As I excitedly posted my debut CD, “REALmatic: An Autobiography” to iTunes, I reflected on my history with rap music.
Twenty years of my life condensed into 10 tracks; it’s been quite the journey.
When I was 3 years old, my mom would play “Jump” by Kris Kross and I would parade around the house singing and bouncing, with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.
If she changed the channel before the music video was over, I would cry non-stop until she flipped it back.
My concept of heaven was very simple: It consisted of Sesame Street, Barney, Butterfinger candy bars, and most importantly, a VCR tape loaded with low-quality music videos.
By the time I was seven, it seemed like I knew every rap song that came on the radio, from Puff Daddy’s heartfelt “I’ll Be Missing You,” to Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s sensual, “What’s It Gonna Be?”
I was a bald-headed jukebox.
Rap was more than music then: It was expression, it was pain, it was pleasure and most importantly, it was culture.
My deep-rooted connection to hip-hop led to me picking up a pen and scribbling my own rhymes … Before I knew it, I was standing in front of my middle school at a multicultural assembly, wearing a black tall T-shirt and some tattered black Chuck Taylor’s, rapping rhymes as a friend looped a beat in the background.
The words to the song are a blur now, but whatever they were, they weren’t very good — something like, “How many people does it take to kill, before you understand that what I say is real?/ Today more people dying by the hands of a gun, then they did back then when the west was won.”
Trust me, I was no Kool G Rap…(I think I already regret putting those lyrics up).
I released a small mix tape at my high school for my senior project, but it wasn’t until this last spring that I actually began to do something significant musically.
It was then that three overeager hip-hop junkies met in the cafe section of the Erb Memorial Union: Greg, a university graduate and producer/engineer with a pretty nice studio setup; Justin, a graduate student in the Department of Education and an up-and-coming producer; and me, a young rapper who had been looking to make music ever since I arrived in Eugene.
The cause of our assembly was clear in our minds. We wanted to put all of our hanging aspirations together and create something new, yet familiar — hip, yet old school…
Thus, REALmatic was born.
The plan was simple: We would use all of our talents to put together a conglomeration of tracks which were inspired by Nas’ Illmatic and twist them with new school sounds and trends. It started out as a CD that would highlight the connection between journalism and hip-hop, but it quickly turned into a biography— there were a lot of things I had on my chest, more especially in terms of my own identity crisis as an artist.
When I was younger my rap name was inFLUence. I rapped about things that weren’t real to me and I pretended I was someone I wasn’t. It seemed like no matter what I did musically, I could never truly love it because it had no connection to what I was doing in real life. Ultimately I was alienating myself — from my very own music.
Threatening to kill people who I didn’t like on a track didn’t reflect with the fact that I was just a young kid pushing carts for a living.
Talking about how much money I had didn’t reflect with the fact that I was more interested in having a good impact on society than wealth.
Bragging about how cool I am didn’t reflect the fact that I grew up as a slightly awkward, knuckleheaded kid, with an obsession for Pokemon and bad words.
This is the trend in hip-hop music nowadays: It has lost its genuineness — its soul — its essence. People are afraid of being real because they think the world wants falsehood — rap artists of all levels are mortified of illustrating a life that doesn’t earn them street cred or party plays. I couldn’t imagine continuing on as a journalist, illustrating my life so falsely in my music.
I have to be real—and “REALmatic: An Autobiography” is me saying I want to show the world who I became — as an artist and a journalist.
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