CHAPTER 7
POWER AND CONNECTION​

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I am an MC and Poet from Oxford. I first discovered lyric writing in my early teens and I quickly began to find it essential; a way to channel my emotions and organise my thoughts. A self-guided therapy. I’ve not studied therapy academically but I developed my own strategies for processing difficult experiences and situations, some of which played out over a number of years. I live with the benefits of this therapy I created for myself every day. 

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I grew up in Oxford, I don’t feel like I'm “from" anywhere else, it’s home. When people think about Oxford, I know that they probably get an image of the University and the world-famous “dreaming spires”, the prestige and elitism. But I grew up very much on the other side of Oxford. The place I grew up in is actually one of the 10% most-deprived areas in the UK, according to the government’s index of multiple deprivations. Things like poverty and crime are higher, and life expectancy is lower than the rest of the city/county/country – it’s that stereotypical council estate area. A lot of people in these areas carry trauma, often multiple traumas. It’s argued that being in this environment is itself trauma-inducing, that makes sense to me, I have experienced some of that. Growing up, we were always in financial trouble, and I saw the emotional effect that had on my mum, who was really the only adult in my life. There were mental health issues in my family, and violence and the temptations of crime were never far from my close circles. Along with trouble at school, my friend’s various dramas and other miscellaneous stuff, it's safe to say I found some tough times. One thing that would always bring me back to where I wanted to be mentally was music. 

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TEACHERS

Music had always been a big part of my home environment, listening to music was something that I always loved doing. It had been at the back of my mind for as long as I can remember, but it was in my teens, aged about 14 or 15, that I started to consciously think about making music myself. I think I was drawn to Hip Hop lyrics because they talked about a lot of things that I was going through; poverty, dad not being around, violence, police harassment, friends being so close they felt more like family than my blood relatives did, being on the outside with no hope of finding a way in. I didn’t really hear any other forum where that was being talked about in a way I could relate to. I wanted to tell my story, to start writing my own lyrics. But I didn’t know anyone at all that was even trying to make music, I had no guidance, or any real sense of where to begin. 

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The way that I figured out how it was done was by learning other rappers’ tracks. I think the first was Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ – I bought it for my mum for her birthday. She liked the song but I think my reasons for choosing this present were at least a little bit selfish. I spent the next weeks and months listening to it on repeat for hours at a time, learning every single word and trying to figure out ‘How does he do this? Where do the rhymes land? How does it fit with the beat?’. I learned by copying. I didn’t have any access to instrumentals – that’s something people have quite easy access to nowadays with YouTube etc but I can remember having to rap over people like Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. so I could try out my verses. 

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I used to truant from school a lot. The first few years at secondary school were tough for me; apart from the obvious, there were a lot of difficult changes happening in my life and I think it just all got too much. Looking back, I see the school really let me down. They had low expectations of what I could achieve and I got no support at all. It didn’t seem like anyone cared if I skipped lessons, or even the whole day. They completely neglected my emotional needs and their duty to make sure I was safe. To me the thing that says it all is the fact that I dropped Music as a subject as soon as I could, I knew I loved music, and I was interested in making it, but I hated the way that it was taught in school. It was so uninspiring and geared heavily towards kids who could read music and were having lessons on piano, clarinet, or some other posh instrument outside of school (paid for by their parents of course). People like me were only allowed to play the coconuts or the wood block alongside them, if we did anything at all, it was just a boring “mess around” lesson. Plus the teacher was crazy! 

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When it came to GCSEs, my school didn’t enter me into some of them and the ones they did enter me in I didn’t do too well in. Although I got close to the highest possible marks in some of the tests (the highest possible mark on my Spoken English test which I made up on the spot), due to the examination structure at the time, I basically left school with no qualifications and went into unskilled manual work. I was making bits of money wherever I could and not getting very much fulfilment from life at all. I was just trying to exist, and contribute to my mum’s household bills whenever I could.

All through that time, I guess I always had a hope in the back of my mind that music was somehow going to work out for me. I was still always writing lyrics, and visualising a me that was good enough and confident enough to perform them on stage. Back then I was doing temporary agency work; picking in warehouses and labouring on building sites. I would write bars in my head and have to memorise those lyrics as I was walking around the warehouse, or doing whatever manual task on site. When I would get home I had to write them down straight away before they ran out of my head. I had to. It felt like something very important. Back then, not a lot of people knew that I was writing...