Being a part of the culture?
Yeah, partaking in the culture as well as contributing to it and help its evolution.From there, did you go to freestyle/open mike sessions?
Yeah, I used to sneak in the club, I was 15 and I had a secret knock at the backdoor of the club.I keep forgetting, you have to be 21 to get into a club in the US.
Yeah, so I would sneak into as many open mike session as I could. I couldn't get into the clubs and this DJ started a group. It was difficult for us to play in a club, because I couldn't get in. We knew this kid who had access to all these abandoned buildings where I lived, so we would transform the building and get all our friends who wrote graffiti to come in and spray it all up and we would have the parties in there. That was really dope.What year are we talking about here?
That was 1995, 1996 and also my homegirls used to have a radio show, cause where I grew up was a college town. So I used to go on their college radio show when I was in High School every week. It was called hip hop honeyz or something. It was these two women that were really cool and really into hip hop. They would let me come in and freestyle every week and I got to learn a lot more about different kinds of independent hip hop and what not. And eventually I learned a lot more about New York, because one of them was from New York, my homegirl Melanie. So I went to New York on a spring break trip one time and that is when I connected with my crew the Anomolies. I hooked up with them in New York and I also hooked up with a lot of other MCs in New York. Like Wordsworth and Jean Grae as well I met through Anomolies around that time, the Arsonists where together at that time. Whatever the case in New York, there was such a strong open mike and freestyle and a really strong independent HipHop culture at that time, like '97, '98. I was really drawn to it so I ended up moving to New York for a couple of years to work closely with Anomolies.There is this project that you are working on, what is it called?
I got this track called The Door, Waajeed produced it. On this cd- project called The We That Sets Us Free: Building a world without prisons. It was put together and released by a group called justice now! They are out of Oakland, California, people need to go and check out that website. It is an amazing, amazing group. They do prison abolition. They work to end prisons, and coming from a womans perspective. So they do a lot of legal aid for women that are locked up in California. This project is a benefit for them.| < Invincible | www.anattitude.net - Anattitude Magazine * Issue One | Invincible > |