DOWNLOAD DUKE BASKETBALL’S BRING ME DOWN BY MIKE POSNER (Opens in iTunes)
Do I leave for “the pros” or hold off and complete my senior year? It’s a question that a number of Duke Basketball players have had to answer, including Gerald Henderson this past off-season. However, G wasn’t the only Devil on campus facing the question.
Mike Posner, a rising star in the music industry as a producer, songwriter and singer, inked a deal with J Records (Sony) over the summer and many people in the music industry assumed the Michigan native would leave Duke to focus entirely on his music. However, Posner opted to return to Duke to graduate, he says, “to make my parents proud.”
Posner also knows he is different, and that helps his brand. His music is different (a unique sound that isn’t hip-hop but isn’t rock either), his story is different (a Duke student making it big in the music business) and his ambitions are different (He says, “People are going to respect me as a producer, musician and songwriter. In the end, I wanna be — I’m going to be — one of the biggest pop stars in the world.”).
For now, he’s back on campus, leaving every weekend for concerts all over the country while still sporting a 3.5 GPA. He has been featured in The New York Times, was meeting with Jay-Z during exams last spring, and made his first national TV appearance recently on NBC’S The Carson Daly Show.
Posner is hugely popular on campus and proud of his association with Duke, always quick to suggest that Duke’s national student body helped get his music out to the rest of the country. His fans here at Duke include Jon Scheyer, Nolan Smith and the rest of our team.
This summer, we reached out to Mike to see if he would have any interest in producing a song for our team. Within 30 minutes of an email sent on a Friday evening from someone who hadn’t met Mike (me), the busiest student on Duke’s campus had called back, offered to write a song just for us, invited our guys to travel with him to NYC for a performance with 50 Cent, and said he wanted to help however he could.
Over the next month, Posner wrote and produced Bring Me Down, a song we incorporated in our annual hype video that debuted at CTC and now introduces our team before games in Cameron. The song has been a huge hit and the hype video had over 25,000 total views in it’s first week on DukeBluePlanet.com, YouTube and iTunes.
Meanwhile, this past week Posner released his second mixtape, One Foot Out the Door, also earning rave reviews. He may have “turned pro” and signed with an agent, but this Blue Devil won’t have to worry about his draft stock. At age 21, in one of the toughest industries to find work, Sony has already made him a top pick.
Mike challenged Nolan to some 1-on-1 after we filmed our Hype video
