We wanted to do for children what we knew would have helped us.
The three of us approached the Student Government Association, which ordains and finances official campus organizations. But the association was not eager to sanction a new group. The officers said we needed a faculty sponsor and a proposal before they could even consider our idea. They suggested we implement our program through an existing black organization.
Nothing motivates Sam, George, and me more than being told “No.” We quickly found a sponsor, Professor Forrest Pritchett, an assistant professor in the African American Studies department. Then we sat down together and put our ideas into a proposal. But what would we call our organization?
In his book, Kunjufu discusses the principles of Kwanzaa. One of them seemed to fit: Ujima, which in Swahili means “collective work and responsibility.” I suggested it to George and Sam. They loved it.
We went back to the SGA. This time the officers gave in, but they awarded us a measly $500. They said we had to raise whatever else we needed. I have to admit that we were pissed. We had grandiose ideas, and we thought that just maybe some folks on our campus didn’t want a bunch of black kids from the inner city spending time at the university. That thought motivated us more. We set out to raise some money.
During another brainstorm, we came up with a fund-raising idea. We could throw a big party in the student union. We were an official campus organization, so we had access to the university’s facilities free of charge. Since we always went to other nearby campuses to have fun because few parties at Seton Hall played black music, we figured we could charge the standard $5, advertise big, and draw students from the colleges and universities we frequented.
I don’t remember who came up with the theme for the party, but it was perfect: Ujima Jam.
By then, George, Sam, and I were sophomores. We had never thrown a big party before, but we had been around enough to know that the d.j. was the key to success. We needed somebody who knew just what to play and when. One of us remembered that a friend of ours from high school was dating a popular d.j. around Newark. We called her, and she helped us book him at a discount rate.
Next, Sam, George, and I used the computer to make fliers. Each of us took a bunch and drove to different campuses within an hour’s drive—Rutgers, Drew, Fairleigh Dickinson, and others—to spread the news. We walked around handing our fliers to other students and placing them on car windows. We distributed at least 1,000 fliers.
The problem with throwing a party like this, though, was that we had no idea until the night of the gig whether it would be a success. That night, the three of us got there early to meet the d.j. We had asked other volunteers to collect the money at the door because we had too many friends who we knew would try to get in free if they saw one of us standing there.
I watched the door all night, and within the first two hours, we had packed the house. After expenses, we cleared several hundred dollars. The party was such a success that we threw another one and sold soda and chips.
We chose two elementary schools in Newark. George, Sam, and I recruited a few other students and began visiting the schools at the end of the day at least once a week to tutor students and talk to them about college. But when we approached the principals about busing the kids to campus, we got a lukewarm response and ultimately got bogged down in discussions about liability.
We were just nineteen years old when we planned our organization, so we naively thought that recruiting mentors and bringing kids to campus would be simple. We thought other students would be knocking on our doors to help and that public-school officials would bend over backward to provide kids with this opportunity. We learned real fast that we were wrong.
We continued to mentor at the schools we had chosen, but it seemed that one of the biggest components of our organization—bringing kids to campus—had failed. Somehow, though, a teacher from a school in Brooklyn heard about our organization and contacted us. She wanted to bring a group of students from her school to campus. We were eager to work with her.
The school itself bused the students to campus and provided chaperones. Ujima bought lunch for all of the students and gave them a tour of the campus, and a few volunteers spoke to them about college life.
Just seeing the excitement in the eyes of the kids as they explored the campus made me feel that I was doing something worthwhile.
I can’t remember ever feeling more proud of myself.
Rameck on
GIVING BACK
I discovered early in my childhood that you don’t need money or status to enrich another person’s life. Anybody with passion and purpose can do so.
Throughout my life, people have given generously of their time, skills, money, and more to help me succeed. They all had busy lives, and they didn’t owe me a thing. Yet they gave. I’ve always believed in the old adage that says much is required of those to whom much is given. So I’ve always felt compelled to give back.
George, Sam, and I believe strongly that God protected us and lifted us up so that we could become examples to kids today—especially kids growing up in poor communities—of what is possible for them. That’s why we started the mentoring program called Ujima in our freshman year of college, and, more recently, the Three Doctors Foundation.
The ways to give are as boundless as your creativity. Maybe you’re a nurturer and can mentor a younger or less-experienced colleague on the job. Maybe you’re good with children and can spend a few extra hours a week reading or tutoring kids at your local elementary school. Or maybe you have the cash to send a kid in your neighborhood to summer camp or to buy groceries for a poor family during the holidays.
Giving is like playing a position on a football team. Everybody can’t be the quarterback. You may be better at linebacker, wide receiver, or water boy. The important thing is that you find your position, whatever it is, and play hard.
As a teenager, I lacked the one person in my life who could have made a difference earlier—a male mentor, a respectable father figure who would have been willing to spend time with me consistently, giving me advice and sharing fun things to keep me away from the bad influences in my neighborhood. I believe that most boys, regardless of who they are or where they live, long for that kind of relationship with a father, a big brother, or even a stranger who steps in to fill the void. And that desire for male guidance stays with us from childhood, when our lives are taking shape, to adulthood, when we are making crucial decisions about careers, life, and family.
George always says that people should give even if they are selfish because there are selfish reasons to give. Your gift might touch the life of a kid who otherwise might end up breaking into your house, jacking your car, or selling drugs to your child. Or your gift might help to raise the brain surgeon who someday saves your life. I’m not trying to scare anyone, but the point is that there is no excuse not to give, even if your reason is a selfish one. But there is another selfish reason to give: when you give to someone else, I’ve found, surprisingly, that you often receive as well.
In college, I discovered that when I went to elementary schools to tutor kids, I received as much as or more than the children did. We live in an age of excess, in which a person’s value is attached to how much money he makes, what kind of car she drives, how many things have been acquired. But no monetary value can be placed on the feeling that comes when you know you’ve made a difference in another person’s life. And all of us could use a boost in self-esteem—especially teenage boys, who can often be too macho to admit that they need a good pat on the back.
And don’t forget—when you touch another person’s life, the gift keeps on multiplying. Consider George’s third-grade teacher. She couldn’t have known then that by making a difference in George’s life, she someday would also make a difference in Sam’s and mine.
11
RAP
George
RAP MUSIC DEFINED our generation the way the Motown sound had defined our parents’
era.
We pumped up our music to get in the mood for studying and when we wanted to celebrate. We partied to rap music. We chilled to it. And in our freshman year, Rameck and I stumbled into the creative side of it.
It started with a video-game competition. After class, Rameck and I often teamed up against two guys from Boston to play video games, mostly Sega Genesis basketball. One day, we turned on some music and started rapping back and forth, the two of us against the two of them. We’d alternately make up rhymes on the spot that chopped up the other players or their hometown. It was all in fun to determine who could come up with the cleverest lyrics.
Later on, Rameck and I challenged each other.
“Man, I’m better than you,” one of us would brag.
And the contest began. Sometimes, we just rapped back and forth to each other in the room before going out to a party on a Thursday or Friday night. We even recorded a rap video once when a video company called Fun Flicks came to Seton Hall as part of a campus fun day. The company set up a booth with the latest high-tech equipment and offered students a chance to make a music video for free. We could choose from a list of songs and lip-synch to a recording while the cameraman added a creative backdrop, like stars. It was video karaoke. There were a few popular rap songs on the list, so Rameck and I got together with about five other friends and made several flicks.
One of the guys with us that day was a seasoned rapper known around campus as P.S. One night, Rameck and I were talking when one of us suggested that we try to hook up with P.S. to form a rap group. We approached him about it, and I was surprised that he agreed right away, because his skills were so far superior to ours. At first, we considered asking P.S. to write our lines, but we quickly realized that just wouldn’t work. To feel what we were saying, each of us had to write our own lines. I became pretty good at coming up with metaphors, and Rameck developed great producer instincts. He was the one who pulled our individual pieces together into one good rap. We began by rapping over other groups’ beats, then Rameck started creating beats for us using a friend’s sampler. Sampling was a popular technique in which musicians lifted a particular sound, say a horn solo or drum beat, from a recorded song and pieced it with other samples or original beats to create background music.
We chose the name A.R.T., Another Rough Tribe, for our group in the tradition of the colorful rappers whose sole purpose was to have fun stringing words together, showcasing their talents, and bragging about their exploits, particularly with women. We were big fans of rap pioneers like KRS-One and Rakim, and others, like A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of the New School, whose star, Busta Rhymes, broke away and became a popular solo rapper, sporting flashy, almost clownish costumes. We enjoyed listening to all kinds of rap, especially socially conscious rap and even gangsta rap, which ignited major controversy with its violent images and themes.
We were just having fun in our spare time, unsure of how far we wanted to go with the group. But gradually, we got more serious. We asked Sam to be our manager. He’s always been more interested in working behind the scenes in rap and envisioned himself more as a business mogul, like Russell Simmons, or a producer, like Sean “Puffy” Combs.
The more we practiced, the better we got. We wanted to go into the studio to put together some original beats and record some songs, but we had no money. That’s when a friend gave one of our tapes to her boyfriend, a Seton Hall basketball star who was being recruited to play in the NBA. An agent he knew owned a big studio in Newark, so he arranged for us to get some free studio time. We went to the studio at least once a week, sometimes more often, depending on our class schedules, and recorded a couple of raps. But after a while, the studio wanted to start charging us, so we had to come up with another plan.
Sam came to our rescue. Always a penny-pincher, Sam had some extra money from his savings over the years and decided to front us $500. Since all three of us were struggling financially, we recognized the huge sacrifice he was making. There was no guarantee that he would get his money back, and, unlike me, he couldn’t call home for help with his tuition when his money ran short. When I made it to college, my mother took on part-time jobs, in addition to her full-time job at the insurance company, and sent every dime of the extra money to me to help with tuition and books. She would have killed me if I had used even a penny of it to pursue a career as a rapper. But Sam understood our passion, believed in our talents, and decided to gamble.
We found another studio owned by Kool and the Gang, a funk band popular in the 1970s, went in, and recorded a couple more songs. We also heard that the Fugees, popular at the time with lead vocalist Lauryn Hill, had a studio in East Orange called the Booga Basement. When we stopped by, we hit it off with the cousin of Wyclef Jean, one of the group’s founders. Wyclef’s cousin ran the studio and told us he would put together some beats for us. We only had to pay for studio time. We used the Booga Basement to cut three more songs, which were even better than our first ones.
Now we were ready to copyright our material, but we mistakenly thought we would have to hire a lawyer. Rameck came up with an alternative, the so-called poor man’s copyright: we typed the lyrics of our songs, and he sent a copy of them via certified mail to himself. When we had four or five songs on a demo tape, we decided to put together a package to send to record companies. We didn’t have enough money for professional photos, so Rameck asked a guy who took pictures for the student newspaper to take a promotional photo of us.
To look like real rappers, we had to appear tough, not like the college boys we had become. We scouted the campus for the perfect photo background. The green grass and stately trees surrounding Seton Hall just wouldn’t do. Finally, we found the perfect spot: the upper deck of the student parking lot. The bare look of the concrete at night and the three of us in our baggy jeans, bad-boy expressions, and hats flipped backward looked just about right.
By now, we were in our junior year of college. We assembled thirty packets, each containing a copy of the demo, a promotional photo, and a short bio crafted by our wordsmith, P.S. Then, we used the telephone book and directory assistance to track down the addresses and telephone numbers of about twenty record companies. We were ready for New York. Rameck, P.S., and I skipped our classes and spent a day there, distributing our material. Rameck drove his white Volkswagen Golf, and each of us chipped in for gas and parking. We went from one record company to the next and handed our packet to the highest-ranking person available. A few times we were asked to drop our tape in a box with hundreds of others.
One of the record companies on our list was Puffy’s Bad Boy Records. Puffy had just started the label with a guy named Harve Pierre. Directory assistance had given us a Harlem address. But when we drove up, we didn’t see any office buildings. The address was an apartment complex in the middle of the ’hood. For a moment, we sat, perplexed, in the car. What should we do? You don’t just go walking up to some apartment in the ’hood without knowing where you’re going. Anything could happen. But we had come this far. We weren’t turning around.
We found a telephone and called the number on our list. Sure enough, it was Bad Boy Records. We asked the person answering the telephone to confirm the address. He gave us an apartment number. We walked up to the door and rang the buzzer. A voice answered.
“Is this Bad Boy Records?” one of us asked.
“Yeah, come on up.”
We felt a bit awkward when we first walked into the apartment because a bunch of guys were just sitting around. We looked around the room. No Puffy.
“What do you need?” one of the guys asked.
We explained that we were rappers and wanted Puffy to listen to our tape. We figured we had a better chance of getting called back if we could get Puffy to listen to it on the spot. Puffy wasn’t there, but we were directed to a bedroom, where Harve Pierre, Puffy’s vice president, sat on a king-sized bed surrounded by at least 300 tapes. Three different phones sat on the bed next to him, and he had one at each ear. H
e looked up and saw us.
“Can I help y’all? What do you need?”
With each of us speaking at different times, we told him we were rappers, that we were in college at Seton Hall, and we really wanted him to listen to our tape.
“That’s cool, man. That’s dope,” he responded with a friendliness that immediately put us at ease. He chatted with us for about five minutes, but he said he was too busy to listen to the tape right then. He asked us to put it in his pile, and he promised to call us back.
We left, feeling super-hyped. We were sure we would hear from Bad Boy Records. Puffy was just getting started and surely must have been looking for new artists like us. But the telephone call from Bad Boy Records never came. We didn’t get even one response from the twenty packets we distributed. We kept trying. We started getting weekend gigs.
Our first big performance was at a nightclub about fifteen minutes from Seton Hall. It was a hip-hop club that drew a young adult crowd, mostly college students of all races, who came to dance and watch live performances. When we made it to the club the night of our gig, customers were lined up outside the door to get in. As V.I.P.s, we bypassed the crowd. That made us feel important. We did a sound check, gave the disc jockey our instrumental tape, and chilled in the back of the club, near the bar, until it was time to go on stage. We were the opening act.
“What’s up, y’all? How y’all doing out there?” Rameck yelled into the microphone as the crowd gathered around the makeshift stage. He introduced himself, then me, then P.S. by our stage names.
“I’m the Old Veteran. This is Sound Seeker, and this is O.Z., the Wizard. And we’re Another Rough Tribe…. Alright, d.j., drop that beat!”
The bass began pounding, and we were into our first song, getting the crowd hyped and dancing to our beat.
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