I made music for my soul to smile. To enlighten the people who listened to it with any knowledge i could pass whether miniscule or not. I loved to sit down and listen to an existing song by an artist in any genre and hear a 3 second part of it that i knew would be a dope beat with some ingenuity. It was like finding a diamond in a pot of gold. But my true passion was a Spitter! A writer! I love to sit down with a pen and paper and formulate a rhyme from nothing but one line....one thought...until it becomes 3 verses. I always felt like i gave birth to a being unlike any existing in our universe.
Like a mother/father admiring their work after a birth. The joy came from filling a this puzzle like structure of words until you painted a picture that was truly beautiful. I truly believe all art is the same,just different methods of expression. Paint,Dance,Comedy,Rapping,Writing heck even trying to talk to woman at the bar to get her number is an art:). Anytime creativity is used it to me becomes ART.
I remember staying stuck on one word in a piece i was writing for an hour just because that word needed to be perfectly melded with it's predecessor. It was almost orgasmic to finally find that one word and finish that puzzle! Music has kept all of sane in times of despair and it is truly a unique creation that any interstellar being would be astonished that we create it. They would over-look the Iphone and go "Amazing...so you said he's called John Coltrane?".
My short lived rap career was started from a buddy of mine who asked me why i carried this notebook around with me all the time. I told him"I write poetry" and he kinda snickered and said"Word?". See living in a ghetto there's not alot of kids 14yrs old writing poetry,its just not common. So after i showed him a couple of poems he said"Dam sun...those are dope! I never really read poems but those are dope! You should try and make those into Raps to put on music," And that's what i did.
I began to almost translate all my poems into raps,just by changing the arrangements here and there. But what i found was the structures really weren't that different. I guess Langston Hughes was our first rapper in the hood:). I began to fill up a new book with just rap and then take these to one of my other friends house to record. He was heavy into producing beats and had a pretty decent studio in his basement. We clicked immediately and made great songs together. He rapped to so we gelled good and added one more of our mutual friends to form a trio. We actually did quite a few club shows and college shows and started to gain a little recognition. So we went to MCA the same record label that had Heavy D and the Boys,Mary J Blige,Eric B & Rakim, Lynyrd Skynyrd,and GZA(Wu-Tang).
We sat down with a A/R and talked about what we were trying to do in the industry and let him listen to our demo. He sat back and started nodding his head in his executive chair as our music played. "This is Dope!" he said to us. He shuffled through the rest of the music and then stopped it,sat up and said" Look guys you have good stuff but i can't sell you to the public,you need more of a sound that exists already Like WU-Tang". "Look i like the songs and i understand the artistic value but the average Hip hop head doesn't know and doesn't care about ART" he said. I was sitting down stunned at what i was hearing.
I looked at my boys and they were agitated and stunned. " So you want us to sound like some other group?!" my boy said. "But we're not wu-tang!"i said to him. He nodded and said he understood and began to say if we came back with the sound he asked for he could get us a record deal. We walked out of there devastated and angry. I mean this was our art! He basically said no one wants art!
We didn't let that whole meeting stop us and continued for years to do shows and have fun. But never made it big. But in hindsight i'm glad i got a chance to just do what i loved and experience the road. It was fun and educational to say the least.
My question is Where Did the ART GO?