After winter walks in and constricts your style of living, simply existing inside of your own heartbeat can seem like the hardest task given to human beings. Winters on the Island can be heavy, a weight that summer life makes you forget – only for that surprisingly familiar chill to creep back in when fall comes.
I’m self-diagnosed as having a pretty serious case of SAD (seasonal affective disorder). My surroundings weigh heavily on me, and the sudden realization that Labor Day is long past and that the shortest day of the year is yet to come is not necessarily a pleasant one.
The first time I remember having a hard winter was my freshman year of high school. I think I got through that winter because everything was new. Nothing was familiar. I was sustained by all of the possibilities, by all of the people who might provide the temporary interest I needed until the summer months. I was sustained by new friends, new video games, and indoor half-pipes (skateboarding); but even so, that winter was trying.
Sophomore year, I started writing poetry. I had taken guitar lessons for about a year at one point, and the frets just seemed fitful for my seldom-restive fingers. A pencil fit in my hand like a guitar never had.
Poetry had been an occasional hobby, but in my sophomore year it became a goal – more so, because I found out I was bad at it. Learning that poetry was not just an artistic reflection of overly dramatic thoughts and feelings, but actually a talent that needed to be approached with discipline, was more of a surprise than it should have been. I fought with poetry, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but mostly just fighting. It was good, it was bad, but more importantly, it was getting me through the winter.
Having a passion is a powerful thing. I do most of my writing when I have an abundance of energy. That energy is plentiful in the summer stream of novelty but can be much harder to find in the wintertime. Luckily, I found coffee. With a good charge of caffeine and a sharp pencil, being the underground herald of teenage angst everywhere seemed to be such a noble cause – it was at least April before I realized I still had a lot to learn before my poems would be worth jumping up and down for.
Junior year, the winter seemed longer and heavier. School was more stressful and, having so much to deal with internally, social relationships seemed taxing. With self-doubt came doubt about poetry. It existed so docilely on the page that even when I would passionately perform a poem for an audience, it wasn’t fulfilling. Poetry didn’t seem to be enough to get me through another winter, and hibernation was looking more appealing every day – until I happened to run into a classmate at a party and we started talking about poetry.
“Your poetry’s pretty fresh,” I believe he said. “Have you ever tried freestyling?”
Freestyling is rap that consists of making up rhymes in the moment, stream of conscious, and speaking them with a particular rhythm. The words have a musical cadence and can stand on their own, or be supported by musicians who are also, in a sense, freestyling, because they are picking up a beat to complement the oral delivery.
I grew up in Chilmark, where kids who liked rap music were routinely criticized as “wannabe gangstahs.” The view that rap is inherently violent is an unfortunate one. Rap is an art form; it is whatever the artist making it creates. For reasons that still dodge my understanding, the most commercially successful rap music continues to be the most vapid and the least substantial. Partially because of this, I had never seriously listened to a rapper before; nevertheless, later that night, after talking about it at the party, I tried to blow minds with subsonic freestyle paradigms for the first time. I was terrible.
To many casual observers it seems impossible, so they assume that the wordsmiths have written the rhymes beforehand. Well, from personal experience, the first time one attempts to rhyme freestyle, it is pretty near impossible. I had one rhyme – after maybe an hour of trying – that was worth remembering. I believe it went, “President Bush is just another beagle / It’s one big game of follow the leader.”
So there I was, having just stumbled upon a new art form, and in an hour I was hooked. I had a passion again. Suddenly the winter was just an opportunity to explore the beautiful underbelly that is underground hip-hop (though at some point there may have been a difference, in my view the terms “rap” and “hip-hop” can be used interchangeably). For decades, artists have been developing the contemporary versions of putting poetry over rhythm – slam poetry, rap, and hip-hop – to make some of today’s ground-breaking and most interesting music. The problem with being underground is that your sound is not widely heard.
In a rap called “Slow Down Gandhi,” Providence performer Sage Francis says, “It’s the same who complain about the global war / but can’t overthrow the local joker that they voted for,” and only his hard-core following blinks an eyelash. A Minnesota-based rapper known as Brother Ali is noted not only for the level of his craftsmanship and as a beacon of light for the voiceless, but also by his albino appearance and Muslim religion. In the rap “Shadows on the Sun” he says, “Leave it to me to create hope where there was none / the human being shall cast shadows on the sun,” and yet, there remains a widespread belief that oral tradition is dead, that poetry is dusty, that words are empty. To me, there are few things braver than articulating your deepest feelings to a possibly hostile audience. After I found hip-hop, I felt as if I had blood in my veins again.
Suddenly winter wasn’t that cold. I could always get in my car and roll up the windows, bump some new beats, and let the day dissipate into the moment. There is a definite secret to freestyling: Keep your ears open, keep your eyes open, and then – once you’ve taken it all in – just practice, practice, practice keeping your mouth open. Millions upon millions of words exist in your head. Millions of intonations float next to matching vowel sounds, and all you need to do is connect the ones that seem to fit. All you need to do is live so fully in the current moment that all of the pressure of day-to-day life just becomes energy you can use to create rhymes.
Senior year was pretty hard for me (I think it can be a tough year for a lot of people), but again, poetry and rap sustained me. Many of the pressures that weigh so heavily upon school-enrolled shoulders can roll right off after graduation. Freestyling, which started out as simple recreation, seems to have more applicable uses every day. In a democracy, where the rights of the people rest on the voice of the people, confidence built over beats can crush the butterflies that impede speech. Being emcee of my graduation was much easier because my experiences freestyling in front of an audience convinced me that my voice wasn’t going to disappear as soon as I walked on stage.
Now, I’m hosting my own one-hour show on WVVY 93.7 radio, where fellow Island freestylers and I perform live on the air (Sundays at 3 p.m.). And I perform whenever I can, often at Che’s Lounge in Vineyard Haven. I’m taking a year off before I go to Reed College out west in Portland, Oregon. The year may take me – who knows where? Even if I spend the whole winter on the Island, I’m not worried. If the leaves drop every winter, why can’t the beat?
