A MUSICAL TRANSITION
Santino Alcoser always liked writing stories.
He grew up in the Heights, playing basketball and baseball with the other kids, roller skating to pass the time. But it was in elementary school that his writing started to take form.
He was getting pulled out of classes to attend special writing courses. “I noticed I was better at it and started writing more poetry in eighth grade because that’s when life becomes more gray, and you start feeling all these feelings and thinking all these thoughts,” he says.
Some of those thoughts were common for kids his age — obsessing over monster movies like “Cloverfield” or superheroes like Spider-Man.
“I would have dreams that I’m Spider-Man, just the other day I had one. In my dreams, I’m always running out of web,” Alcoser says.
Other thoughts were less common.
“I remember asking my parents how long it would be until I didn’t have to wear a shirt,” he says. “I never wanted to wear a shirt, I never wanted to go through female puberty or any of that.”
That was when he grew up as Sarah Alcoser, before transitioning to Santino, and before putting his writing skills toward hip-hop rhymes as MC i Ckan Ryme, a Houston rapper whose social-media presence is getting him attention in a crowded genre.
Still, he hopes to be more than just a local rapper, in a lot of ways, Alcoser wants to be a voice for the LGBT community.
Though the MC’s lyrics aren’t exclusively about coming out or transitioning from female to male, it’s something that the rapper wants people to know, which is why the nuances of that transition float into his lyrics. And yet, his most popular track is the graceful, lyrical “Buffalo Bayou,” a song mostly about Houston.
Rappers who are challenging the status quo and ideas about gender in hip-hop are growing in Texas. Within the past year, Dallas rapper Don tha Doll, a trans rapper who wears stockings and lipstick and challenges haters to gun duels, got a flurry of attention when his video appeared on World Star Hip-hop.
Still, openly LGBT rappers have always had to work a bit harder to find their lane and reach a general audience, while at the same time addressing issues important to them.
Houston music producer Baker Yung, who met Alcoser on Twitter, says he almost cried at some of the sincerity in Alcoser’s lyrics. Yung calls Alcoser’s sound “pure hiphop.”
Alcoser says making hip-hop music has helped him present his truth with confidence. It wasn’t always that way.
Alcoser didn’t come out to friends until late in high school, and it was in preparing for the senior prom that he made a drastic change by cutting off all of his hair. He was getting closer to the person he is today. He went to a salon his mother suggested and kept the locks in a bag after it was done. He still has that bag, not for sentimental reasons, he says, but to donate to people who might need it. His mother works with pediatric cancer patients.
It was from that point on that rapping started to take a larger presence in his life. In 2014, he first started making recordings. His first EP was recorded in a dorm room inside Moody Towers on the University of Houston campus, before he was an actual student and still a senior at John H. Regan High School, now Heights High School. A friend had a laptop, a mic and music-recording software.
“I was like, ‘Damn. I just recorded my first EP.’ A lot of my good stuff isn’t just punchlines, it’s a lot of intricate hidden things,” he says.
Rhyming and lyrics are his strength. It’s a sound that doesn’t stray too far from his Houston roots, the H-town swagger is there, but also a sound that’s similar to Golden Age rap lyricism.
Alcoser said he chose the name Santino because it’s derived from “saint” or “angel” and holds the image of being mom’s little angel.
For his stage name, MC i Ckan Ryme, there’s no hidden meaning other than an inside joke for fans of Adam Sandler’s film “Billy Madison.”
“I threw the K in there for a silent K, I always giggle at it because it’s kind of silly,” he says.
But as far as his desire to become a well-known trans rapper, that’s no joke. Santino Alcoser is 100-percent serious.