Amari's Rap Journey #2: Class Listening Party
Imagine this. It's the day after classes ended, and you wake up at 12 again, and look up around you at the messy-ass room that's been left after a 48 hour work grind. You do two loads of laundry, take a shower, and cook yourself a breakfast, all while watching the time because at 3 p.m... At 3 p.m. is the class listening party.
MIT Building 4 Room 237. You enter the lecture hall at 3:15 and most of the other kids are sitting sporadically in the first five rows. Scoot up! You think, and you sit next to your friend Z in row 2. Scoot up someone says, and I sit in the first row next to Tagoe, a DJ whose energy I'm a fan of [1]. Everyone is in the first two rows now, including Dee-1 from Harvard and two HASS professors that are close to Lupe, and we're waiting for Lupe to walk in and the listening party to start.
Yo... You needed to be there, it was soooo crazy. We started listening to EP after EP, and these people are actually sooo talented. Some industry level sounds, some quirky conceit albums about physics and history, some conceptual ones about being on one long drive or one continuous loop, and one fun Rico Nasty sounding track that was so fye we had to play it three times and mosh.
When we played mine, I was a lot more confident because I'd already played it in front of iHouse before. I hope to never forget the responses of my fellow rappers in the room though.
They were caught by surprise by the trap record for Show Me The Money, Dee-1 looked at me and asked: that's you? They found G-DRAGON funny, and Ally even recognized it was about G-DRAGON before the chorus hit (that's more than I could ask for). Suffolk county water dropped, and Lupe shouted me out after that some of those bars were written behind bars and Ally said she had been hoping to listen to them again. So both of them responded positively, and I'd shouted them out in the beginning of the track. Nomadic Seoul of course was a little quieter until the beginning of verse 2, which I knew was going to get a stronger response. They really liked the bar:
"Now I know better there's more to life than work, in fact life don't work less there's more to life than work."
And the bars before and after. Lupe said the bars were hard. In general I'd been a little scared about being TOO personal in a freakin, class project, but I'm glad I did what I wanted to. Monk said she liked it too, when I saw her in the hallway.
All in all, I really appreciated them all for hyping the EP up, I think I was dapped up more in those 8 minutes than I been in like 8 years. And Dee-1 even bowed at me after, bruh, like I'm such a fan of his Jay, 50, and Weezy track [2]. I can't. He did leave right after, but still??? I'm complete.
Some of the kids didn't want to show their EP's off, but I know know know that showing up was so important to me. That's a value that was always important but really instilled in me by Lupe and this class.
After my UROP meeting I ran into Ally and we went to his office to get feedback right after. I love Ally, I'm a fan [3]. For advice, I asked him to teach us how we should improve in the next three months. The advice I'll record in another post, but it was detailed and I'm so grateful for it. I appreciate Lupe as a teacher so much and after our dinner tomorrow, the class is really ending. It's been amazing!! Now, to take his class next year or not...
Footnotes (inspired by @tumblasha):
[1] Tagoe's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-tagoe-548571918
[2] the track is so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IGfv8zSgw
[3] Ally Minju's spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3jZQxUxjnQ753paNQHHuUk?si=EK-A6vkPSKOmB9s6wOqZ7g
