Watch: Local Boys & Girls Clubs teens try to rap their way to scholarships - and Atlanta
Can someone pass us Drake or Kanye’s number? They might want to take a look at these Kansas City teenagers nippin’ at their heels.
Over the last two weeks the teens wrote, produced and performed in a video they’ve entered in a national freestyle rap contest for Boys & Girls Clubs of America members across the country.
The result of their hard work?
They’re “lit like a lighthouse,” to quote one of their lyrics.
“The whole video — the beat, the song, the visuals, the editing — all that was all done by the kids at our clubs,” said Jamel Malone, area teen services director for the clubs who shepherded the teens’ work.
“We did not use any outside sources, or companies, which kind of speaks to our kids’ abilities. It’s pretty exciting.”
The teens in the video represent two Eastern Jackson county locations of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City.
Like club members nationwide, they are involved in a new literary arts program called “Lyricism 101” that teaches them how to express themselves through positive hip-hop messages, “and the history behind it as well, the culture,” Malone said.
To kick off the program, the clubs are sponsoring a nationwide freestyle rap competition for its members. When the local teens learned about it earlier this month “they took it by the horn,” Malone said of the video’s participants from the Independence and Hawthorne units.
They did some of their work in the recording studio at the Independence club. Then they went on location. A fellow member, who does not appear in the video, found a colorful, graffiti-covered wall near Kansas City’s Cliff Drive that fit the raw, gritty theme of their lyrics.
It took them an hour and a half to record, but they were having so much fun they stayed there for more than four hours, Malone said.
“They shot it on an iPhone,” he said. “That was not the plan. We have cameras at the club.”
But someone forgot to bring the cameras. (It was Malone.)
The teens picked the order of appearance and gave 15-year-old Steven Taylor — aka Yung $tebo — the honor of going first in the group freestyle, called a cipher. They wrote their own lyrics.
“Imagine bein’ down in the dumps
“You and your brothers, your mama, your grandmama, too
“Daddy in jail, mama livin’ in hell.
“She’s workin’ too hard and she’s trying to prevail
“Don’t know what to do
“I swear it’s the truth.”
“He provided the framework for everything,” said Malone. “What they wrote, about their experiences, is personal. It’s raw, it’s uncut, it’s what they see on a daily basis.”
What they’re rapping about, he said, “is a reality” for many of the 1,500 kids the clubs in greater Kansas City serve daily.
All the videos entered in the contest have been posted to YouTube, where the Kansas City teens have scooped up 3,800 views since Oct. 18. But Malone is spending a lot of time telling people that it’s not the number of views that will push the video along to the next round of the competition. The video needs likes — or thumbs-up on YouTube.
On Nov. 4 the four videos from across the country that have earned the highest number of likes will advance to the second round, where they will be reviewed by judges.
Scholarship money awaits the finalists. The grand prize winner will get to spend a few hours recording in Atlanta’s famous Tree Sound Studios.
“No one in that group has been out of the metro,” Malone said. “They know Kansas City, but that’s it.”
Some very famous musical acts have used that studio in Atlanta.
Miley Cyrus. Justin Bieber.
And, look at that, Drake.
Watch out now.
This story was originally published October 28, 2016 at 7:52 PM with the headline "Watch: Local Boys & Girls Clubs teens try to rap their way to scholarships - and Atlanta."