Ghais Guevara: I’m not sure if it’s a question of “what made me want to become a rapper”. There’s not a lot of black urban landscapes where the people don’t want to be rappers. Shit, nowadays the whole world wanna be rappers. It’s like asking a member of the church who wants to be the Pope, it’s a pinnacle of our culture, my whole demographic admires rappers. Same with politics. I had to understand politics because in order to succeed, I had to learn how to navigate how I’m viewed as a Black boy and why.
Maybe it’s more so, when did I know this was for me rather than it being an aspirational attainment as it was for everyone else. Even then, that feels like a victim of circumstance more than you’d think. I was great in school, straight A’s and what not, but rebellious. I didn’t “see the point” so I rejected it. I lost interest in academia for the same reason anyone does. It didn’t ‘help me grow as an individual’’, it costs too much, it’s no black people in those spaces and if you’re from a HBCU then your degree gets this social asterisk next to it, as if to say: “He’s a special case.”
Despite that rejection, I was well educated, my parents didn’t play that. My father had a strong “never throw away a book” rule in the home. If I told my mother I was bored the default response was, “Read a book”. Need to know something? Look it up and find out. Not only was it encouraged but it was enforced lol. “30 minutes of reading a day”, was what my pops demanded of my brother and I on the daily. Both of my parents are musically inclined, with my mother even pursuing singing and dancing as a career when she was in school. So all of that would’ve been a part of me regardless. Plus, I was always a showman, I loved sports because of that. At the family gatherings, I was the dancer and if I was bored in class, I was the class clown. I may actually just live for applause. A minute without admiration and I’ll wither up and cease to exist! Essentially, it’s sort of that age old question of knowing what to do with your capabilities without confining yourself to a path that didn’t feel right for you, so you see what I mean by “circumstance’.
I just figured rap is my calling. It’s verbose to the point where you need to be knowledgeable to do it well. Its essence of it all is within confidence and showmanship and I didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars for an AAU spot to learn how to get better at it. So I fell back on it, pushed all my chips in or whatever. Learned enough about making music to actually get tracks recorded and from then on it was universally known that “you could do this”. I didn’t really want anything else, I just had to prove that I was worthy of such a career.
Goyard Ibn Said by Ghais Guevara is out January 24 via Fat Possum.
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