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...”
