Making Moves on the Music Scene

It’s October. I had a feeling this would happen, but gradually time here seems to be moving faster. Anyway, since there's so much going on, I figured I'd write about something more specific this time around. I’ve actually started to make a few moves on the music scene recently, and things have moved pretty fast in the past week. Last week, Jason and I hit up Hypnotiq, the poetry lounge/café in town I mentioned in the last post. While Tuesdays have singing and poetry by candlelight, Thursdays are designated hip-hop nights. It was a really great time and I hadn’t had a cipher (freestyle session, for all of you non emcees) that serious in a long time.

Basically, a DJ brought his sound system through, and we passed the mic around for a while. My homie DK and his boy PY (they’re big on abbreviations here) co-host the event, so they were really generous with the mic. Although the place wasn’t too crowded at first, we ended up passing the mic around between about 10 or 15 rappers. By about 11:00, it was the group of us, the DJ, and only a handful of spectators. We did a lot of impromptu flowing, and even did a routine where we’d each rap 8 bars of a story and pass the mic to the next guy to continue. I hadn’t freestyled extensively in a long time, but somehow I zoned out that night and ended up having my “Rain Man” moment.

The majority of us were rapping in English, but we had one or two dudes bust into Twi, and a few Rastafarians in the house did some melodic flowing a la Shabba Ranks or Bounty Killa. Jason had to leave early to get some rest for his early Friday class, but I stuck around after the freestyle session for the performance segments. I actually ended up performing “The Quest”, a track I hadn’t done live in a long time, but it was received pretty well by the house. Needless to say, it was a blast, and I even sold a couple of CD’s while I was there. After I finishing performing, I was approached by the the house disc jockey DJ Vision, and it turned out he also works on a local FM hip-hop radio station. (He and Trigmatic, the host of the show, are pictured in the studio above.) He said he really liked my rapping, and actually invited me to an in-studio interview with him the following Saturday. He said it would be cool if Jason (a.k.a. Spanky) rolled too, so we ended up making our big radio debut that Saturday.

From 10-12 last Saturday, you could have enjoyed the sounds of Vocab & Spanky on 91.9, Vibe FM, here in Ghana. We played a couple of tracks from my latest album, (which I’m SURE you’ve downloaded by now…) kicked a whole lot of freestyles, and even took a bunch of callers. The folks who called in like the music, and everyone in the studio received our stuff really positively. The radio station seems to be popular, and even after about of half hour of talking to guys on the phone, we still couldn’t get through to all of our callers. At the end of the night, we were invited back to the show by the hosts, so hopefully we’ll be live again in another few weeks. My boy DK (the host of open mic night's @ Hypnotiq) is also a poet/MC, and we're talking about collaborating with lyrics and production. Always something in the works, ya know!

We had a lot fun the rest of the weekend too, since we got to go to our program coordinator’s house for a delicious buffet dinner on Sunday. We also made it to a local beach Sunday night with a few of our boys from campus. Since my homie Trigga is the big man on campus (and in the city, for that matter), we didn’t have to pay to enter a really cool club right on the beach.

The only issue I have so far is that there’s almost too much to do locally. There a SO many things we can do if we travel outside of the city, but we haven’t experienced too much besides our trips to Kumasi and Cape Coast. With that said, I’m making a concerted effort to get off campus and out of the city most of our remaining weekends. There are a lot of really interesting trips in store for us in the 11 weeks we have left here, so I’m most definitely trying to take advantage of all of the opportunities I can. We’ll see how things go.