Jrnl Entry No. 9.13.2000 “MY HIP HOP STORY” PART VII

In Dec —- I graduated from college. My plan was to move straight to New York or Atlanta. My boy Leon was staying in Atlanta at the time. He told me not to come because he knew a couple of accountant graduates who weren’t having great luck finding that, just so right, accounting job. Now I don’t know, but maybe he was hatin’, and didn’t want to see me prosper because I think I could have found the right job. But then again, when I first graduated from school, I was sending a resume in to anything that had to do with accounting: accounting clerk, payroll accounting clerk, staff accountant. Maybe the people he knew were doing the same thing and getting into jobs that were not so accountant like. So after he told me that, I started focusing my attention on New York, going to the library and searching the N.Y. Times and sending out resumes. I was getting no responses, but I kept trying.

Like in January my girlfriend of three months was pregnant. After that I dropped the New York idea and started concentrating on Akron and Cleveland and Youngstown/Boardman. Even though I graduated from Youngstown State University, I pretty much figured the only way I was going to get a job in Boardman was to have excellent grades; have played on the football team, or to be white. I graduated with a 2.6, didn’t play football and I wasn’t white.

I took a part time job at a record store called NRM in our local mall. I worked there for like two month and then decided that I needed to quit to focus more on finding me a job in my field of accounting. So the search was on and I was getting interviews from out of the Cleveland area, but no offers. After about five months, in June I got a job offer from Dairy Mart Corp, a well-known convenience store chain. My starting salary was $25,000. First thing I did was pay off my credit card bill which was small, only about $3,500, compared to most people I knew at the time. I would pay like $700 a month.

When I graduated from college, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a Hip Hop producer. I started telling my friends and whoever would listen that was what I wanted to do with my life, not accounting. After I finished paying off my credit card bill, I started saving for my ASR 10 keyboard, which I purchased in March of 1998. Me and some friends of mine had also made plans to purchase a sampler. We all paid $15 a month and got an ASR X which was mainly kept by Burton and Billy. Our plan was to make a CD with about six songs on it. I wasn’t supposed to purchase my own sampler, we were all just supposed to purchase one together and have it from house to house to make beats together, but I couldn’t see myself working like that.

We started off rolling. Nelson and I were writing songs to the beats Billy and Burton had done, and it seemed as if we got off to a great start. We had some pretty good songs too. But then Billy decides that he wants to rhyme, which I’m not too impressed by his rhyme skill. We changed the plans and basically threw out like six songs we planned to record and started over, and this would be the cycle.

We went to one garbage studio and recorded two songs and we were on our way. We went the next week, and the engineer guy didn’t show up. We had two more songs ready to go. Nelson and I could get together like a crew is supposed to and write a song in 30 mins to an hour. After we couldn’t get in touch with the engineer, we had to find another studio which we did like four months later.

So here I was rapping again. I started out as a solo MC, and now here I was rapping with the guy Nelson, who was once my DJ. After we broke up TWC, about six months to a year later, he started writing rhymes. If that was what he really wanted to do back when we were together, he could have said so, and we could have found another DJ. I was in group mode now; me and Nelson as the main MCs, and Billy and Burton and me on the production team. But yeah while I was in group mode, I think Billy was in some other mode. He could never write with us, and he seemed to be hard pressed to do songs with him and Nelson on the vocals because they were a group after Nelson and I broke up. Billy would always change his mind on songs that we were to go into the studio and do. Scrap the old and pick up the new, which I thought was flaky. We couldn’t decide how many songs we would all produce each. I came with the idea that we split production, but Burton and Billy disagreed.

By the time we were ready to start going to the new studio and record, I was moving to New York to work and pursue my dream to get into Hip Hop production for real. I would come back to Ohio every two weeks in order to maintain a relationship with my daughter and my girlfriend Sausha. So now that I was gone, we would go to the studio every time I came home. I had no money for studio time because the initial move to New York kilt my finances, and I just couldn’t afford it. I was barely living. Well, I was living, but I had no money for extra-curricular activity. I told them I would pay them when I got my income tax return. We recorded the two songs that we did in the garbage studio over and they sounded good. We recorded about seven or eight songs in all.

The songs we recorded, I wasn’t too excited about them. The songs that Billy and Nelson did by themselves, I could see Billy’s enthusiasm like on Fresh MC, and Holy War. In our songs there wasn’t enough interchanging between us like most groups do. Billy would always say, “let’s do one 16 bar verse each and that would be it.” We never could write a song with subject matter because we never got together to write songs. If you listen to groups like The Flip Mode Squad, Wu-Tang, Slum Village, those groups interchange rhymes like they all in it together and write it together and were all feeling it. I tried to express this to Billy and Burton but I never got heard. On a song that I produced called “We don’t dance”, Billy says he didn’t like the song. He wrote a wack verse to it. Nelson ripped the song down with his lyrics, and my verse was alright. I just got the feeling from Billy that he wasn’t into the total group thing with me included. Now him and Nelson, yeah, but him, Nelson and me, no! To this date, we still need to complete one more song. It probably will not get completed. Personally I have no money for this project. When I was in town, I made the suggestion that we put like $75 each in a pot for studio time. They x-ed that idea.

I feel Burton and Billy think they know too damn much about Hip Hop to let anybody have some input without disagreement. I’ve kind of proven this to myself when I was working on songs with Priest and The Sewer Rats. Me and Priest completed a track in like an hour. The Sewer Rats recorded one of my songs in the studio; put some lyrics over my beat and it came out dope. This happened because they let me do my thing and I let them do their thing. The beat me and Priest produced, I layed down a piano track, he layed down a bass line and a beat. I did the beat over and added some other stuff and it was complete. I could never do that with Burton or Billy. So who knows what will become of us. I want to be in a rap group. I feel group albums more than solo albums, and the group albums usually sell more. I was thinking of getting two females and starting a group.

Jrnl Entry No. 2.22.2000

I went over to Elaine’s house last night to pick up some grease that she makes. I got over there and sat for a while. She is ugly man. I had been figured this out when I first met her for an outing at the LaBar Bat. After that outing, we really didn’t talk anymore. She does have some nice tidies though, but she doesn’t look clean. She has this dirty look about her. I really can’t see myself reaching over and kissing her.

Well my car has gotten its second official nasty scratch, and it is on the hood. A truck must have backed into my car and its bumper got my hood. I had a little luck getting some phone numbers on Saturday night but so far they have not been anything but the same ole bullshit. The one girl who is a school teacher, we sat in the club in the booth and talked with her and her friend all night, she hasn’t been home the two times I called her. I left my name and number on her answering machine but she hasn’t called back. Another girl who does accounts payable work and has two kidz, she actually called me Sunday to my surprise. I called her Monday, and we established that I was going to visit her. When she told me to call back, she had left and I waited a little while for her to call me back but she never did so I went to Elaine’s house.

So the women here are still bullshit. Nothing is happening for me here in this city. All I see is a bunch of ass, most of it Rican and white which I know I can’t have, and when I go and meet black women, they don’t respond to me. I really got no place else to go though, but I’m about fed up with this shit. But fuck it though, things will get better somehow.

I’m going to some shit tonight that Elaine was telling me about. I guess it’s an after work spot, free from six until. From there I’m going to go over by Justin’s for some industry networking party that Elaine was telling me about. Hopefully, I’ll meet someone to talk for real about my music at Justin’s. I probably won’t be able to get in or some shit, or it will cost too much. I’m gonna go though to see how it goes down. I hope I run into Puffy so that maybe I can get an accounting job with him, and maybe that would make my life happier for the moment.

And I don’t know why but when Thursday night comes around, I get happy. I’m free for the weekend to do what I wanna. So maybe like in that stupid movie “Office Space”, each day at work is like the worst day of my life. When the weekend approaches, I get happy because I don’t have to go to work for two days. Friday is like a day I just wait for work to end so it’s really not a bad day at work. I don’t even take a nap at lunchtime on Friday.

I heard a couple of beats that Elaine’s cousin did for someone, and the one was kind of wack. He has the same beat machine as I do. Ensoniq ASR 10. This leads me to think that maybe I have what it takes to become a producer in this town because the amateurs are really amateurs. Lark has some good shit and some bad shit coming out of his MPC 2000. Kenneth and them were telling me about a guy they met who has an ASR 10 and they said his shit didn’t sound all that. He was telling them that the ASR 10 was a limited machine. No its not, and in fact it’s probably one of the most complete beat machines that are out there. I can do everything but put different effects on the eight different tracks that are available on board. I program a sequence to do whatever I want it to: stop on a certain beat, take out an instrument, etc. Maybe he hasn’t put the extra money in his to purchase extra memory like I did. Without the extra memory, yes you are very limited. You can only use a certain number of tracks before all of the memory is used up, and you can only program a certain number of sequences. Maybe I ought to keep that as my secret to give me an edge in the game; unless someone asks because they’ve read and know about it, don’t tell em’. Sometimes you got to keep shit to yourself to have that competitive edge you know.

I think that Lauren will be my forever lover, and one day we will get married probably when her kidz are grown and we are like in our 40s. I have been thinking about that ass lately and I want some. I tried calling her last night but she didn’t pick up the phone. My dick instantly gets hard when I see that little big ass of hers switching around. She turns me on like that. But I don’t know if right now I can get over how she was treating me because she had her man Jamelle. She was dogging me to the fullest. One moment she’d be nice and let me fuck a couple of times. The next moment she’d have some attitude and we’d argue and I’d end up leaving her house. We had great times together though.

She came to my house to see me in N.Y. about a month after Sausha and I broke up, and it didn’t feel all that good to have her there. She was trying to get me to fuck her all night and day like I used to but I just wasn’t feeling it like that. She was there from Friday night to Monday morning, and we had sex Friday night and Saturday morning; Saturday night and I think Sunday morning but I’m not sure. She was getting on my nerves. Sunday night she put on some little lingerie thing and I didn’t even make an attempt to fuck. But I’m thinking about her now though.

I am just not motivated to work. I take too long to do my task. It takes me two to three days to review the accounts of three yards, and Dawn just told me that she reviews six or seven in I don’t know how long. And maybe I’ll always be this way or maybe not. Maybe something is just missing in my life and my work life. And NO it is not god.

Jrnl Entry No. 12.8.1999

Well I got fired / quit my job at The Gap. “I used to work at Foot Locker but they fronted / Got fired or I quit it / However do you want it.” (Lauren Hill “Everything is Everything) I got written up on my second incident and they were giving me a final written warning before firing me on my next warning. The first warning was do to some tight, no pussy getting manager of loss prevention. I was sitting down on the escalator because I was tired from running up and down the stairs all day after getting home the previous night at 3 A.M. So he’s right down at the bottom of the escalator and I see him looking at me as I was riding down and knew he was going to say something to me. He comes up to me and says, “hey, don’t sit on the escalator.” I looks at him as says “O.K.” and then I continues to go and do my job. He wanted to lecture me though and asked me my name, and did I think it was professional to sit like that with customers looking right at me. I was tired and wasn’t hearing him. I told him that I understood what he said, and that he didn’t have to be so serious. So he tells me to come here again while I am walking away. I just kept on walking and he follows me. I don’t even know who this guy is all in my face like I’m his son. After he says a few more times for me to come with him, I goes. We meet up with my floor manager as we walking back to his office, and she comes with us. He explains to her that I sat down on the escalator and that he feels I should be sent home for the day. He said I totally blew him off when he told me not to sit on the escalator and that I was showing off in front of people when I told him not to be so serious. I explained to her that I heard what he said, I got the message, and that I would not sit on the escalator anymore. I mean what did he want me to do; start sucking his dick to show him I was paying him full attention. My manager agreed with him and sent me home, which I was quite thankful because I was operating on two and half hours of sleep. I went home and slept the whole day.

My next incident about a month later was on the same scale. It was 11 P.M. quitting time, my third day straight of working two jobs, and I was tired and ready to go home. There was 5/10 minutes of work left to do and I told her that I was going home. The work would get done by the morning crew. She said that walking away was not acceptable. As I was walking away, I said “write it down and I’ll sign the paper.” When I came to work my next scheduled day I went to her and said I was sorry about the other day, that I work every day from 8 AM to 5 PM and by time 11 o’clock comes I am irritable. She takes me down to her office and tells me that my behavior was not acceptable which I understood. I told her that my availability needed to be changed to 3 days during the week and one day during the weekend in order to prevent these type of incidents from happening again. She basically told me that she already adjusted my schedule for four days a week and no weekends and that she couldn’t adjust it again. We were going back and forth with me telling her that four days a week straight of working two jobs leaves me with no life, and she basically was telling me tough tidy, and if I had another incident I would be fired. After I saw that she was not going to compromise with me on my schedule, I just said “I’m going home. Do you need your shirt back?” I took the shirt off and handed her my discount card and left.

The problem on part time jobs is that they don’t seem to understand the concept of part-time. They want to work you as much as possible. Part-time means you work when you want to because you have another full life and responsibilities to attend to. They should try to accommodate you as much as possible, and if they can’t work you as little as you want, they should work you a little less. Part-time jobs are for extra money that you really could do without because nine times out of ten you are not paying any major bills with the money. But part-time companies want to treat you like you need their job and they are doing you such a big favor by letting you work; therefore, you should happily abide by all the rules and work whenever we want you to. If they want to do people a favor, hire them full time and give them benefits, or work around people’s schedule as much as they can.

So it feels good to go home after work again and chill. Yesterday I went searching for some boot leg CDs around 34^th St and Time Square but found none. I went back toward home and went to the grocery store and then home. I called my new shorty, but she wasn’t home. I was about to work on my new song and she called. It was about 10:45 PM and she called me. I didn’t get off the phone with her until 2 A.M. I think she likes me a lot from what she knows. I like her also. It may work out to be long term if she is as sexy as I think she is and as she tells me she likes to be. She has that bad word in her vocabulary though, “Ghetto.” She doesn’t seem to use it as much as Victoria did, but its in her vocabulary. If she thinks she likes me now, wait until I dick her down and get my mouth on that pussy, she going to go crazy. She often makes comments that we should go here or there one day, or that I should go shopping with her one day; hints that we are going to be together in the long-run. I don’t like that. I usually like to take it day by day.

I’m still nervous about this kid situation. I seen on the news where a man was paying $12,000 a month child support. His wife was married to him for 700 days; time enough to make him believe she loved him, to have a kid, and divorce his ass and get paid for 18 years. The news says that the law says that a child has the right to live the lifestyle of its father while it is with the mother. I have no problem with that. I will buy my child whatever it wants. But if we have to pay all that money mandatory, then we should have the right to choose to have custody or joint custody or something. A lot of women are abusing child support. The woman originally wanted $112,000 a month in child support. Melonie says she is not mother material right now, and that she wants to be married before she has a kid, but I bet if I start bustin nuts in her ass, she will come up pregnant and want to have the baby. I’m kind of used to bustin nuts out of the pussy since I have been doing that with Sausha for a year and a half, so I should be able to continue my pattern.

I think that Melonie will probably not work out because she lives in Jersey and I live N.Y. I am not moving over there and she probably has no plans of moving over here. If it wasn’t for those damn bridges that you must pay $4 to go through I would be happy to stay in Jersey. But you never know how shit will go, we probably will be together for a while. I want a bitch right here in N.Y. though. A bitch who has her own shit. When I run across one, I’ll definitely get on. I see mostly bitches with weave in their head, which I don’t like. I was telling Melonie last night that I do not step to a woman who is not wearing her real hair. I just don’t like it, I can’t compliment it, and it is like a turn off like cigarettes.

I’m gonna try and go over Melonie’s house tonight, well no I’m not. I know one thing though is that I will not be on the phone all night bullshittin’. I’m gon cook and hop on my ASR 10 Sampler. I have been thinking about CLUE the past couple of days and how I should have shouted at him. He probably would have been cool. I talked to him at the Jay Z concert in Pittsburgh but he wasn’t paying me any attention. Being in an area where everybody isn’t on his dick, he may just conversate with a brother.

The next mutha fucka I see though I’m hittin him with my speech that I prepared I don’t care who it is. Them mutha fuckas got to know that they need to put people on just like someone put them on. If I was a star, I would probably spend most of my time listening to demos, and if I heard something that impressed me like my frat brothers tape, I would do whatever I could to get him on. I mean CLUE wasn’t always CLUE and Jay Z wasn’t always Jay Z, and Nas damn sure wasn’t always The Rapper Nas. He was some quiet kid who never let anybody know he rapped.

I feel like I’m in prison not being able to do what I really want to do, which is make some money in Hip Hop. I feel trapped. I mean I want to sit at home all day and make songs and get paid for them. I want to be steppin up in the club at 12:30 A.M. on a Sunday night not worrying about getting up for work in the morning. I want it so bad, I can taste it. I’m gonna get it. In my heart, I got so much love for this, I got to get it.

I just completed a verse to my incomplete song about my love for Hip Hop but Hip Hop has no love for me or MCs who give their all on the mic. Hip Hop only shows love to simple gimmick cats like DMX. Even Jay Z is sounding a little repetitive. Like Jay Z says he don’t write rhymes down anymore, he makes them up as he goes along in the studio. your best shit doesn’t come out that way. Like his best shit was on his first two albums. His third one was cool, but far from the potency of his first album. He had clever lines back then, now all his lines are sounding the same and that is what happens when you stop thinking about what you want to say and analyzing it and rewriting it when it sounds corny.

I think writing is one of the reasons KRSONE has stayed fresh for 11 to 12 years. Writing keeps you on your toes with the skill. Biz Markie said he never wrote. He has a song with Will Smith and he is saying the same shit he was saying ten years ago not writing, and that is why he feel off. And niggas like Pharoe Monch who has one of the dopest albums with some of the dopest lyrics, he get no love from Hip Hop, no record sales, no cash, just mad respect from niggaz like me for his true skill and art of spittin rhymes. It never pays to be an abstract artist with real shit and talent until you die, and with Hip Hop, even dieing won’t bring true MCs like Pharoe Monch much recognition.