Clyde Carson does not wait for opportunity; he creates it. The 25 year-old rapper-cum-entrepreneur is best known as the front man of the Team, a locally-successful rap group that lit up switchboards with their major radio hit in 2004 “It’s Gettin’ Hot.” Musical talent aside, he is also the mastermind of the nation’s fastest-growing energy drink, Hyphy Juice, and Partner of Moe Doe Records. Success at such a young age fared no small coincidence, as Carson set out to prove early on in his career that he was not content with being just an artist. “My main goal was to make music with an Oakland element to it, but on a national level,” Carson explains about his objective in the music industry. Raised in the era of Mob Music in the Bay Area, he pioneered the resurgence of party music in a time when content was all about violence. With a combination of uncanny timing and relentless work ethic, Carson became one of the biggest purveyors of the Bay Area’s Hyphy Movement that brought his hometown back into the spotlight after nearly a decade of neglect from national attention. After a brief stint in New York to soak up the mixtape hustle, Carson put together a “side project” in 2002 that would later cement his contribution to the local hip hop industry. That “side project” was the creation of a group with fellow members Mayne Mannish, Jungle, and Kaz Kyzah called The Team. Battling at local radio stations gave the group enough recognition to earn a chance at making it to the airwaves, and after scoring major spins with their previously-mentioned single “It’s Getting Hot”, Carson proved that the Hyphy Movement was not something so easily categorized as a passing fad. “There is no such thing as hyphy music. It’s a lifestyle,” he explains. Comfortable with the claims he was staking on this regional phenomenon, Carson patented a sound that would later prove his premise. “While everyone else in hip hop was yelling, we were whispering,” he explained about his personal style. Carson’s laid-back delivery caught on, offering a more universal sound at a time when local artists such as E-40 and Keak Da Sneak prided on being artists with catalogues where acquired taste was necessary. After the Team album “The Negro League” dropped in late 2004, they scored another radio hit “Hyphy Juice” – and the beverage soon followed – as Carson took a similar approach to market the Bay Area’s first energy drink. “We researched independent distributors and hit the streets knowing that, as long as it tasted good, we’d be alright,” he says. (Tasting good was only half the story; the drink later beat out Red Bull and Crunk Juice in SF Weekly’s “Best Energy Drink of 2006” Award.) In 2006, the Team dropped “World Premiere”, which included the highly-anticipated “Hyphy Juice Remix”, an all-star lineup of the Bay Area’s most prominent artists, and Carson set off on a solo deal with Capitol Records in June of 2006. Pushing for a West Coast unification with a joint venture with Game and his Black Wall Street label, Carson is set to release an album in June 2007 that will continue to take his universal sound to the next level. Because of his musical and entrepreneurial success (Hyphy Juice, the beverage, made $12 million last year), Carson has earned the reputation of being one of the Bay Area’s strongest independent hustlers with no aims of stopping any time soon. “Everything happened for a reason,” he shares. “Now the sky’s the limit. There’s nothing I feel I can’t do.”