dismissing his mother for failing to raise him, he spits:
“Full of crazy rage, an angry teenager/ nothing could change me back/ gangsta-rap had me acting like a maniac/ I was boostin’, so influenced by rap, I used it/ as an excuse to do shit/ no one could tell me nothin’/ hip-hop overwhelmed me, to the point where it had me in a whole ‘nother realm/ it was like isolatin’ myself was healthy/ it felt like we was on welfare but wealthy/ compelled me to excel in school and failed me, expelled me …”
The sense that he had been transformed by rap, changed into a more furious, powerful, criminal (
boostin’
) boy than he had ever been before, flows through the verse. Probably there’s an element of play, too, with credulous critics’ belief that rap fans dumbly do whatever rap records say. But the idea that it was
“an excuse to do shit”
, to act positively for himself at last, is no joke. And the feeling of being
“overwhelmed … in a whole ‘nother realm … on welfare but wealthy”
, rapped in a tone of fervent transport, suggests gospel transcendence: that gangsta-rap’s gritty street tales lifted him out of his poverty-stricken, unhappy existence, into something better.
He remembered that sensation again when
Newsweek
suggested his own raps were harmful. “I don’t think music can make you kill or rape someone, any more than a movie is going to make you do something you know is wrong,” he said, “but music can give you strength. It can make a 15-year-old kid, who is being picked on by everyone and made to feel worthless, throw his middle finger up and say, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know who I am.’ It can help make them respect their individuality, which is what music did for me. If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible, as long as you keep workin’ at it and don’t back down. I didn’t have nothin’ going for me … school, home … until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.”
Of course, rap didn’t strike him like that all at once. After the first rush of Ice-T’s ‘Reckless’, and with Uncle Ronnie continuing to be his musical mentor, it was the fearless, taunting, street-wise raps of Queens’ L.L. Cool J which convinced him the music was for him. The attitude alone must have been a wistful fantasy, for a skinny boy preyed on so often by bullies he loathed, but couldn’t beat. “When L.L. first came out with ‘I’m Bad’, I wanted to do it, to rhyme,” he remembered. “Standing in front of the mirror, I wanted to be like L.L.” He would wear shades, too, lost in his superhero secret identity. And, in pursuit of this dream life, he became studious, in a way he never managed at school. “When my son first got into rap as a teenager,” his mother remembered to the
Mail On Sunday
with a sigh, “he would wake me at 5 am to ask me what words rhymed with what. I bought him a dictionary, and it all went downhill from there.” The capacious vocabulary this high school drop-out would go on to flex on records shows how deeply he absorbed that gift. His life with his mother was part of the reason. “We were so fuckin’ poor,” he told
Kerrang
. “My mother used to do so much fucked-up shit to me, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that house and just …
do
something. Even my mother used to laugh at me about this rap shit. She’d hear me upstairs, I’d have two radios set up – one playing the beat, and the other one recording me rapping over it. She’d be going, ‘I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with that – you can’t rap.’ Thanks, ma!”
“It was like isolatin’ myself was healthy,”
as he rapped on ‘Revelation’; he was reading, listening and recording round the clock, abstracting himself from the futile, bored adolescent life he could have had. Instead of fading away on a street corner once his pressure cooker home flung him outside, becoming a
“Full of crazy rage, an angry teenager/ nothing could change me back/ gangsta-rap had me acting like a maniac/ I was boostin’, so influenced by rap, I used it/ as an excuse to do shit/ no one could tell me nothin’/ hip-hop overwhelmed me, to the point where it had me in a whole ‘nother realm/ it was like isolatin’ myself was healthy/ it felt like we was on welfare but wealthy/ compelled me to excel in school and failed me, expelled me …”
The sense that he had been transformed by rap, changed into a more furious, powerful, criminal (
boostin’
) boy than he had ever been before, flows through the verse. Probably there’s an element of play, too, with credulous critics’ belief that rap fans dumbly do whatever rap records say. But the idea that it was
“an excuse to do shit”
, to act positively for himself at last, is no joke. And the feeling of being
“overwhelmed … in a whole ‘nother realm … on welfare but wealthy”
, rapped in a tone of fervent transport, suggests gospel transcendence: that gangsta-rap’s gritty street tales lifted him out of his poverty-stricken, unhappy existence, into something better.
He remembered that sensation again when
Newsweek
suggested his own raps were harmful. “I don’t think music can make you kill or rape someone, any more than a movie is going to make you do something you know is wrong,” he said, “but music can give you strength. It can make a 15-year-old kid, who is being picked on by everyone and made to feel worthless, throw his middle finger up and say, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know who I am.’ It can help make them respect their individuality, which is what music did for me. If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible, as long as you keep workin’ at it and don’t back down. I didn’t have nothin’ going for me … school, home … until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.”
Of course, rap didn’t strike him like that all at once. After the first rush of Ice-T’s ‘Reckless’, and with Uncle Ronnie continuing to be his musical mentor, it was the fearless, taunting, street-wise raps of Queens’ L.L. Cool J which convinced him the music was for him. The attitude alone must have been a wistful fantasy, for a skinny boy preyed on so often by bullies he loathed, but couldn’t beat. “When L.L. first came out with ‘I’m Bad’, I wanted to do it, to rhyme,” he remembered. “Standing in front of the mirror, I wanted to be like L.L.” He would wear shades, too, lost in his superhero secret identity. And, in pursuit of this dream life, he became studious, in a way he never managed at school. “When my son first got into rap as a teenager,” his mother remembered to the
Mail On Sunday
with a sigh, “he would wake me at 5 am to ask me what words rhymed with what. I bought him a dictionary, and it all went downhill from there.” The capacious vocabulary this high school drop-out would go on to flex on records shows how deeply he absorbed that gift. His life with his mother was part of the reason. “We were so fuckin’ poor,” he told
Kerrang
. “My mother used to do so much fucked-up shit to me, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that house and just …
do
something. Even my mother used to laugh at me about this rap shit. She’d hear me upstairs, I’d have two radios set up – one playing the beat, and the other one recording me rapping over it. She’d be going, ‘I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with that – you can’t rap.’ Thanks, ma!”
“It was like isolatin’ myself was healthy,”
as he rapped on ‘Revelation’; he was reading, listening and recording round the clock, abstracting himself from the futile, bored adolescent life he could have had. Instead of fading away on a street corner once his pressure cooker home flung him outside, becoming a
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