Ryan “Bubba” Ginnetty’s first job in the music industry was a humble one. For his senior internship at Fenway High School, he helped run the street team for Metro Concepts, which at the time was an influential management and marketing outfit in Boston’s hip-hop world. His first big project was helping spread the word about 50 Cent’s 2003 debut, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” through posters and fliers, which were the primary methods of hype in the pre-social media era.
Two decades later, Ginnetty was the creative director for DJ Snake’s 2024 set at Coachella, the famed music festival that takes place in Indio, Calif., across two weekends every year. DJ Snake’s surprise guest, who appeared on top of a jail cell-like set that Ginnetty and his team designed, was 50 Cent.
“That was the first show that I had creatively designed for Coachella,” said Ginnetty.
Seeing the rapper on a stage he had created, performing songs from “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” “was a sign that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be,” he added.
Ginnetty and his company Co.Lab will be back at Coachella this month, working as a designer and creative director for rappers Sexyy Red and BIA (a fellow Boston native), and as the creative producer for Mexican electronic duo RØZ. (He’ll also serve as the production manager for electronic artist Kaskade.)
Creating eye-popping set designs for one of the country’s largest music festivals was hardly what Ginnetty dreamed of when he was growing up in Boston.
“I wanted to be a fireman, or a working detective — like, working man things,” recalled Ginnetty. He described teenage years where he was “not the best student, or the best person. I was more concerned with drinking and smoking weed than anything else.”
Ginnetty paid his way through college by working for a New York-based marketing company, and eventually secured a contract to promote video games through hip-hop tours. While working on tours that included rappers Common and Q-Tip, Ginnetty set up game consoles and branded the venues, and eventually realized that tour management was a potential job.
Around the same time, his brother Eric was planning to move to Los Angeles. So was Ginnetty’s friend Billy Walsh, a Jamaica Plain native who would go on to become a massively successful songwriter for the likes of Post Malone and The Kid LAROI, as well as a sneaker designer.
“I was like, ‘Yo, can I come?’” Ginnetty asked them, even though he had no plan about what he would do. Once he arrived on the West Coast, he pursued his passion for standup comedy, wrote scripts, and worked on reality shows like “Pawn Stars.” Eric was moving into production (he’s since worked multiple Super Bowls) and the brothers got jobs working on tours by Italian group the Bloody Beetroots at a time when electronic dance music (EDM) was exploding in popularity.
Ginnetty’s success as a tour manager stemmed in part from his distance from the EDM scene.
“I didn’t want to be a producer, I didn’t want to make music, the whole hang out [with celebrities] wasn’t for me. I treated it like a construction site in Southie,” he said.
When touring stopped during the pandemic, Ginnetty found himself with dwindling savings and a family to take care of. Thinking of his comedy work, Ginnetty asked himself, “What if I took my creativity that I do in these other worlds and applied it to [live music]?”
When touring resumed, Ginnetty started pitching artists specific creative ideas. Once he had his foot in the door, some of his old touring clients, including DJ Snake, saw him in a new light.
“He never listened to a creative idea I had,” Ginnetty said with a laugh, reflecting on his time as a part of DJ Snake’s touring crew. “Because I wasn’t in that position. He [hired] the biggest people, and I executed [those ideas]. And that was cool. I didn’t have an ego about it, I didn’t earn it. And then once I left, and did things for other people, he gave me the opportunity to pitch him.”
Commenting via email, DJ Snake praised Ginnetty’s designs.
“He really delivered designing my 2024 Coachella show, as well as [last year’s MTV Video Music Awards] performance with J Balvin,” he said. The Video Music Awards set included a giant Timberland boot as an homage to classic hip-hop footwear.
A similar vision propelled a design Ginnetty did for the Los Angeles hip-hop group Shoreline Mafia when they performed at the Kia Forum last fall.
“The Forum show was a major one for us, and Bubba killed it,” said Shoreline Mafia member OhGeesy in an e-mail. “It was stylized to be all vintage Lakers visually — even though he’s a Celtics fan!"
When working on set designs, some artists “are involved from start to finish and have their own vision,” said Ginnetty. “Other artists trust the team and I to have the vision, and let us be free in how we approach the art direction and execution.”
Reflecting on the challenge of setting up powerful visuals during quick set changeovers at festivals, Ginnetty admitted that the 50 Cent guest spot at Coachella “was almost the worst moment of my life.” The plan was to lower DJ Snake into the cell and then raise it again when 50 Cent joined him. But with the rapper waiting in the wings, the lift broke. Ginnetty had to scream above the music as he ran up to 50 Cent and told him to wait.
“We had to hotwire it, and because I’ve got that Boston aggression — that need to just get this [stuff] done — we got the lift to work, and we got him up there.”
Noah Schaffer can be reached at NoahSchaffer@yahoo.com