riQueZo

​These boys, really did some damage. We’ll call them the major disruptors of the rap game for their time and place. Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren & DJ Yella brought their community to the forefront of the conversation on why America just still hasn’t gotten it right and

they did it through what was labeled, Gangsta Rap, aka

the raw lyrical expression of the struggle on the street.

 

I didn’t grow up in Compton, in fact, as a white suburbanite, my youth was spent about as far away from that community as anyone could imagine. But the history has my heart. It truly is my Mecca as a rapper. Today, that Holy city is still under siege from drugs, violence & poverty. Because I rap, I’m compelled to act. Luckily, in 2015,

I was given the chance to act in a big way.

 

Music Unites

 

It was 2012 when I decided that I was going to be a comedy rapper (previously, ‘Surgical Device Salesmen’, which didn’t really fit me). The ‘comedy’ part of my new title was engineered to indicate that, while I had committed myself to the poetic art form of rap, I could never truly and seriously replicate the original roots of the genre. Rap began as a voice for the voiceless. It stemmed from America’s destitute communities where people had little more than their words to share with a world that seemed to not be listening. I just don’t have those same experiences and didn’t want to commit myself to faking it. I think it was a smart realization to go in the direction of goofy rap and I will show you how it has made me more approachable in my attempts to work in communities like Compton, which take great pride in their rap history.

 

If you are like me and you have had the good fortune of tuning into your life’s passion, then it won’t surprise you to know that, upon committing myself to rap, the universe began to facilitate the shaping of that reality. It became frighteningly easy to take the right steps in the right directions. While I have countless anecdotes of people I’ve met and music I’ve made to offer testament to that truth, perhaps none is more impressive and important than my introduction to Michelle Edgar, the founder of a wonderful non-profit called, Music Unites.

 

I met Michelle at a networking event in New York City for graduates of our shared Alma Mater, Northwestern University, who were working in the music industry. I had flown to New York from Chicago specifically for the event. My excitement and optimism for my new found passion were far more priceless than the cost of that ticket. I was either the only artist at the event or in a very minuscule group of us. Most of the others were working in music distribution, analytics or publishing. Michelle was not. She represented a side of music that I hadn’t really thought of before: education & philanthropy. Her organization, Music Unites, was working in New York’s underserved communities to bring after-school music education to kids. Whoa. Actually, I just started crying a little.

 

Please hold...

 

(insert mental picture of a tear drop on a laptop here)

 

What a beautiful vision! And yes, in retrospect its like, duh! These types of programs must exist but I had never come face-to-face with one. I fell in love immediately. I introduced myself to Michelle and when I got back to Chicago, her and I got to work very quickly. I had asked how I could help build Music Unites in Chicago. She already had a relationship with a school there (the principal was a fellow Northwestern Alum) but there was no programming outside of a Guitar Club that a few teachers had created together. While I had nothing to lend in terms of skill with guitar, my previous career in sales had taught me that building a relationship is the first crucial step to creating long-term sustainability, so in the winter of 2013, I just started going to guitar club. Getting to know the students and the staff at Benito Juarez High School on Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. My 5-month observational and participatory stint

had afforded me the ability to play a few chords.

 

I knew that in the next year

I’d like to do something bigger.

 

It was the beginning of the new school year in 2013-2014 when I proposed to Juarez that they let me host a 2-day ‘Master Class’ on rap, where we would get a bunch of students together for a workshop on how to rap. By the grace of God, a shear accident in communication occurred and the school approved me for something I wasn’t asking for. ‘Sure, you can teach a weekly rap program here’. Haha, I knew right then and there to not double back and to run with that opportunity. Thus, when classes commenced, I had officially become the ‘rap teacher’ at a high school.

 

Baller.

 

I started recruiting for the program with the help of my friend, teacher & Guitar Club leader, Joe Passi. The school had an extracurriculars day in the cafeteria where non-profits could set up a make-shift booth and present their after-school programming to the kids. I didn’t really stay at my booth. Instead, I went around rapping for the kids at the lunch tables as a way to encourage and inspire them to sign up. A few did and we started our first Music Unites rap program with 6-8 ambitious young rappers. That program ran for 18 months before I decided to move to Los Angeles. That was a personal choice related pretty exclusively to weather. The cold in Chicago’s winters tends to stifle me as a creator and I could afford it no longer. Michelle had moved to LA too.

 

After meeting Michelle and working with Juarez for a short time, I started to weave my own sense of self-identity into the organization. Music Unites, even as a title, was an idea that I really could get behind. Like anyone, I recognize the power of music. It affects us personally and it affects us as a society. Woodstock in ‘69 would probably be the greatest visual representation of the unifying power of music that I could think of. I’m sure you have your own. The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Kurt Cobain. I even recently was educated on the group, The Sex Pistols, who I had no idea were so influential in the creation of an entire genre of people, let alone music. #Punk. I knew I loved the idea and would be committed to the unification of people through music

for the rest of my life, especially young people

and especially through education.

 

When I got to California, a whole new level of potential was born. (I got there via motorcycle by the way, just in case you are wondering whether there is any precedence to this crazy walk I am on). Upon arriving, I had a similar conversation with Michelle as the one that we had

when we first met. ‘Where do you need me and how can I help?’

 

She had already been working in Compton with the marching band at a school called Centennial and had begun to exercise her expertise in event planning by creating one-off workshops for kids of all ages. The first one I had the chance to help design was right before the end

of the 2014-2015 school year at an elementary school called

Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary.

 

We worked with a non-profit organization named, Take Me to the River, who had made a film about music history in Memphis and how it had revolutionized the world in a similar vein as Mo-Town out of Detroit. The event was in two parts. During the day, we held that rap workshop that I had been proposing nearly 2 years prior in Chicago. TMTTR brought in some heavy hitters, including legendary Blues man, William Bell & Academy Award Winning Song-writer, Frayser Boy who had penned, ‘It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp’ off the soundtrack from the movie, Hustle & Flow. We worked with the kids to teach them a bit of songwriting and then broke into groups that wrote the rap battles, Cats vs. Dogs & Students vs. Teachers. The classroom portion of the event concluded with a panel that included those men mentioned before, including the film’s producer, Martin Shore & Chicago underground EDM master, Mr. Magnificent. Later that evening, we had invited students & their parents to a local high school where they were treated to live performances

from some of the musically gifted students at MLK

and then shown a feature presentation of the film.

 

What a precedent to set. This was a much more accelerated version of that relationship-building that I had done with Guitar Club back in Chicago. In having helped organize this event, I killed many birds with one stone. I worked in synergy with another non-profit to create an educational experience for the kids, showed an aptitude for working with the school administrators & got to introduce myself to the kids

as I led the workshop for the day. Booyah!

 

It wasn’t difficult then to start planning for and visualizing programming for the next year in Compton. I spent the latter half of the summer introducing myself more formally to the principals at MLK

and Centennial and we started preparing

a program offering for the

2015-2016 school year.

 

The Freshman

 

I could never forget the day that I met Elias, who I would later know to call, Ely. It was a clear, crisp, California afternoon in September of 2015. I hadn’t yet started teaching rap at Centennial High School on Compton’s north side but we were getting pretty close. The principals of the school had approved the program proposal that I had made to them and we had organized a two-day schedule where I would visit a majority of the classrooms to introduce myself and present Compton Raps to the student body. Imagine a white rapper about to go around classroom to classroom at the high school of Dr. Dre & Kendrick Lamar and present himself as the new rap teacher. If ever there were a time for butterflies, it was then. I was nervous, yes, but I let the epicness of the stakes drive me through the nervousness. If we could make this work, it would be awesome! That was certainly what I was thinking as I opened each classroom door that day with a big old grin, ready to entertain & recruit.

 

My presentation to each class was simple and rooted in one main idea ~ don’t take yourself too seriously. That’s not a motto I was passing off to the kids, it was the one that I was using to keep myself humble and Cheezy in a delicate situation. I think if I had come in representing anything other than the goofball rapper that I am, it might not have resonated with a student body that lives in a community that is really struggling. We touched on this before. The rap coming out of Compton is known as gritty & raw because the environment is often gritty & raw. A lot of the kids there have important things to say about the tough reality that they live every day. My best way to connect was not to pretend that I had seen or known that same struggle, but to stay in my lane, the comedy side of rap, that makes my work honest and approachable.

 

I would open up my 10 minute presentation to each class with an introduction: who am I? Kirk Sells but my friends call me ‘White Chedda’ Why am I here? ‘I’m starting an after school rap program at Centennial’. Cue giggles. And then I would make it clear that before I went into the details about the program that I very much would like to rap for the class. That was the litmus test right? The students had to see if there were bars (i.e. can the dude spit? i.e. is he talented?). So I gave them some options as to what they wanted to hear, my song ‘2 Facebooks’ or ‘An Obligatory Rap About My Awesomeness’ (of which I had prepared a PG version specifically for the occasion). They picked it, I rapped it.

 

Two words: Open. Jaws.

 

These kids never expected to see what they were seeing. The shear idea of it made it hard to fight off laughter and that laughter was amplified by the lyrics of either of those goofy, yet lyrically impressive songs. At the very least, I had won their attention and we had found the perfect balance between taking me seriously and not taking me seriously at all.

 

I am proud to say that I didn’t engineer that phenomenon right on the spot. It had been in the works since the day I decided to be a comedy rapper. I wanted to be able to speak this language of rap but not in

a way that patronized the real roots of the art form. This day was

an affirmation that I could speak rap to anyone, even the children

of Compton: a tool I will forever cherish

and continue to put to use in my life.

 

But the victory was just beginning. See, after I rapped, I got some time to enjoy the undivided attention of the students so that I could talk to them about this upcoming rap program. I framed it as, ‘hey, we’re here on the campus of some really amazing rap history. Let’s build something fun to do after school that embraces the heritage and legacy of the school’. I’m sure it didn’t sound as robotronic & calculated as that but you get the gist. I announced that I would be on campus every Tuesday at 3pm and Saturday (for Saturday school) at 10am and that all students were always welcome to join. I fielded questions as well, with the #1 question being, ‘can you rap again?’, which I obliged with pleasure. Then I would say goodbye, leave out the door, and move on to the next classroom.

 

On the second day, I had just left one room and was waiting for the bell to ring so students could move to their next class. Still relatively fresh to California, I had my head towards the sky basking in the midday sun in the center of a classroom quad. I was here: The Mecca of Gangsta. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw one young homie walking towards me.

 

That was Elias.

 

He was wearing a beanie,

which I would come to know so well.

 

‘What’s up?’

 

‘Hey dude, what’s up?’

 

‘You were just in my class rapping

and talking about the rap program.

I’m a rapper’

 

Boom.

 

Crying again, sorry.

 

See, that was an epic introduction. Mostly because I wasn’t there to try and get the whole student body to join rap club. I was there to see if my idea resonated with anyone who might be looking for something like this to totally transform their life. I try to never look beyond the one person, the individual, who is right in front of me when building a big dream. You can’t. We’ll talk about this more later but that’s how it has to be in this great fight of ours to enter our destitute neighborhoods and save our children from despair. A one-on-one engagement is the easiest

of undertakings and often the most effective.

‘if you can reach one person...’

 

The dot dot dot stands for an unlimited life-altering potential. Think about that as you are forming your own idea about how to involve yourself in the lives of the misfortunate. Could you afford the energy

to invest yourself in the life of one person? Of course! Let’s set that idea aside for the moment and later I’ll challenge you later to think about your own individual strengths and how you can lend them

to bettering the life of even just one child.

 

Elias was a freshman. It was his first year at Centennial. I would come to get to know him pretty well over the course of that year to the point where I now consider him my brother. He’s an Eminem type, though he hates the comparison. He told me once that he would sit on a train and ride it to the end of the line and back just observing the world and writing lyrics. That was how he passed the time. I believe it. By the time

I had met him, he already had notebooks full of lyrics. In fact, he had already been working with the Boys & Girls club in Compton

to produce beats and record some of his work.

 

This is a self-empowered young man

tuned into his passion & willing to go for it even when

no one was yet taking a vested interest.

 

Now, someone was.

 

Elias life, well, hasn’t been too easy. He lives in a foster home, parents sort of out of the equation. Despite that disadvantage, he has a great sense of humor, a brilliant mind for writing and a lot of undirected energy. And that’s both the problem and the solution in our high schools today. Kids have so much energy! If that energy isn’t directed well, it leads down darker paths. This is more especially true in a community like Compton where the opportunities to connect to a skill or passion are more scarce than in a white suburban hood.

 

The reason that is true is because there are less people and organizations invested in your well-being. Then you factor in

the home life. Statistically speaking, we see

more broken homes in America’s ghettos.

 

Sometimes a child’s birth parents are not involved in the raising of their kids (like in Elias’ case as a foster child). Maybe there is one parent.

And even if there is one, that one isn’t always fully capable.

 

I remember one time a principal was telling me that she had to call the home of a student around 12pm. On the other end of the phone was a parent who was unenthusiastic that the principal had just woken her up. Uh-oh. Lady, I sleep until noon because I can. You, on the other hand,

are the head of a household. That is not ok.

 

Elias went on to attend nearly 100% of the rap club meetings in the school year that followed. That is important because it spurs a question that is central to this movement. If he wasn’t in rap club, where might

he be? In Compton, this question is critical because of two factors.

 

The first, is that there really are not a lot of enriching after-school opportunities for kids. Thank God for the Boys & Girls Club, which has both the scope and resources to make themselves available to youth in that area from all schools. Other than that, an individual school might have one or two non-profit partners but certainly nothing similar to the enriched after-school offering in a community of affluence.

 

Where I grew up there were arts, athletics, cub scouts, business clubs,

chess clubs, math clubs, really a large number of ways

to get plugged into something beyond school.

 

Often times these programs were generated in-house, by the school themselves, not in partnership with an external organization. In a more resource-strapped school district like Compton, there isn’t always the budget, the people or the infrastructure available to build programming like that. It’s up to great organizations to pro-actively build

opportunities for Elias and his peers.

 

The second reason we have to ask about where Elias would be if

he wasn’t in Rap Club is because of his environment. Compton is a community known for its gang violence and drug use. When I talk about the neighborhood and the work that we are doing there, I often ask my audience to make a deduction with me.

 

Can you solve this equation?

​

Broken Home

+

Gang Community

+

Drug Culture

+

Nothing to do After School

=

?

 

Need I say more?

 

To me, this sort of stresses the urgency of building a seamless and collaborative network of individuals and organizations in these types of communities. Can we weave a web capable of catching each and every one of these students before they are caught by the ills of their environment? I think we have to. This is the best way that we can involve ourselves in a seemingly distant and solution-less problem and begin to empower our children to grow into individuals who can

affect their own community-wide change.

 

It is imperative that outside communities take a vested interest in the unbridled energy of our underserved youth and help them tune it into something of value; An opportunity to be productive and prosperous that they can carry with them through their whole lives. If we don’t do that, we will continue to see a direct correlate between our lack of interest from the outside and the rising gang affiliation & drug use on the inside. It’s time to create a new gang in Compton. I know the school district and its administrators probably wouldn’t want to frame it that way but that is how I see it. Forget Bloods & Crips, let’s give our kids another option: The after-school gang of non-profits.

Quick, someone come up with a catchy name!

 

~

 

Before I move on, I want to highlight something a bit more simple about this whole conversation surrounding Elias and that is the power of our friendship. Elias is my friend. I couldn’t be more proud to say that. I know he would say the same. At the end of the day, regardless of the bigger vision of building a network of non-profits and transforming the lives

of our kids, there will be nothing more powerful than the unique and personal friendship that we have. We’ve spent time together, talked through life together and learned from one another. That element cannot be forgotten. While I know it has impacted my life greatly to know him, imagine it from his perspective. I’m sure he hasn’t thought about it this way but he finally has someone who really genuinely cares about his well-being and is invested in him arriving at his fullest potential.

 

That is what truly matters.

 

It would be so easy for each of the privileged in this country

to take the same type of personal interest

in just one person and make a new friend.

 

The Senior

 

In our first year of rap club at Centennial, there really were two primary participants: Elias, the freshman, and Randy, the senior. Now if Elias represents the potential that exists in inspiring and empowering a student in Compton, then Randy represents the success.

 

A lot of people ask me, ‘how do you teach rap?’ ~ obviously a pretty good question since we are dealing with uncharted territory (I’ve yet to hear of another program similar to ours). In Chicago, I learned a lot through trial and error. We did a lot of writing together, we talked about things like nervousness, swagger & spent a lot of time preparing for performances that the school was affording us through assemblies & talent shows. I quickly discovered that rap isn’t a lesson-plan kind of thing. It’s more of a teach-what-you-know and let-the-creativity-run-wild kind of thing. It’s such an intimate and individual venture to pen something that is personal to you that you can’t really be told what to say or how to say it. I was fortunate enough to realize early on that

it wasn’t my job to impede on anyone’s self-expression, rather to facilitate the creativity, build the confidence & give

feedback and guidance where appropriate.

 

I met Randy some days after Elias. It wasn’t with the same assuredness that he approached me either. Randy’s desire to rap was strong but buried. He had some other things in his life that would need to be addressed before we flushed out the lyrical monster that I now know today. For starters, Randy wasn’t originally from Compton. He was from Mexico. He had been back and forth a few times to the states in his 17 years of life and was just recently starting to identify as a Comptonite. His first language is not English but Spanish and, as a result, his confidence was a bit lacking. He spoke to his peers and his teachers with a stutter that I can only assume came from being somewhat socially uncomfortable given his background. Despite those inherent disadvantages, I can say I’ve never met someone with

a greater drive to turn it all around.

 

When I first started teaching rap to the boys at Centennial, I started with a simple question, ‘what do you want to learn?’. the answer was a bit scary to me: ‘freestyle!’

 

uh-oh

 

That wasn’t really what I expected to hear and it certainly isn’t what I wanted to hear. The whole idea of me coming to teach rap in Compton was predicated around the idea of me playing to my greatest strength: WRITING poetry. Freestyle rapping, or improvising rap off the top of

your head, was NOT my strength. It’s something that rappers do

but many prefer to have the time to pen lyrics.

That was me.

 

Regardless,

I was committed to taking the journey no matter the curve and so we started our first few weeks with Freestyle as the focus.

 

I know why they wanted to learn it so bad. For them, that was the way they could win respect & credibility with their friends. I’m convinced that freestyle rap exists on all high school campuses across the country not because everyone wants to be a rapper (although a lot of young people would like to be) but because that’s just a fun way to pass the time and see who’s got the skill. Groups of young people hang out at lunch or after the bell and pass the freestyle in a circle, seeing if someone can come up with something so lyrically impressive that all the other kids are like, ‘Whoa!’. I remember doing the same with my own friends back in the suburbs of Chicago. It’s fun and it doesn’t cost anything.

 

So we started with freestyle. Didn’t take me long to realize that as long as I was in practice, my freestyle game was still something to be admired. Countless times Elias would get frustrated with the fact that

he couldn’t piece together words in the same way but he always kept trying. I reinforced with both of them that when we were in rap class, failure was just between us and that we were there to practice and get better. That seemed to work well enough. We spent the whole year re-visiting this side of rap just to keep our minds sharp and though a freestyle can always go south, I think these guys have a lot more confidence going for it, even when the stakes are high,

like when there is a girl around!

 

As the fall rolled into winter, all elements of our collective rap game were going stronger. I had some great support from what is now an epic Compton Raps team. Visitors like my friend Zach Majors would come in and show the kids a totally different style and break up any monotony that might exist from hearing from the same teacher week after week. Rene Navarro, my good friend, was equally committed to ensuring the success of our program and showed up with me week after week, even substituting if I had a conflict. I couldn’t have been even half as effective if it weren’t for his encouragement and dedication.

 

Another key player came along who really opened up the potential for what we could do. Mario Baltes is a rapper sure enough but the greatest skill he lent to our team was the ability to engineer beats and produce songs in the studio. That is something we didn’t even have back in Chicago. The kids ran with that! Mario started providing them beats to write to and, for Randy especially, this was a game changer.

 

He was starting to gain that comfortability that had been lacking in the early days and now, because of his increased swagger, he was starting to visualize creating a project that would act as his formal introduction to the rap world: an album. At the beginning of 2016, Randy told me that he wanted to create an album by the time he graduated in the Spring.

I said, ‘no way, you can’t do it’.

 

Kidding.

 

We were all thrilled! What a great goal to set. Not only would he be able to flash his high school diploma in May but to have a self-empowered music project to boot? What could be better? He started working in his time outside of class with Mario’s beats and began penning the lyrics to the project, which he called, Graduation 2016. Then, when a song was ready, he would organize studio time with Mario to lay down the tracks. They kept coming, one after the other. There was a determination there that was something to be emulated. It became his obsession and his passion and we all saw the vision with him and offered our feedback, support & encouragement. The greatest element of this undertaking had nothing to do with the teachers of the class, it had to do with this young man having visualized a goal for himself and exercising his own will to get it done. If Compton Raps was an extracurricular,

Randy was putting in overtime.

 

My favorite part of watching Randy do his thing was witnessing the birth of his love affair with music. It was hot and heavy and he openly talked about the impact that it was having on his life. There was love abounding. He started singing at school to his classmates, and embracing the idea that they would see him as Randy KC, ‘the rapper’. Don’t forget, this is the same high school where Dr. Dre & Kendrick Lamar went to school. That took a lot of cajones. He totally transformed his own existence from quiet kid with a stutter to baller with a dream. As we say in the rap world, ‘peoples were fucksin’ with it’. Everyone knew that Randy was going to drop this album before it was all said and done.

He even started developing his own YouTube channel where he would give us samples of what to expect. He grew that channel from

0 subscribers to 120 in a matter of months, with most of the

subscribers being fellow Centennial students.

 

Wow.

 

From January-May of 2016 we were afforded several opportunities to perform for the student body. Multiple assemblies were lined up to showcase the talents of Centennial musicians and our rappers were front and center. We even all had a song together, Do it For the Love, which we were ready to perform at a moment’s notice. Now performance was a whole different animal. It is one thing to be in a classroom exchanging freestyle raps for practice. It’s a whole other thing to step in front of 500 students in Compton and perform. I had a certain level of assuredness because I had quite a few performances under my belt years but these guys were very nervous and rightfully so. Our first performance as a team didn’t go too well. Neither Randy nor Elias

had never held a microphone in front of that many people

before and so there wasn’t a lot of comfort there.

 

Good.

 

We learned.

 

And then there were more performances; Each one influenced by the last. Each time, our guys evolved their approach, their presentation

& even just the way they carried themselves in front of a crowd.

 

I remember Elias even walking up the steps in the bleachers to touch hands with fans closer to the top. No one told him to do that, he just figured it out. The swagger was growing and I was so proud.

 

By the time May rolled around, we had one last performance where Randy would be presenting a few songs off the album. By this time, there was so much buzz on campus about his project that the expectations were high. When we dropped the beat on Randy’s

party banger, VIP Section, he turned to the crowd and gave

them a performance that will live in infamy.

 

I will never forget the way they erupted after his first verse when the hook dropped. Ever. It’s the screams of the girls that really lingered. Beatles-esque. All the pride that I took in being Randy’s mentor and teacher that day pales in comparison as to what he must have felt

to have delivered such a performance in the

waning days of his high school career.

 

What a precedent to set as he made the transition from student to man. He even went on to perform the song at prom. I wasn’t there but the video is sick. I’m sure he’d love to have you watch both the prom video and the assembly performance on his YouTube channel.

 

The most critical takeaway from the story of Randy KC and Compton Raps is what our program inspired him to do. It was total and utter self-empowerment through just a little nudge. Music was a missing element from Randy’s life and we were able to help facilitate the introduction. He took it from there. His success story then came back to inspire his fellow classmates as well, which cannot be understated. I’m proud to say that I was a part of his story in some way and again, honored to call him my friend. I’m also super grateful because I never could have imagined drawing up a greater paradigm for what it looks like to involve yourself

in the world of a young student with such bright potential and help

them achieve a dream as epic as his. Every last member of our team, including the principals of the school, deemed our program a great success when they saw how it had impacted Randy’s life.

 

Calling All Kendricks

 

There is a reason I so desperately wanted to teach rap at Centennial in Compton. Obviously, as I mentioned before, there was a connection there already through Michelle. What a blessing. She is an expert strategist for her organization and an opportunist who would never miss the chance to optimize the impact of her work. I am the same. Thus, the larger agenda in Compton goes beyond just teaching music. Compton Raps was designed to set a paradigm for after-school music education that derives from a recognizable community. In catching the right attention and media stream, this idea, which is a powerful one, could spread throughout the entire country, inspiring countless more stories like that of Elias & Randy. At a school that boasts such amazing alumni as Dr. Dre & Kendrick Lamar, the goal is to call them to the movement

and inspire them to take on the same charge.

Then we’d really have something.

 

I once asked one of my students who their classmates would rather have speak at their school, President Obama or Lil’ Wayne? I probably don’t have to tell you what they said. I think it says something when

our rappers have more persuasiveness and influence than our own president, don’t you? What a tremendous power. A lot of people would say, ‘that’s a shame.’ Why? The way I see it, it's just an indication of how much respect young people have for those who aren’t afraid to stand up, give convention the proverbial finger and live their dream.

I respect that too, though I probably would rather see Obama.

 

The real problem comes from our expectations of our rappers. They aren’t high enough. We don’t hold these influencers to the same level of accountability that we hold our president. If that were to shift, maybe

we could see another musical revolution of love and progress like that sparked by John Lennon or Jerry Garcia. But as of this moment, the expectation for a rapper is to live fast, get money and fuck bitches

(Their words, not mine).

 

Sometimes I feel quite alone in visualizing something bigger for the rap world. It doesn’t stop me from pressing forward though. I like to think that someday my music will also stretch to the far reaches of the globe just like theirs. For now though, I see the work at Centennial as kind of like spinning a spider web of love. At some point I figure these guys are going to say, ‘hey, I wonder if I should invest some of my time, money & energy back into the school that I came from’ and that’s when we catch em’. That’s got to be inevitable right? When those globally respected voices unite and turn towards social progress, they’ll transform the way the world sees rap. Our program is raring and ready to be the platform for that evolution. Until that time, it’s just about keeping the nose to the grindstone. Working to transform the lives of students one at a time.

 

~

 

At this point in the text, I want to shift the conversation away from rap and move it a bit more towards the way that non-profits can together

to positively affect our underserved communities.

 

When Compton Was Close

 

In the 2015-2016 school year, the Compton Unified School District happened upon an idea that I see as super-critical to the success

of any school district. They created the position, Network Partnerships Director, for their administrative team. The person in that role

was assigned the task of acting as the liaison between the school district and the non-profit (and for profit) organizations

working in the local community.

 

Yes!

 

(Insert Quick Emotional Transition Here)

 

It is with sadness that I report that the woman who was assigned to that role, has since moved on to work in another district and that Compton Unified decided not to try and fill it with a new person. I did speak to the assistant superintendent and expressed my interest in taking this position (I would crush it!) but alas, it was reinforced to me that for the time being they weren’t going to be seeking a replacement. When I return to Compton, however, I will continue supporting my suggestion that they do try and recreate that role.

 

The philosophy here is too good and sets a major paradigm for building relationships between an underserved community its students. Having a point person who has an understanding of the non-profit landscape in their district and who is constantly working to create an environment in which these organizations both thrive and work to support one is a ‘Wow!’ kind of idea. For the brief time that my friend, Dr. Jacqui, held this position, I was able to introduce the district to two other non-profit organizations who ended up building what should be

a long-lasting partnership there.

 

I would constantly be encouraging Dr. Jacqui to think about the idea

of picking ‘low-hanging fruit’ ~ a metaphor for making easy, no-brainer connections within the school district that would

directly and immediately benefit the students.

 

We did just that.

 

The first introduction I made to Dr. Jacqui was my friend, Justin Wolff, who is the founder of a nationally known brand called Yoobi. What Yoobi does is pretty awesome. They are a 1-1 school supply company, meaning to say that when someone buys one of their pencils, notebooks, etc. another is donated in a community of need.

They are in Target so it’s no small operation.

To date, they have donated over

1 million school supplies.

 

Before making the introduction between Justin & Dr. Jacqui, there was no relationship between Yoobi & The Compton Unified School District. We are talking about two phone calls and an email, y’all. I said to Justin, ‘Hey, I’d love to introduce you to Compton’ and I said to Jacqui, ‘Hey, you guys gotta meet Yoobi’ and then sent an introduction email between the two. So easy. A few days later I found out that Dr. Jacqui and Justin had met. The result of the meeting was the donation of 5,000 sets of school supplies to children in the Compton Unified School District.

 

We’ll call that one a BoomShakalacka!

 

Those two never saw it but when I got that news, I was screaming & dancing in my living room. This shit works people. I don’t know even a fraction of the kids that got those school supplies and they will never know how it happened. That’s not what matters. What matters is that something epic & positive got done. The best part is, it wasn’t at all difficult. It doesn’t have to be. Amazing people & organizations are out there doing their thing. Positive change doesn’t have to be built from scratch every time. Sometimes just plugging the right connections together can take that amazingness next level.

 

Another no-brainer introduction that I made was between the Compton Unified School District and the Western Golf Association who runs the Evans Scholar Foundation. I myself am an Evans Scholar, which is to say that I got a full-tuition scholarship to college for being a golf caddy with good grades and upstanding character. If you’ve seen the movie, CaddyShack, then you know about this scholarship.

 

Now, the Evans Scholarship Foundation realized that not all American high school students are aware of, or even have the opportunity to pursue, their scholarship. One of the biggest barriers is that many communities don’t have golf courses, let alone courses with a youth caddy program. Someone from the foundation came up with a brilliant solution to this problem and called it, Caddy Academy. Caddy Academy selects female freshman high school students (academic top-performers from these non-golf communities) to fly back to Chicago for 7-weeks over the summer to be able to work at a golf course. They live with all the other young ladies selected for this program and work nearly every day of their stay in order to become eligible for the Evans Scholarship after 3 years of participating. Compton is the type of community that this initiative is designed for. There isn’t a country club in Compton (yet!) and so the students qualify for Caddy Academy.

 

I introduced the WGA to Compton in January 2016. By March 2016 there had been 3 girls selected from Compton to participate in the program and at the time of writing this book, they have already completed their first summer of caddying. Two more summers and they will apply for the Evans. They are more than likely to receive a full-tuition scholarship to college. As an alumni of ES, this one hits me in the heart. I cannot wait to be there the day that these 3 young ladies receive their scholarships. They won’t be thinking about the inter-workings of how this opportunity came to them in the first place and they don’t need to. But picture me, in the back of the room in 2020, with a big smirk on my face, knowing how easy it was to put this ball in motion and embracing the impact that this simple introduction will have had on their lives. By the time I die in 2101 (yes I am predicting my death at age 115), there will have been hundreds of students from Compton selected for this program

who will have received the Evans Scholarship.

 

After School Programs: Daddy 2.0

 

Single-parent homes are becoming a rampant epidemic in this country. I’m not sure why. Regardless of the reason, divorce and parental abandonment are a critical factor in the underdevelopment of communities like Compton, Detroit and the South Side of Chicago.

 

As a result, these places need the support of

interested individuals and larger organizations.

 

It is so difficult for a single-parent to take on the responsibilities of work, managing a home and child-rearing at the same time. The education and well-being of the child is compromised by the absence of a second parent, while the well-being of the parent has already been compromised by the separation with their partner and the new responsibility of raising a child on their own.

 

But these families don’t need to be alone. Those of us outside of the struggle in this world really have to develop a stronger sense of accountability to these families and reach back

for the children in our broken homes.

 

The great liaisons for connecting those of us with privilege to these disadvantaged youth are our after-school programs built by education-based non-profits. With our current educational infrastructure, there is no way that our public schools will be able give individual focus to a child suffering from a difficult home life. But the non-profits can help by privatizing specific educational programs that serve students with a greater intimacy than that afforded by their general education.

 

When a school is connected to a great after-school program it isn’t usually just the program itself that’s great. It’s the people leading it. They become the mentors of the students who are invested in teaching them something that will engage and excite. In my case, I now know that I have an accountability and responsibility to roughly 25 kids (high school and elementary programs) who are looking at me for inspiration & guidance. That is awesome! Bring it on baby! I know that since I am happy, healthy and eager to teach that I am well suited to inspire and encourage children of lesser fortune. And it isn’t just about inspiration. It’s also about engagement. You have to be available and communicative with your students in order to maximize the impact.

 

I have the energy for this because I don’t have a wife, kids, mortgage

or restrictive job. I realize that’s pretty rare. It won’t always be as easy

for people who have those responsibilities to embrace a similar involvement but that’s why engaging with an excellent non-profit

is a great option for extending your hand to these children through

those who are already organizing efforts to do so.

 

If you haven’t thought about it that way before and don’t currently have a non-profit partnership that you support, I encourage you to find one. And if you can’t find one, then... TA DAH! Here I am. Hopefully you can see my commitment to growing our impact in Compton and have gotten a sense of the great one-on-one work that I have been able to do with these incredible students. I’m going to put a link to our Straight Intta Compton fundraiser here. It’s an easy, trackable and tax-deductible

way for you to forge a commitment to dynamic after-school

education for youth in a tough community.

 

https://www.facebook.com/donate/735758429908760/

 

~

 

At this time, I’d like to shift the focus of this text. I hope that you will stay with me as I attempt to get a bit more personal with the message and talk about some things that I’ve been noticing about myself and others in this country. I want to tie it all back in to our conversation

about non-profits as we wrap up a few pages down.

 

A Question From Kate

 

One time a good friend of mine, Kate, said ‘are you going to be a rapper when you are 50?’ Good question. I think the simple answer is, once a rapper always a rapper. But I saw her point. Kate is an ambitious and well-respected friend and she, of course, was challenging me to think beyond my youthful exuberance towards something long-lasting with a good and progressive foundation. I think I can have an incredible impact on the world even just through my words and performances as an artist but I really have held Kate’s words with me as I have also worked to build educational infrastructure for the kids in both Compton and Chicago. I want this rap career to be bigger than just me. I challenge you to think along that same vein. Is the work that you are doing right now A. Satisfactory to you and B. Advantageous to the whole?

 

If not, what needs to change?

 

This Intta Compton movement is designed around an idea that I only recently was introduced to: Asset-Based Community Development, or leveraging the strengths of a certain community and making them work towards its overall betterment. The music and the music education are our great unifiers of our vision in Compton but the ultimate goal is so much bigger. It is to demonstrate the transformative power that we can have when we turn our energies and attention to those in need and help them empower themselves to change their world from within. We do have the power to develop to curb gang violence, poverty & drug use in our inner-cities. It takes innovation & action to unite us around these types of goals. It also requires a self-assessment. Do you believe that your life work is allowing you to have the type of impact that you see necessary for transforming our world? It’s critical that we all do.

 

Nothing will get done if we keep saying things like,

‘that will never change’ and rationalizing our dis-involvement.

We can each have a personal relationship with the evolution of the

world around us. We just have to spend some time thinking

about what that will look like and making a plan of action

in our own individual lives.

 

Energy & Empathy

 

I always feel guilty when I’m not exercising my gifts. It’s like Catholic guilt; inherent and unavoidable. This guilt, however, doesn’t stem from religion, rather my human drive to be better and do more. I can’t imagine how someone feels who hasn’t even tuned into their gifts. That must be a real tough existence. If you never had the opportunity to explore what it is that makes you happy, then it’s simple math: you won’t be happy. Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong. Maybe having this understanding of my passion & what I’m good at is the catalyst to that guilt. I think I’ll take it though. After all, it seems to me that living up to a fraction of

your potential is better than not believing

you have potential in the first place.

 

For me, it all comes down to energy. We talk about energy a lot on a macro-scale in this country. Where do we get our oil?

How can we build alternative sources?

Questions like that.

 

But there is an often-overlooked energy conversation

that relates to the individual too.

Where do we commit our own individual human energy?

 

I’ll never forget that scene in the Matrix when Morpheus is telling Neo why machines have decided to use humans to power their revolution against humanity. He explains that a person is a collection of so much undeniable force and power that the machines eventually recognized that we are the greatest source of energy that exists on the planet today. As a result, they start harvesting humans to power their own existence. While that’s a bit ugly of a thought, the idea behind it is true. We have this amazing potential. The problem is it seems

like many of us can’t help but waste it.

 

It’s fun to me to think about the guy who invented the windmill. The idea that we could capture the wind and make it work for us. Wow. But, while the invention itself transformed the thinking about the resources available to us and how we can use them, what’s more impressive was the thinking that went behind the invention. That in itself was a well-appropriate use of mental output. This guy was spending his own human energy to better the world in the most simple way. But it’s one thing to think and another to act. I’m sure this guy (or gal) whoever he (she) was, was not the first to sense the great power of the wind but he was the first to really focus on how we could harness thisever-abundant resource for the good of the whole.

 

Any lasting invention or initiative is the result of a well-directed human energy coming to manifestation through design, trial and error. We happen to live in an age where, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, energy output from humans has grown exponentially (relative to our history) and afforded us the comfort of the world we live in today. In Compton, as in many underprivileged communities, there still exist the same level of energy within each individual. The problem is that the conditions of the community tend to discourage people from tapping into theirs and it ends up getting redirected towards drug use or a life of crime. Imagine if that was reversed by a mass empowerment.

 

As more and more people got tuned into their life’s purpose, they began to see themselves as equally accountable toward building a better world. Then communities like Compton wouldn’t have to play catch up. Instead, the people there could become an equally valuable

resource as contributors to building an awesome

society with minimal pain and suffering.

 

As people, we will commit our energy to something. We have to. Otherwise we are just blah. Your decisions about where that energy will go are so heavily influenced by the values of your youth and the environment that you live in. Who is going to paint a picture if no one teaches them to paint? Is there even any paint available?

 

One of the great catastrophes of our age is the amount of energy we commit to our own self-destruction. I’m puzzled as to where this comes from in our evolution. Why can’t we resist being bad to ourselves? I think the greatest example of this in America is in our relationship to alcohol. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why do people spend so much of

their hard-earned money and exert so much of their physicaland mental energy to the pursuit of getting fucked up?

 

Excessive alcohol consumption contributes to uglier health,

lighter wallets, and often times damaged relationships.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

 

To me, the answer lies in a subconscious resistance to fulfill the entirety of our potential. It’s much easier to drink and socialize then to connect to something that will make us vulnerable and hold us accountable

to eachother each day. If we could turn even a fraction of the world’s drinking problem into an attempt to right our societal ills,

we’d be close to paradise in no time.

 

I think there is also an infatuation with the affect of alcohol and a societal acceptance of its use that factor in. On the one hand, people still have major social inhibitions. This, to me, is justifiable relative to where we are in our existence. It’s just now that we are becoming comfortable peacefully sharing our planet with others. America in itself is founded on the principal that we can all live in harmony regardless of our background, ethnicity or religion. The result of the infancy of this openly ‘social age’ is that we are still safeguarding against disappointment and destruction caused by others that

has occurred through all of human history.

 

We don’t want to be that way, so we attempt desperately to find the things that give us commonality and help us shed our inhibitions when interacting with one another. In essence, we are just learning to turn off the evolutionary survival switch that says ‘be afraid’ and we are turning on a new switch that says, ‘It’s all good’. Lots of people think they need help keeping the first switch off and turning the second switch on. As a result, they turn to the things that make that transition a bit easier. Alcohol of course is not the only example of what people turn to but for some reason it has become an overly prominent one.

 

The real leaders & change makers in this world, however, are the ones that teach themselves the characteristics that we like about ourselves when we are drunk, high & happy and apply those characteristics to their sober existence. Their productivity comes from a contentedness of self and their ambitions start to direct them to a more positive

existence for themselves and those around them.

 

As we talk about building a healthier existence for our entire race, there is a temptation to see yourself as just a drop in a limitless ocean. But as my favorite movie, Cloud Atlas, suggests, ‘what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?’ Your life and your actions matters. Definitely to you, definitely to those around you but also to all of humanity. Do you see it that way? If not, it might be time for a readjustment. Why don’t you see your life as a significant part of the whole story of Earth?

 

One thing so many of us forget to do is find truth in the wisdom of what has come before us. The reason the Bible, for example, has been so impactful throughout the course of human history, is because there is so much truth there that resonates with the human condition.

 

One of the great challenges of our age is that

wisdom and truth have a lot of competition.

 

We aren’t always tuned into the best sources for bettering ourselves and instead, we squander a lot of our minutes each dayabsorbing

content & engaging in activity that don’t foster

our understanding of the worldand our role in it.