Here I am at college. Not making friends like I thought I would, my music not being embraced like I thought it would, and feeling pretty much lost as a result. About this time is when I met Jay Money. Money was an interesting cat. He had (and still does) a wide-range of musical tastes. What intrigued me was his love of Christian Rap. After talking to him a few times we came to realize that between the two of us we had just about every significant Christian rap CD that had been released up to that point. Our favorites were pretty much all the same. Gospel Gangstas, SFC and Super C aka Soup The Chemist, T-Bone, etc. I was deathly afraid of making my own beats. I just didn't think I could do it. Not to mention the fact that my passion was rapping. That's pretty much all I wanted to do. Jay Money was making beats. Some of his beats were rap and some were some techno style shits that I didn't really get. I started bugging him to make more beats so we could make some Christian Rap songs. This is the early stages or almost the birth of Mergence.
Jay Money had some beats ready and I was definitely ready to record some of my raps. This was around the time I met J. Roach. Roach and I had a music business class together. I had seen Roach in the studios the year before but had never really met him. We started talking and goofing around in class and found out we had a lot in common. Not only did Roach love rap. He also loved wrestling. We became friends pretty quickly. One night Money and I had some studio time booked and I asked Roach to come up to record a verse or two. Roach dropped this crazy style that had both Money and I buggin' out. We had never heard anything like it. He used two vocal tracks in almost a question/answer style type of rap. It was dope! He never wound up using that style on anything but that's how it started! After a few takes he came out of the booth and mentioned this friend of his named Damien. "He's probably at the Union." Roach said. "Let's go get him and see if he wants to spit!" I said. It was on. Mergence was born. Mergence included J-Dot, Dalexand, Jay Money, and KEC-Dogg aka The King's EmCee. Yeah I used that name for a quite a little while. We recorded an album that was definitely in the vein of Christian rap. The album was called amalgamation and in my opinion it still sounds good today. The group was short lived though. Dalexand transferred to a college in Canada to play basketball.
After Damien split, Roach and Jay Money started working with a singer who went by the name Howie T. They were also working with some rappers that Roach new from St. Louis, his hometown. We were all starting to drift from "Christian" rap. We were all still Christians but we wanted to express ourselves. That is my biggest problem with "Christian" music. As an artist or poet you are forced to limit yourself to certain guidelines based on the church's doctrine. Please do take note of exactly what I said. I did not say guidelines given to us by God or found in the Bible. I said the CHURCH'S doctrine. That's a whole other blog waiting to be written. But I digress.......
Money had been on me for a while to start making my own beats. He and Roach were so busy working with other people that I kind of got left behind a little. I know it wasn't intentional now, but at the time I didn't know what to think. I felt like they were ditching me at the time. They were just doing there thing and trying to work with different people. They did put me on a couple things here and there. Roach and Howie T won the battle of the bands that Greenville College held each year to determine who would do some early morning/afternoon sets at the Agape Christian music festival. If you aren't familiar with Agape think "Christian Woodstock" on a much smaller scale. Roach and Howie T did have me do a song with them during their set. To this day Agape is the largest crowd I've ever played in front of. I'm not sure how many people exactly but I'm pretty sure it was in the thousands.
During this time was in I truly started to find myself in music. The key word in that sentence is started. I wouldn't arrive for a few years yet but the foundation was being set. I started making some beats and started recording myself in studio sessions. This was actually very exciting for me. Once I got in the lab I was like a kid in a candy shop. I never got great grades in Warren Pettit's studio classes. I wasn't so much concerned with every aspect of what he was teaching. I just wanted to be in the studio. I put in just enough effort to get by. I can't tell you how many times I've thought to myself "Should have studied more in Pettit's classes". Pettit loaded the studios with some great gear. A vintage Mini-Moog, a Roland Juno, an Alesis HR-16, and of course Digi Design Pro Tools. I still think back to those studios and how much I learned. This was around the time Jay Money and I did the first Big Fletch album Erase the Hate. This was my last "Christian" rap album. If you listen to it you can hear where I'm starting to make the shift. I did the song Undercover, one of my favorites from that album, in chapel at Greenville. I had a line that said "expose those who pose as pimps and hoes". Jay Money thought it was hilarious I did that one in chapel because of that line.
After college I moved back home to Mason City, IL for my summer internship as a youth pastor at the church I grew up in. I started working at Bonanza again and got hooked up with a job as an Adult Resident Assistant at Lincoln College. For me, it was perfect at that time. I didn't want to live at my Mom and Dad's. Not that I had anything against my Mom and Dad. I just wanted to be on my own so bad. I had already been away at college for four years. The job at the college gave me room to stay in for free and paid a little. Not enough to live on mind you, but I could still work at Bonanza too. I had my computer and Pro Tools Free. I couldn't record vocals on this free version of Pro Tools but I could make beats. Money was still making beats too. I wanted Money and I to be a rap duo sort of like Gangstarr. Money would handle most of the beats and I would do all the raps. I started to drift away from church at this time. I didn't feel like I fit in at all. For starters, I didn't (and still don't) believe there's anything wrong with cussing or the use of cuss words. Who decided which words are the bad words? Isn't that a completely subjective concept? What offends you might not offend me and so on. I've never read a list of words that are never to be spoken in any translation of the Bible. At any rate, that was just one of my issues with "The Church". One of my closest friends, Chris Fink, had just graduated from college and moved to St. Louis. I had the itch to move either to Chicago or St. Louis so I could get involved in the local rap scene. Fink offered to let me stay with him and sleep on his couch until I got on my feet. The Rhyme Commission was just around the corner.
.......to be continued............
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