it's best that we just get the music taken care of and as we get closer to the album being released, then we can start picking up shows."

And once the songs are there, as Grinberg says, "He's very comfortable in front of people."

In the meantime, he's working on building his street cred.

"These days," Grinberg says, "when you release an artist, it's not just 'Let's take a song to radio.' There's a process to it. Wiz has been on a bunch of mix tapes in the Pittsburgh area. He's starting to appear on some more national level mix tapes. And nowadays, that's where a lot of artists get their start. An important aspect of the whole thing is they need to have respect in the streets as well as the more pop-oriented fans."

So how exactly does one go about securing that respect?

"The streets is my roots," says Khalifa. "I got a lot of family from the streets. Not necessarily streets like shootin', sellin' crack, blah, blah, blah, but just urban black youth. It is HARD growing up in the inner city with all the gang violence. I see a lot and I've seen a lot so I'm basically just speaking to what I've been through and what I know that my people that I'm close with and actually related to have been through. I'm speaking for them. And I speak for myself. It's just Pittsburgh."

The next step is finding a major to press and distribute the record.

"I think I could make it happen," Grinberg says, "but it would happen on a much grander scale if we aligned ourselves with a more major label. It's kind of set up like an oligopoly, where there's these four or five major labels and they have all the networks set up, so if you align yourself with one of them, it's like pushing a button. Suddenly, the record's everywhere.

"And the state of the music industry is that the major labels aren't as much into artist development as they were maybe a couple of decades ago, so they rely on people like myself to go and find the artists, to develop them to a particular level where they can come and blow it out like crazy, in conjunction with us."

While those labels are flooded with unsolicited packages from aspiring artists, Grinberg knows exactly who to go to from his years as L.A. Reid's executive assistant.

"I just play it for the people who can push the button," he says. "It saves time and energy."

And once they've heard it, everyone who's worked these past 11 months at I.D. Labs agrees, those buttons will be pushed.

"I'm super confident," Khalifa says, "that we can make happen what needs to happen."

Most of all, he'd like to give the folks in Pittsburgh bragging rights.

"We've got a football team," he says. "But we really don't have too many musicians, especially in hip-hop, where you can say 'That dude's from Pittsburgh. That's Pittsburgh right there.' There's nobody out there like that. And I hope to be one of the first to step out and put us on the radio."