A freestyle and a talk about music after dark.
Three and a half minutes of a Denver night that stops on one person, a rapper standing outside a venue who is asked for a verse and gives one on the spot. “So give us a little no beat freestyle”, and he goes: “I’m walking on the turf, I came to this earth without nothing”, then “so I get my crew and I tell ’em to come along”. A second one follows a beat later, “It’s the move, we moving, looking like we grooving, everybody want to do it”, into “I ain’t been pursuing nothing that you wantin’ ’cause I got my own goals, got my own dreams”.
The plan for the year is small and specific. “I’ve been releasing all my music on YouTube, and I think this year I’d like to actually make the jump to start putting it on some bigger streaming platforms”, he says. The audience so far is honest about its size: “It’s like friends and family, you know, so it’s a very small following right now”, though “after this weekend I’m hoping that we can grow bigger”.
Asked what he would say to those people, he does not perform it. “There’s not a lot of you guys out there, but just notice that I notice the shit and I really, really, really fucking appreciate it.” He puts the work out without conditions: “I don’t really care if anybody sees it, but the people that do see it”, and the sentence finishes as thanks.
The best stretch is the answer to why music matters, and it is about strangers. “it’s just one of the things that we’re blessed in life to have. It’s like a universal language”, he says, and “Some of the best connections that I’ve had in life come from music.” What a venue does, in his account, is undo the default: “all these people, we all walk on the streets every day, we pass each other and we don’t give a fuck about each other”, until “once we get into like a venue like this and we’re here and we’re fucking banging our heads and we know that we’re relating”.
He closes on the hard version of the same idea. “Life without music, I’ve definitely had that thought before, and that is kind of like a depressing thought”, he says, and offers the fix he actually uses: “One of the ones for me is Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb.” The lows and the highs both arrive on their own, and “music can get you out of any headspace that you want”. Everyone is going through the same thing from a different angle, he reckons, which is the whole argument in one line.