EMCEE Erin Emily
@emceeerin
Rapper & Underground hiphop artist! #EmceeErin #EmceeErinEmily Also: Scholar, Model, Scientist, Artist, Pro Storm Chaser, Actor, Slacker. |Academics| DEGREES: BA, UNT, '08 {Major: Philosophy | Minors: Physics, English, Spanish} MFA, The New School, '12 {Studied: Prosody, Linguistics | Focus: Nonfiction Writing} PhD, (TBA), (TBD) Doctoral Field: Linguistics _______________________________ I'M REALLY JUST MY MUSIC . ____________________________________________________ MORE ON MY MUSICAL PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE —————————————————————— Rapping is my passion, but I dabble in vocal work and sometimes I will cover one those soulful R&B songs, or give a nod to the songwriting-genre in a chorus I sing mid rap song, and I even have some collaborative experience with the R&B industry... but rapping is definitely what I'm all about. I'm straight OBSESSED with hip-hop, I can't really do anything without HipHop being involved in it somehow, it's like being in love for the first time, me and this music... It's so strange, I never used to listen to any, I used to say music is just noise, and when I heard HipHop for the first time ... It blew my effing mind. A few years ago, I was in grad school, getting my Master's degree in writing and poetry (The New School, '12) and I couldn't help but feel that poetry was ALMOST what I had been looking for as an artistic medium my whole life, but something was always missing from poetry. I was always vaguely aware of this lacking, but could never quite place what it was that poetry and prosody lacked that I was looking for. When I fist heard Hip-Hop, by total chance, I was almost done with my degree - but that was when it hit me. Poetry is such a mute art, and what it was always missing - for me - was something I'd never had any concept of until first hearing hip-hop: It was missing a beat. Rhythm. Music. It was missing music. Adding that element to poetry gives you some semblance of rap, but it was a long time of constant immersion in Hip-Hop music before I figured out the subtle differences. But on that day that I fist heard hip-hop, I mean, really listened - not just overhearing some five second blip of a song over someone's car stereo as they drive past you on the street - the first time I sat down and listened to a hip-hop song I was brought to tears - where had this been my whole life?! Why wasn't everybody listening to this?! Couldn't they see - hear - how brilliant it was? It was like a scholar's prosody given a composer's sound, it was so heightened, so clever, witty, brash, exciting, exuberant... IT WAS INCREDIBLE. I remember looking down and seeing my finger was tapping rhythmically along with the music, of its own accord, without my initiating that motion - I had always wondered what made people tap their fingers and feet in time to some vaguely recognizable force I could never hear until hip-hop, which was of course, the beat. And it moved me - literally! Moved my finger, tapping away at my side - what an incredible power this music has to move my body without my willing it to move - without even knowing I was doing it - I thought. Suddenly the whole world seemed to have a beat behind it, an undercurrent of rhythm sounding out from everything - and I could suddenly hear beats in everything, in the traffic noises, in the hum of the air conditioning unit, in the indinstinct chatter from people on the street, in the sound of my own footsteps, my own chewing, my own heart, in the sound of typing on a keyboard, in the clatter of the revolving plate inside my microwave that had me bobbing my head and tapping my toes while waiting for it to finish cooking a hot pocket - in everything. Hip-hop had made the whole world come alive and it was suddenly audible - like I'd been living life on mute my whole life and suddenly I was able to hear it full-volume - and it was such a beautiful chorus. That chitty-chitty-bang-bang effect, as it is often called. Finally, I thought, I have heard music. It honestly felt like before that moment every song from every other genre had been something else entirely - not music, not if that's what hip-hop is. Everything else was just as I had always suspected it was, all other forms of music, to my ears, was really just noise. Hip-hop That changed everything - I've been enthralled in this craft since then, and I give little time to any other projects, even singing takes a back seat to my need to spit it on the twos and flow these rhymes I write, reherse these cover raps I have invested so much time in, trying to raise myself to the level of my rap heroes, who I revere and also feel deeply moved and inspired by when I listen to their rhymes and more so when I spit them out myself. I write raps incessantly - pages and pages and pages of rhymes, experimenting with all different styles - leaving behind the training in poetry/prosody, with it's meter and stanza and syllabic 'feet' and trading those things for the grander, musical versions of the same thing. And now instead of mute stanzas, I have bars of verse. Instead of that esoteric and impercise measure of soundless tempo and timing called meter, I have a flow, an audible rhythm. Instead of counting syllabic, feet I count the actual beat, which seems so obvious and natural it's a wonder to me that I wasn't able to intuit the fact that what I was really looking for (a never finding) in poetry was an already existing form of artistic expression - music, of all things - and that it could be found in hip-hop. I think so many people really don't know what hip-hop is, and their preconceived ideas about the genre - and posisbly their preexisting misconceptions about it - keep them from ever reall listening to it. And that is such a tragedy ... Because, to me, it is the only music. It is the ultimate poetic form. It is the most important and most life-changing thing I have ever been exposed to. So, for the last two years since finding it, I have been obsessed with it - to put it mildly. Now, hiphop is something I can't go much more than a moment without thinking about, tweeting about, writing rhymes, riffing ciphers until I sound weird even in normal conversation (lol you know what I'm talking about!) or else I'm recording it, listening to it -- curating playlists on spofify, like hip hop is my doctoral research project or something, and thus creating a pretty involved taxonomical way of organizing all the various flavors of rap and Hiphop into categories and genres and sub genres and sub-sub genres (some I've had to coin a name for myself) as I come to them, trying to bring order to the inevitable chaos that lends to an all-but sensory overload when exposed to an unebbing flood of all the various breeds of urban music as I quest on in my constant exploration of all eras and areas of rap/hiphop music, forever insatiable and always hungry for more, more, more. I started out recording cover songs - "look at me now," "6 ft, 7 ft," "worldwide choppers," "rap god" anything fast and long and technically challenging - and wouldn't stop until I had mastered each one to the point that I could do the whole rap from memory, in one-take, and mimicked to sound as much like the original as I could humanly manage. It didn't matter to me that some of these rappers didn't perform their own songs live in that manner - that many of them broke it up or had another rapper fill in during crucial breath-moments, or whatever. It didn't matter that some effects were obviously studio effects and not meant to be recreated by the human voice alone, or not in one breath, or not in one take. I wanted to know that anything I could do in a studio setting, I could also do live - in one solid take, (as is always the case when performing live), and without the help of any special audio effects or post editing or separate takes or fill-in artists. And so far, I have been able to accomplish that, for every cover song I've released online (I always release a one-take, un-cut, un-edited version, and often in Accapella, to show myself and the world - rather the world cares or not - that anything I've recorded with the benefits of audio processing, multiple takes, special effects, and other studio advantages, I can equally achieve with no such help at all... Live, raw, in one take and often with some very strategically-timed breaths. It takes longer ( A LOT longer) to learn a song this way, but to me, the feeling of achievment only comes with having mastered a song in this manner. If you can't do it live, can you really do it? I don't want to take any chances, so I spend countless hours, so many all-nighters, in marathon-long rehersal sessions, practicing a song again and again until I nearly go mad from repetition but eventually succeed in learning thoroughly enough that I can do the whole rap just as the original song sounds, all at once and without any audio editing to pad my abilities. Recently, after countless cover projects, I finally decided I was ready to start recording my own stuff. I had to learn how to use DAW programs and how to structure an instrumental track (and I'm still struggling with making them from scratch) and I had to invest lots of money I didn't have in audio equipment. When I say 'money I didn't have,' you have no idea how little that is - essentially, I've been living off the occasional borrowed buck from my parents, dwindling student loan money, and any credit card that is crazy enough to credit me; this has been the case for the last year and half, since I had decided to hold off on getting my PhD, which was always 'the plan' I had in mind for the years following my masters degree, because I wanted to pursue making music instead. Not only did I forgo starting a PhD program, I decided to quit working and, basically, quit anything non-related to my music - social life included. So this music has been literally everything I have been about and all have been up to for the last year and a half, when, in some kind of hip-hop crazed insanity, I had decided to do nothing but persue my music career, full time... While living in Manhattan... With no income. Even up here in East Harlem, where I've lived since grad school, it's outrageously expensive to live. I honestly have no idea how I've managed to do it this long without a job or a solid income or any fresh student loan money coming in every semester. All I really wanted and needed was hip-hop.... and I always found a way to get the things I needed to further my endeavors in it. Now, I'm recording my debut mixtape, with my own original raps. This was a big leap from focusing so solely on cover versions of other artist's rap songs; stil, the writing came almost too easily (I have more rap verses than I could ever use, even if I had dozens of albums to put them all on, and I almost overwhelm myself in the sheer amount of raps I am constantly writing, Re-writing, editing and expanding upon) and for the instrumental component, I have been lucky to have the help of my boyfriend, who is a not only a computer whiz, but equally, it turns out, he is randomly a total prodigy when it comes to making beats. He's always been a bit of an all-around musical genius; it just comes to him naturally... as annoying as that is. For the audio editing, it will be minimal to non-existent. I want this mixtape to showcase my raw abilities - since we all know a studio mixing session with professional audio engineers can make the curdled cried of a dying cat sound melodic and beautiful, and equally they can take any recorded blip of human speech and chop it up/reorder it/sync it/tune it/synthasize it to make it sound like the most complex and ingenious rapping. So, to me, it's important to show what can be achieved outside of the miracles of audio editing, as it seems to me a good audio editing session in a mix lab somewhere - or even the audio editing software you can use yourself on your computer - can work such wonders, it's almost tempting to say even the most accomplished rap by the most talented rapper, could've also been accomplished by a lesser artist, having greater audio engineers. So the mixtape will be raw - it may not sound like something polished and perfect playing on the top-40 radio station - but my goal is to have it show my abilities as a rapper, and not my abilities to obtain studio mixing... as the latter is somewhat an unimpressive feat. I hope this will help me shop my work around.... and get some semblance of a career going for me. All I really want, is enough recognition, credibility, and financial backing to be able to work with the other hip-hop artists - underground, mainstream, old school, genre-pushing, all of them - who have so inspired me and forever enriched my life with their rhymes, their raps, their flows, their individual styles and their uniquely moving voices... All the hip-hop artists who have so moved me with their music - I just want the ability to work with them, to collaborate with them, to stand along side of them. If I can achieve that much, I could care less about the rest that comes with recognition. For me, if I can work with others more talented than I, and I have enough income to survive on (even if only just, like it's been this last year and half unemployed in manhattan) - If I can achieve that much, then the fame and fortunate will never be missed if absent from my career. I just want to share with the world what I love so much... I couldn't possibly hope to keep it all bottled up inside. I hope my mixtape, which should be out by October 2014, will help me to begin that journey. #EmceeErinEmily #EmceeErin @The_ErinWheeler Http://www.EmceeErin.ReverbNation.com/ Http://www.soundcloud.com/threnody-3/ Http://www.facebook.com/erinemilywheeler/
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