All the pain and struggling and suffering I went through in life, made me work hard to get out and build a better life for myself. Pain and struggle teach appreciation and gratitude. If you're in pain or struggle, embrace it. Life is precious and short, but no one said it would be easy. You can continue down the same broken road you're on or go back and take the other direction and make better choices that will ultimately better your situation in the end. The choices you make after that is what dictates your life. Hardly anyone ever tells the listeners (which is mostly kids) the truth that making bad life choices leads to prison or death. They like to either A: bitch and moan about whatever situation they're in (but they leave out the many, many poor life choices THEY made to put themselves into the situation to begin with) or B: they glamorize and romanticize the lifestyle and perpetuate the negative and bad choices to make. Too many rappers spread bullshit and complaints and not enough solutions. I will give the listener a window into all the madness in the hood, but I also give them an escape, to open their eyes and see that you don’t have to continue the cycle, that you can focus on the positive: working hard, saving, sacrificing and making something of yourself. I’ll touch on similar subjects and topics, but I also bring a critical thinking perspective to it. When it comes to serious music, I try not to just say the same things that every other rapper says. I prefer the latter, but I can do the former. There’s a time to do laid-back, fun, music and there’s a time to do serious music with substance. I’m all about substance and truth and actual lyricism. I’m an old-school b-boy from the era of MCs and DJs, so naturally I’m all about outshining not only all competition, but outshining myself. From cassettes in 1988 to CDs and vinyl to DVDs and blu-rays into the ‘90s and 2000s and the rest is history. We recorded and released albums and singles and performed all the time like crazy, long before we worked with any other artists. Oso was also there at the beginning as well. As far as Darkroom Familia goes, I’m one of the original founders of Darkroom Familia, me, Duke, Dyno, D-Roll. We went from that to full-color, professionally shrinkwrapped albums to selling directly to stores and distributors. From then on, it was EPs and full-length albums (cassettes). We would put our cassettes on consignment in stores in Oakland, San Francisco, Hayward, Fremont, San Jose, East Palo Alto, Berkeley, Daly City, etc., After a short while (maybe after the first month or so) when we went back to consign more cassettes, the stores just outright bought them from us, 20, 50, 100 at a time. We went from that to replicating more /different maxi-single cassettes and selling them all over the Bay Area out of a gym bag. We released a cassette maxi-single with a black-and-white Xerox-copied cover and shrinkwrapped with plastic and a hair dryer. In 1988 we started recording our own raps over instrumentals we had on vinyl (everything from Eazy-E and NWA to Ice-T to Audio Two to Biz Markie and more). Then I saw my older brother (Duke) write a rap in ’84 and I started to write not too long after that as well and I would sing along, rap along to Slick Rick, LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Too $hort and others. The crime, the drugs, the violence, the chaos, the charity, the government tyranny, the politicians pretending to care while doing nothing about the problems, etc., I grew up in the ‘80s, was a b-boy breakin’ and pop-lockin’ and battling other people or crews, etc. I experienced all the bad that comes from poverty and economically depressed areas. I grew up in low-income housing with Oakland about 5 minutes to the north of me on the 880 freeway and San Francisco right over the bridge on the other side of the Bay, about 35 minutes from me, depending on the traffic (which is almost always bad). The Bay Area of Northern California (the East Bay to be exact). 1) Tell us a bit about yourself where you're from, when did you start rapping and how'd you become part of Darkroom Familia? I’m from the Northside of Hayward, California.
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