Silver Medallion

The hero-pop (hip hop, electro and rock) duo Silver Medallion has had a non-stop ride to independent music industry success. The group, consisting of MC/Phoenix native Carnegie and singer/songwriter Oren J of Hawaii came out of the Arizona club scene with records that were too undeniable to be held to just the Southwest and quickly caught on nationwide with their trademark dance/pop sound.



Silver Medallion got their name from a particularily lavish Scottsdale party in the weeks following the pairs' initial debut of their songs to their party-going friends and associates. "Carnegie walked out of a room at this house party, shirtless holding a can of Four Loko, all you could hear from the room was a kind of orgasmic squeeling from what sounded like several girls… He had a super obnoxious grin on his face and he was wearing this giant silver chain, like the kind of chain you lock a construction facility fence with, with a mismatched medallion on it, and I was like that's it, Silver Medallion" recounts singer Oren J.
Silver Medallion was forced into the local spotlight by an enormous response to their early music. Their song Scottsdale was a rampant local hit on MySpace, the pair couldn't go anywhere without hearing it as a ringtone or being played in the clubs, even before their first shows. A local on-air personality at a major hip hop station heard the song "Gravity" off Oren J's MySpace and the group had its first set of radio spins as a feature on the local music spotlight "Street Heat of the Week". After attending several of the bands performances one radio personality 98.3 declared "I'm stalking your group. When you go on world tour, I'm quitting radio and I'm going to follow you like hippies followed Grateful Dead", and another from 101.5 said "I've seen the future of music, they have a golden touch and will hang platinum plaques."
When the band did decide to first take the stage for a set of performances around Phoenix the response was so great that the pair simply never stopped… For a year straight it was impossible to go a night without seeing or hearing about Silver Medallion, they performed three nights a week, from club nights to rock concerts to shady bars to pool parties and back again, racking up an impressive 100 performance in less than a year and becoming on stage veterans. "We were making the bands we were opening for, national acts, look foolish. We turned the party out, the energy just kept getting higher and higher, the whole town knew our songs". When they weren't performing Silver Medallion ran amok in the party scene, forming relationships with the deejays and nightlife personalities necessary to cement them in the Scottsdale scene forever. That summer the pair was declared "most influential in nightlife" and "the next big thing" by 944 magazine, and proceded to win a battle of the bands to perform a showcase at the Vanguard in LA for Project Ethos. The LA performance garnished enough industry attention for the pair to travel to Hawaii, Las Vegas and beyond for shows.
From there, Silver Medallion sat down in the studio and completed their debut album The Last of the Popstars. After launching it independently with a sold out private release party at The W in Scottsdale Silver Medallion's song "Gravity" was given a shot by local radio channels. The song skyrocketed up Arizona charts ending up at 14 weeks in rotation, topping out at 13 at Power 98.3. Crossover songs from the album began to get spins elsewhere, and soon Silver Medallion was being heard in more than a dozen markets around the US. The group then began to receive syndicated attention through DJ legend Fatman Scoop's international radio show. Arizona was no longer big enough to hold Silver Medallion, so they packed up their belongings, rented a van and proceeded on to a 20 city college tour sponsored by Oakley, Muscle Milk and Crunk Energy Drink in the Spring of 2010.
During this run Silver Medallion knew they had to make a big move to take the group's success to the next level. Their next single, "Slave" had been written by Oren J in NYC and its impact would be lost by just another attempt at local radio success in Arizona. With that in mind the pair moved immediately to the musical hotbed of Brooklyn, NY. Upon the start of their fall tour Abay Lattin aka Carnegie was killed by a drunk driver after the second tour date. Oren J currently continues on representing Silver Medallion.