Hip-hop artists work to lift music’s profile
TODAY: rap music FEB. 26: books
Years have passed since a hip-hop artist from central Ohio hit the big time, but that doesn’t mean such musicians aren’t hard at work in Columbus.
Promoter Josh Miller, co-founder and organizer of the fledgling 2x2 HipHop Festival, estimates that several hundred rappers, beat-makers and producers work locally in the genre. The larger community just doesn’t know better.
“A lot of people who aren’t in the hip-hop scene look at it and say Columbus doesn’t have a hip-hop scene,” Miller said.
For the uninitiated, hiphop blends jazz, gospel, African rhythms and poetry. It originated in the 1970s in the New York borough of the Bronx and later spread to Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Outsize personalities dominate the genre, which is respected for its outstanding musicality.
Last Sunday, in fact, the Grammy Award for best new artist — open to musicians in all genres — went
to Chance the Rapper, from Chicago.
DJ Tron (24-yearold Tyler Harris), a fixture at Skully’s Music-Diner, cited the recent rise in hip-hop artists from Chicago — Chance, Chief Keef, Mick Jenkins — as an example of what Columbus could offer if artists would lay egos aside and promote one another’s work.
“The thing about Columbus that’s so cool is there’s no specific sound,” DJ Tron said. “It’s not like Atlanta or California or even New York. It’s the same reason none of us has accents; everyone’s art form is up to their interpretation.”
By all accounts, the rap scene in Columbus features plenty of talent, from freshfaced performers to seasoned veterans.
“The difference between now and when I was coming up is the scene is . . . a lot more splintered,” said Jawhar Glass (aka the rapper Illogic), who has performed in the city since the early 2000s. “There’s not a lot of camaraderie.”
Miller, the promoter, said that the local rap community can be loosely divided into two parts — the harder-hitting “trap” rappers and the more poetic, introspective MCs. But each faction further breaks down into many narrower groups.
When Glass started writing rhymes in the late 1990s, Bernie’s — a now-closed bar near Ohio State University — hosted a weekly hip-hop open house, with DJ PRSM and his group, the Fonosluts, presiding.
One Sunday night might feature a hardhitting gangster rapper, Glass said, and the next, a more lyrical rapper. DJ PRSM served as the common bond, uniting disparate styles into one beautiful mess of sound.
During this era, Bizzy Bone, from Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and the rapper originally known as Lil’ Bow Wow launched their careers, with both Columbus-born artists eventually reaching national acclaim.
But PRSM’s death in 2007, Glass said, left the hip-hop community without a unifying force, and the genre suffered as a result.
“I think one of the things within the black community itself is a lot of us have more of an ‘I’m gonna get mine, you gonna get yours’ mind-set,” he said. “There’s not a mind-set of us working together. There’s not a centralized person bringing people together.”
Rap artist Vern Christian (OG Vern) exudes a more optimistic view.
His manager, Hakim Callwood, used his connections in the arts community to book Christian’s first show at 129 Studios, a tiny gallery in Franklinton, in June 2015. From there, Christian said, “it’s been nothing but love.”
He performs every week at venues ranging from Kafe Kerouac, a coffee shop and arts space, to the Summit, a hip-hop haven.
Christian, 19, estimates that 50 to 100 rappers and music producers populate his hip-hop crowd, which shies from heavier trap beats in favor of more artistic arrangements.
“They’re trying to call it a renaissance within the underground scene because there’s a lot of us,” he said. “That’s where that family-type thing (comes in). Every time we go out, you see the same people. But it’s not a bad feeling. . . . It’s like you’re having a good time ‘cause it’s all your family.”
Still, Christian and Callwood agree with Glass and Miller that Kanye West-like fame will remain elusive for Columbus rap artists until the fragmented pieces of the community unite.
“I think in hip-hop people don’t do that great a job of reaching down and helping people up,” said Callwood, 22. “And people don’t do a lot of asking because that rags-toriches is so fantasized, so glamorized . . . and that’s just stupid.”
On the other side of the scene, the hard-hitting rappers typically have a strong fan base and often get more than 3,000 plays per song on music-sharing site SoundCloud — the primary means by which hip-hop artists share their work.
Christian said he might get 3,000 on an entire mixtape of four or five tracks. On the other hand, he has connections to Columbus venues that they might not.
Securing venues hasn’t always been easy.
Three years ago, when he tried to secure a spot to start a monthly hip-hop night, Miller said he found it “ridiculously hard.”
“Everybody automatically said, ‘Nope, we don’t do hip-hop here. Every time we’ve done it we’ve had problems,’” he said.
The perception that hip-hop shows and lyrics promote violence is overblown, Christian said.
“That’s not what rap is,” he said. “It’s an art.”
At the radio station WCKX (107.5 FM), a segment called “Street Heat” highlights a new local rapper each week and plays one of his or her tracks every night.
Terrence “City News” Sigers, a former Power 107.5 DJ who now works for sister station WMBO (106.3 FM), has watched Columbus hip-hop expand from a few pockets of activity to what he called an explosion of talent.
He said the biggest problem for the hiphop artists is the lack of awareness from the wider listening community.
“Outside of Columbus, these are major people doing major things, and they come back to the city and (people) don’t even know who (they are),” he said.
Miller has seen a similar problem while booking shows for the past three years.
“You’ll see thousands of people in line for a big headliner, but it’s hard to get 50 people into a local show with music that’s just as good, if not better,” he said. “Somewhere, there’s a gap there.”
Which is why rap artists need to keep pushing their work into the community, said Christian, who thinks the time is ripe for outsiders to take notice.
“Eventually, it’s gonna pop here,” he said, “because we gonna make it pop.”