A Trip Down Memory Lane
A few weeks back a cat named Dan put up a post about an XM radio show called Unmasked in the CYE forum. The show consists of interviews with stand up comedians about there process and what their journey through stand up was like. I bring this up because the series awoke a sense of nostalgia and I took my own trip down memory lane.
As a kid I always wanted to be a stand up comedian, some where along the way I ran into “The Rap Musics” and took a different path. Although I think that little comedian is still alive somewhere in there, I tend to enjoy talking and cracking jokes on stage more than the rapping during our shows. That’s neither here nor there. After talking with Reggie about the first show I ever did he suggested that I write a blog about it. Since I don’t have any ideas of my own I figured why not.
I honestly don’t remember the date but it was in the spring of 1994. By then I had been writing rhymes for about 4 years, but I just started rapping in public in late 1993. I was attending SUNY (State University of New York) at New Paltz and was a resident assistant in the resident hall I lived in. I didn’t really care much about doing work in the hall or creating a community, I mainly didn’t want a roommate or to pay for my room. So the RA position was perfect. Unfortunately I still had to put together social events for the hall and for people on my floor. This usually involved me getting money from the student fees and ordering a bunch of wings to have a Wing Night. However in 1993 there was a lot of MCs on the campus. You could bump into a “cypha”, which is the technical term for dudes rapping, anywhere on campus. So to I started throwing open mic nights in my dorm. This helped me reach two goals; get one of the required social programs out of the way and to meet some of the other rappers. A little side note I had a friend who lived down the hall named Melynda. Melynda was part of a group called City Kids which was started by Malik Yoba from New York Undercover fame. She happened to have a few friends from the program up during one of my open mic nights. One of her friends grabbed the mic and started rhyming he was pretty fresh; I have to give him props. Turns out that MC was Donald Faison who now stars in the hit TV series Scrubs, I take full responsibility for discovering him.
We didn’t have a sound system, so I picked up a second hand karaoke machine and let the festivities begin. At one of these open mic sessions I met a kid named Billy G. Billy was a freshman and quickly built a rep as the best rapper on campus. Billy and I became friends after we were supposed to battle. After checking each others styles we both decided we would rather work together than battle. So we formed a little MC crew that included myself, Billy G., Angel aka Analytic (who was an original member of Hangar), and the kid Dre. Billy already had a bit of a resume going, he had performed a few times at the Bobbito Garcia hosted All That and was even invited up to the Stretch and Bob show to freestyle.
Billy was invited to play a special All That benefit show for El Puente High School in Brooklyn. He suggested we all head down and perform a song together. Unfortunately Dre couldn’t make it, so it was just Me, Billy and Angel. At the time we knew nothing about song structure, so our song ended up being 3 verses back to back.
There were two things that still stand out about that night. One was the cypha after the show. There were about 15 of us, all MCs from the show freestyling until about 5 am that morning. It was the first time I had ever really rhymed with people that weren’t friends or who I didn’t know, and to be able to hang line for line with them gave me a great sense of pride and accomplishment. The second and probably most important was the response from Bobbito after I finished my verse. I was the first MC in our group to rhyme. I don’t think I took my eyes off the ceiling the whole time I was performing, but I knew the verse was good, it was pretty much all of my best lines from everything I wrote over the previous few years. Probably explains why I got booed off the stage the next time we went down to All That. Anyway after I finished my verse, I stepped towards the back of the stage while the other guys performed their verses so I didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of being on stage with nothing to do. I didn’t even realize I was standing next to Bobbito, but sure enough I was. He tapped me on my leg, gave me a pound and told me the verse was dope and to keep at it. As corny as it sounds I knew that night that this was what I wanted to do with my life and that I was going to continue doing it as long as I could.
Although the story I just told has nothing to do with the intro paragraph about Unmasked or stand up comedy I think it connects in that I find the back stories of artists are always much more interesting than the actual successes. So I hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane, I know I did and if people want to know more history I can write more of these. Either way I will be back next week with another story for you guys, which will probably be about why I no longer care about rap.
As a kid I always wanted to be a stand up comedian, some where along the way I ran into “The Rap Musics” and took a different path. Although I think that little comedian is still alive somewhere in there, I tend to enjoy talking and cracking jokes on stage more than the rapping during our shows. That’s neither here nor there. After talking with Reggie about the first show I ever did he suggested that I write a blog about it. Since I don’t have any ideas of my own I figured why not.
I honestly don’t remember the date but it was in the spring of 1994. By then I had been writing rhymes for about 4 years, but I just started rapping in public in late 1993. I was attending SUNY (State University of New York) at New Paltz and was a resident assistant in the resident hall I lived in. I didn’t really care much about doing work in the hall or creating a community, I mainly didn’t want a roommate or to pay for my room. So the RA position was perfect. Unfortunately I still had to put together social events for the hall and for people on my floor. This usually involved me getting money from the student fees and ordering a bunch of wings to have a Wing Night. However in 1993 there was a lot of MCs on the campus. You could bump into a “cypha”, which is the technical term for dudes rapping, anywhere on campus. So to I started throwing open mic nights in my dorm. This helped me reach two goals; get one of the required social programs out of the way and to meet some of the other rappers. A little side note I had a friend who lived down the hall named Melynda. Melynda was part of a group called City Kids which was started by Malik Yoba from New York Undercover fame. She happened to have a few friends from the program up during one of my open mic nights. One of her friends grabbed the mic and started rhyming he was pretty fresh; I have to give him props. Turns out that MC was Donald Faison who now stars in the hit TV series Scrubs, I take full responsibility for discovering him.
We didn’t have a sound system, so I picked up a second hand karaoke machine and let the festivities begin. At one of these open mic sessions I met a kid named Billy G. Billy was a freshman and quickly built a rep as the best rapper on campus. Billy and I became friends after we were supposed to battle. After checking each others styles we both decided we would rather work together than battle. So we formed a little MC crew that included myself, Billy G., Angel aka Analytic (who was an original member of Hangar), and the kid Dre. Billy already had a bit of a resume going, he had performed a few times at the Bobbito Garcia hosted All That and was even invited up to the Stretch and Bob show to freestyle.
Billy was invited to play a special All That benefit show for El Puente High School in Brooklyn. He suggested we all head down and perform a song together. Unfortunately Dre couldn’t make it, so it was just Me, Billy and Angel. At the time we knew nothing about song structure, so our song ended up being 3 verses back to back.
There were two things that still stand out about that night. One was the cypha after the show. There were about 15 of us, all MCs from the show freestyling until about 5 am that morning. It was the first time I had ever really rhymed with people that weren’t friends or who I didn’t know, and to be able to hang line for line with them gave me a great sense of pride and accomplishment. The second and probably most important was the response from Bobbito after I finished my verse. I was the first MC in our group to rhyme. I don’t think I took my eyes off the ceiling the whole time I was performing, but I knew the verse was good, it was pretty much all of my best lines from everything I wrote over the previous few years. Probably explains why I got booed off the stage the next time we went down to All That. Anyway after I finished my verse, I stepped towards the back of the stage while the other guys performed their verses so I didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of being on stage with nothing to do. I didn’t even realize I was standing next to Bobbito, but sure enough I was. He tapped me on my leg, gave me a pound and told me the verse was dope and to keep at it. As corny as it sounds I knew that night that this was what I wanted to do with my life and that I was going to continue doing it as long as I could.
Although the story I just told has nothing to do with the intro paragraph about Unmasked or stand up comedy I think it connects in that I find the back stories of artists are always much more interesting than the actual successes. So I hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane, I know I did and if people want to know more history I can write more of these. Either way I will be back next week with another story for you guys, which will probably be about why I no longer care about rap.
posted by Alaska aka Timillionaire at
2:39 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home