Friends remember Steez in high school as a smiling kid with a short afro and skinny jeans. Though he was a heavy teenager—he once said in an interview that he weighed more than pounds at one point—he was no slouch, always keeping up with his friends as they bombed around the city on skateboards. Steez made friends easily; he loved to joke around, though he was never one to force a smile or laugh to fit in. An avowed sneaker-head, he had an impeccable sense of style; his friends could never figure out how he was able to leave his shoes untied so they puffed out but never fell off.
This flair was reflected in his first rapping name, Jay Steez: Jay for Jamal, Steez, old school hip-hop slang for style. By his junior year, Steez became known around the school for his rhyming skills. One day he walked up to Joey, a skinny freshman who had been filming raps and posting them to YouTube under the name JayOhVee, and asked if that was him. Joey was ecstatic Steez had approached him. Pro Era began to coalesce the next year, in Originally four members—a lanky rapper named CJ Fly in addition to Powers Pleasant, Joey and Steez—the crew began linking up in the auditorium at lunch to trade bars with each other, with Pleasant on the piano or drums.
He was raised in a relatively religious household, with church as a regular family function. By high school, though, he had concluded that conventional religion was full of lies. They talked about how they were beings of a higher dimension. Soon, Pro Era started meditating together in Prospect Park and rapping about opening their chakras. And we decided that we wanted to change the world through our music.
Even as Pro Era began to include many different personalities and egos, like rappers Dessy Hinds and producer Kirk Knight, they decided to stick together.
A few months after they formed, Joey was contacted by Jonny Shipes, the CEO of Cinematic Music Group, a boutique management company and label, who had stumbled across a video of the teenager freestyling online and was interested in signing him. Joey was just 16 at the time, but his mother, Kimmy Virginie, worked out an informal arrangement with Shipes for the two parties to work together without signing any contracts until she and her son were ready to do so.
Shipes urged the young rapper to work with him as a solo artist. But the teenager was adamant that Pro Era be a part of whatever situation they worked out.
Suddenly, the crew had the backing of a manager and a promotional team while most of its members were still in high school. For Steez, the connection with Cinematic and the timing, coinciding with his high school graduation, were the first signs that his passion could be more than just a hobby.
He dropped out of the community college in Brooklyn he had enrolled in, telling his family that it was distracting him from his music, and started to hone his image, growing out his dreadlocks and working hard to lose weight, buying a fixed-gear bike that he began to ride everywhere. Steez also began putting everything into his first solo project, which he planned to release in early Though he already had the rhyming skills, he was also coming into his own as a thinker, developing an anti-establishment view of the world that many teenagers could relate to.
Rey Sanchez says he and Steez were stopped and frisked by NYPD officers at least seven times together, and that Steez had grown increasingly critical of the government and police through those experiences. The two visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment and spent a night at Zuccotti Park, excited by both the ideas that the movement espoused and the more adrenaline-worthy aspects of the demonstration.
As his views became more militant, in person and on Facebook, Steez seemed to relish in his role as an iconoclast. But the thing is, as you grow, this world makes you take your eye off of things like that. As he readied his debut solo mixtape, AmeriKKKan Korruption , he began thinking about a design that he would make into stickers to promote it. Steez had become fixated on the number 47, which he felt was a perfect expression of balance in the world, representing the tension between the fourth chakra—the heart—and the seventh—the brain.
Ever the provocateur, he also put the design in a white circle surrounded by red—the same color scheme used by the Third Reich. He and his friends began papering the city with the stickers, particularly in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood around Murrow. He was ready to engage with people who criticized the logo. Steez seemed to enjoy the controversy the sticker caused beyond his Facebook page as well. It was an impressive debut, a track collection of acrobatic lyrics and rich beats, but beneath the wordplay and rhymes was a paranoid visionary commenting on bleak prospects for inner-city youth, US-sponsored violence overseas and what Steez deemed was a coming apocalypse.
Steez was painfully sensitive to the lack of recognition for the project. I wish I got free clothes! Relatable and charming, Joey holds court in front of the group with a microphone that he rarely relinquishes, a kid who clearly enjoys entertaining a crowd.
He went on tour anyway, where he had a number of firsts: he did shrooms and lost his virginity, according to his friends, and he went to Canada, where he said to an interviewer that he smoked weed four to seven times a day.
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Lucille Gotti Full Metal Jacket Run It Back Freestyle Never Again Lotus Blast Off Divine Time I Don't Trust You Skit Get tha Cash Interlude feat. Pomer All Said and Done feat. La La La feat. Self Pyramids Hands Up Dangerous BagBoiii FTW feat. Switch Face On My Own World On My Shoulders Full Clip Alive feat. Okay feat. Najjee Dreams Reality Nyck Caution - Open Flame Famiglia feat. Meechy Darko Margot Robbie More Than I Deserve feat. Flipp Dinero Slippin Away feat.
Goin Thru feat. Rudebwoy feat. Barrell feat. Haile Supreme Grew Up feat. Show You I Tried feat. OSHUN Block Party feat.
City We From feat. Conway Jooks LV Ascot Hard Times feat. Lexipaz The Pros feat. Frozen Dinners prod. Luke Crib prod.
Regular Season prod. Family Dollar feat. Ka prod. Operations feat. Caleb Giles prod. Surrender feat. Navy Blue prod. Peter prod. Publicar un comentario. Demente A. Dolan B. Terrible C. Smooth C. Krugga D. Cole J. Littles J. Symphony L. Complex Mr. Green Mr. Hyde Mr. Medeiros Mr. Lif Mr. Magic Mr.
Hardem N. Various Artist V. Nyck Caution. Pro Era - New Era Dessy Hinds - Chocolate Strawberries. Pro Era - New Era V Kirk Knight - Late Knight Special All for Nothing. CJ Fly - Flytrap
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