A Freed Mind and Creations Follow: Teamwork in Hip-Hop

I am exceedingly wealthy – in knowledge compared to many others my age; in friendships because I have friends I’ve grown to call brothers; and in hair because I haven’t cut mine since last August. So despite the fact that I am a poor, unemployed USC film student, I do have a few things going for me. One of those things that I am very grateful for is my freedom to create. You see, I only did decently in school because I enjoyed most of my courses, I’ve never felt the need to prove myself by cramming words and numbers into my head, reiterating them, and then forgetting and repeating the process. Most of my merit, I suppose, comes from my spirituality (Mother Earth guide me!) and my ability to write. This August I start at the University of Southern California as a major in Writing for the Screen and Television. Writing is my passion; I am also drawn to create comics (Somebody needs to do something about this Moon Knight problem), Video Games, and, as you probably know from reading this particular blog, raps.

Now I’ve talked before about the Prejudice of music (and got trolled up the ass on Nerdcore Now), how one will consider the fact that a song has vocal percussion incorporated and immediately categorize the artist with ones they already know like 50 Cent who just did the Youporn theme song (Haven’t heard it yet; I always get sidetracked) or Souljaboy (Don’t beat me up. I have no grasp on what’s popular these days outside of One Direction -_- ). But when I write percussion, my music sounds nothing like theirs because our souls are very different. I – for one – accept women and men as equal beings and have never exploited steatopygous females in my music videos (Not just because I have yet to do one.) to distract from the lack of literacy apparent in my words.  I was surprised and disturbed when my  father told me he wouldn't have trouble with me writing songs about “Beat[ing] the pussy up up up up up up…”… you get the drift. The fact is I think ones music should be seen as art and an expression of oneself and the music of many artists shows me – quite frankly – that I don’t want them in my life or in the lives of my little sisters.

You see I am also vastly wealthy in ability to create because of my partner in geek, Keify K.

I met Keith Kilgore through Kilgore Gardner, a friend of a friend. Gardner had been showing me instrumentals of various hip-hop artist he had known and worked with and many didn’t fit (I heard a few of those so-gangster-it-can-only-be-popular-in-the-forgotten-and-abused-urban-neighborhood-it’s-from type beats and you know me; I don’t quite fit the gangster rap bill). But one of the beats he sent me caught my attention. It was smooth and funky and had a sample from the Hanna and Barbara cartoon the Jetsons (writing this now, I’m wondering why we never used that jam). I knew this couldn’t be your average beat junkie. And it wasn’t. This guy was cool. Like mad kool. He was fresh, had fun with the music, liked to experiment. (He took a break before doing the last two songs of Nerdgasm to play with crunk music and when he came back he’d learned something, “Hey Hey HEY!!) I told him about Nerdcore and gave him youtube links for some of my favorite artist. He said he really dug Megaran and so that meant he was studying K-murdock.

The short of it is that Keify-K is the other half of what makes Maasai Warrior possible. His programming has a rhythm that beats with my spirit and I have one hundred percent confidence going into a project that all I will have to worry about is my own part. And here’s the key: that’s why I can be me to the fullest extent. Keith’s beats fit the Warrior's style and his excellence leaves the Warrior to write, leaves the Shaman to conjure. In creating this next album, there were several songs that I put time in researching to create (I won’t give ALL the topics away here). 

Because I had no job this summer, I was freed up to watch Dateline and think about the murders and examine my philosophy. I saw the story of Etan Patz and was introduced to the idea of that change in American consciousness- you know how kids used to play in the streets and go to the mall alone at age ten but then that stopped because Americans were like “Oh shit, Pedophiles? They’re real”?  And they don’t all act like Humpert Humpert.

Well I wanted to do a song about that change in collective consciousness and I was told, by a more senior person that the case of Adam Walsh, son of the host of Americas Most Wanted, was more well known. I’ll tell you that the song came out in a way that made me proud but I won’t yet decipher for you the subtleties and the meaning behind it (You’ll have to download it in about a month. What? You don’t like free shit?). The point is I spent time researching that case; I saw the bio on Bio(that’s a channel right?) about Adams father, John Walsh, found out there was a 1983 made-for-tv-movie about the kidnapping, downloaded and watched it, read on the history of Pedophilia, read about it as a paraphilia, read about Ottis Toole the man who claimed to have been responsible (I’m still not sure.), found out that he was not, in fact, a pedophile and killed at LEAST one-hundred-and-seven other people in the company of his bearded lover whom he met in a Jacksonville soup kitchen and that, in prison, they admitted to a number of murders eventually exceeding six hundred. Then I wrote a song about it (Don’t worry there are happy songs and even some romance on “Shaman” too… oh shit did I just give out the name of the album?)

 The point is Keith is a dope producer and I’m a [Insert perceived level of skill here] writer and his taking over in his area of expertise frees me up to explore and be better at my own. So I have time to write more words than “Life sentence is enough nough nough nough nough...”

Prejudice of Music

            Last night at the battle of the bands at the Thatcher School, I was the only Black man to preform. As it was my first time doing a show as a Nerdcore hip-hop artist, I was anxious. One of the things that stood out to me was that I was receiving dirty looks regularly from white nerds who were judging me based on my brown skin and fabulously curly hair. It was truly hurtful to see guys, with skinny arms and bottle lens glasses who looked like they’d never been laid, treating me, a true believer who should be their friend, as a threat for such petty reasons. Nerds shouldn’t be racist. That’s just stupid. 
            Recently I’ve been thinking about what it means to be hip-hop and I’ve concluded that hip-hop is a soul that the music has. Flying Lotus and Dub FX are often hip-hop even with out rapping. I feel hip-hop is the most versatile musical genre because it takes from all others. In my song “Just a Gigolo” on the last album, I had Keith sample the 1929 Italian opera song, “Just a Gigolo”. Hip-hop can take on any form melodically and it adds the unending possibilities of the spoken word. Too many rappers are not writers and that is where pop music and singles that spout ideals detrimental to the health of people and cultures derive from: crap rappers don’t read and can hardly write. 
            So, because it can take on any form musically, I’ve always thought that people who do not like hip-hop must feel negatively about it because of the subject matter they regularly hear. They hear misogyny, infidelity, drunkenness, and ignorance and after hearing those associated with “hip-hop”, for so long, come to think thats what hip-hop actually is. These non-writer rappers are why there exist a genre called “rap” aside from hip-hop. It’s “total chaos; no - mass confusion.” 
But, truly, it seems I was wrong; there ARE people that dislike music simply for the fact that vocal percussion is incorporated. Take yesterday for example. 
            I performed “Spiderman” my song about a child who grows up reading comics and aspiring to vigilanteism and later as an adult meets human beings who experienced dramatic events in their childhoods, who were in need of a hero at the time when he was leisurely reading Marvel Team Up on his race-car bed. The boy, a man by the end of the third verse, comes to the conclusion that he, as a man, shares the same responsibility as Peter Parker even with out having been given the same power. He realizes that it is every human being’s duty to help and protect other sentient beings whenever they have the opportunity. 
            Of the four judges I got two eights and a nine. The last judge who, through-out the night had been making offensive comments about Chinese, simply said, ” While I appreciate the change of pace, I can’t give you more than a six”. In his next Chinese joke, he managed to incorporate the Buddha. So he insulted a sixteenth of my blood, my religion, and my love, hip-hop. Another interesting fact is that I was the only Black man to preform that night and this judge and I were the darkest skinned humans on stage… all night. 
            It seems even when a vocal percussionist (rapper) is positive, there will be people who shy away from hearing his words simply because they are rapped. This hurts me but I want peace. I make music to tell stories, to share love, and to ease my soul. I feel sorry for those who are phobic of drum rolls. May the force be with you, ever and always. 
- Darth [MC] Maasai Warrior the Fanboii Prime the Pooh