ORIGIN
My
Story
The day I knew I was going to be a rap artist was a day like every other. I wish I could tell you a more eventful story, but sadly not every origin is slathered with a plethora of powerful or meaningful events.
This story on the other hand was meaningful enough for me, so meaningful in fact that I remember it like it was yesterday, and I’ll remember it like it was today tomorrow, tomorrow the day after, so on and so forth.
I walked into my cousins’ 2 bedroom flat at the top floor of an estate building in Barnfield Gardens, Plumstead. They weren’t really my cousins, but this was a done way of understanding who we were to each other in our culture, a manner that I’m sure still applies till this very day.
It was only natural, because our mothers saw themselves as sisters and so we would by default see ourselves as cousins. The day would play out as it usually would, I’d walk into my cousins’ bedroom, and my mum would immerse herself into a 5, 6 or maybe 7 hour long conversation with her friend.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
The devil’s in the detail when it comes to this part of the story, see as foreign kids growing up in low income families we did what we could to entertain ourselves in this massive expanse of time.
This time felt like a never ending ocean. Apart from school, whilst our dads were busy working every hour of every given day, all we had were the four walls of a bedroom in a council flat, and whatever forms of entertainment we could find to come to terms with our own identities.
I find it hard to find the best words to explain this, but anime and wrestling hit differently when it was the only thing that we had. The same went for gaming, the internet, whatever it was that our parents sacrificed their hours and pennies for so we didn’t have to feel the full force of our emotional and physical neglect.
To put things into perspective, before technology was smart enough to autosave our digital work, because you know as dinted and futile human beings we will always be bound by the limitations of our human error, when it came to the Sony Playstation, we needed this thing called a memory card.
For most of us this small rectangular piece that held no more than 8 megabytes of storage was a luxury our parents found hard to afford, so when we played through any video game it didn’t matter how far we would get.
By the time we flicked our disk tray open, flicked the off switch on the back of our PS2 or pressed our fingers firmly on that button with the green LED light, all our data would be lost, and we would have to start our game all the way from the very beginning.
As a result of this technicality we BINGED our games from morning till night just so we could get as close as possible to the end in one sitting. I’m saying all of this to explain that when we did something, ANYTHING to pass the time, we would do it OBSESSIVELY.
We would all learn who we would become not by watching our mothers and fathers grow because they would always be at work, but through the characters that we would see on our TV, play on our video games, or watch and listen to on the internet.
I wasn’t expecting anything different when I walked into my cousins’ bedroom that day. Subconsciously I got used to my expectations to find them obsessing over the next game, toy or tv show that they picked up.
The scene was no different than usual. Two double bunk beds cramped in a small, most likely overcrowded bedroom, a cousin or two with their eyes glued on the tv screen, and a cousin or two with their eyes glued on the PC display at any given time.
Our ages were all over the place to be honest, but I think it was safe to say none of us were older than 15. I would usually gravitate towards the playstation as my pass time of choice, because the brodies on the computer would usually be on MSN chatting to God knows who, which was something that at the time was very foreign to me.
This time around however, the mandem were up to something different. Now I don’t know about you, but getting your hands on a movie, game or software that you didn’t have to pay for back then was a BIG deal, especially if you were 15 years old or younger.
Somehow someway, the mandem managed to download and install a pirated version of this audio recording software called Mixcraft. I could see my cousin trying to babble some words into this skinny microphone, what our parents would have used back then to communicate to their relatives overseas via Skype. I heard my cousin rap for the first time, and immediately I became curious.
Now don’t get me wrong, the fear of missing out is a powerful thing, and back then I wasn’t a fan of being left out from anything (Unless it was football of course), but for reasons that I can’t quite phathom, there was something about allowing myself to miss out on this activity that made me feel empty on the inside.
I would only come to terms with this emptiness the day I found the courage to speak up and say I wanted to give it a try. It took a while for that day to come because I couldn’t record what I hadn’t preconceived or written down on paper. In other words, I didn’t have any bars.
It was the days leading up to, the days during, and the days thereafter the moment I laid my first vocal recording down that told me everything I needed to know about just how badly I wanted to be a rap artist; how impossible it was going to be to ignore this passion.
If truth be told there was no sign for a 100 country miles that I was going to be any good at it, but the signs were always there in the way I felt every time I wanted to express myself.
My life wasn’t perfect, nobody’s life was, but there was a lot of raw emotion that I stomached as a kid because I couldn’t process what was happening around me; what was happening to me, how I felt about a world that made as much sense as it didn’t.
So here I am I guess, still trying to do what I love after I’ve been told no, after I’ve been asked why, after I’ve tried to do and be everything else for the sake of fitting in.
I go by the name Made Eze, I’m a rap artist, and this is the diary of a rap dragon.