CHAPTER 7

POWER & CONNECTION

I am an MC and Poet from Oxford. I first discovered lyric writing in my early teens and I quickly began to find it essential; a way to channel my emotions and organise my thoughts. A self-guided therapy. I’ve not studied therapy academically but I developed my own strategies for processing difficult experiences and situations, some of which played out over a number of years. I live with the benefits of this therapy I created for myself every day. 

I grew up in Oxford, I don’t feel like I'm “from" anywhere else, it’s home. When people think about Oxford, I know that they probably get an image of the University and the world-famous “dreaming spires”, the prestige and elitism. But I grew up very much on the other side of Oxford. The place I grew up in is actually one of the 10% most-deprived areas in the UK, according to the government’s index of multiple deprivations. Things like poverty and crime are higher, and life expectancy is lower than the rest of the city/county/country – it’s that stereotypical council estate area. A lot of people in these areas carry trauma, often multiple traumas. It’s argued that being in this environment is itself trauma-inducing, that makes sense to me, I have experienced some of that. Growing up, we were always in financial trouble, and I saw the emotional effect that had on my mum, who was really the only adult in my life. There were mental health issues in my family, and violence and the temptations of crime were never far from my close circles. Along with trouble at school, my friend’s various dramas and other miscellaneous stuff, it's safe to say I found some tough times. One thing that would always bring me back to where I wanted to be mentally was music. 

 

TEACHERS

Music had always been a big part of my home environment, listening to music was something that I always loved doing. It had been at the back of my mind for as long as I can remember, but it was in my teens, aged about 14 or 15, that I started to consciously think about making music myself. I think I was drawn to Hip Hop lyrics because they talked about a lot of things that I was going through; poverty, dad not being around, violence, police harassment, friends being so close they felt more like family than my blood relatives did, being on the outside with no hope of finding a way in. I didn’t really hear any other forum where that was being talked about in a way I could relate to. I wanted to tell my story, to start writing my own lyrics. But I didn’t know anyone at all that was even trying to make music, I had no guidance, or any real sense of where to begin. 

The way that I figured out how it was done was by learning other rappers’ tracks. I think the first was Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ – I bought it for my mum for her birthday. She liked the song but I think my reasons for choosing this present were at least a little bit selfish. I spent the next weeks and months listening to it on repeat for hours at a time, learning every single word and trying to figure out ‘How does he do this? Where do the rhymes land? How does it fit with the beat?’. I learned by copying. I didn’t have any access to instrumentals – that’s something people have quite easy access to nowadays with YouTube etc but I can remember having to rap over people like Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. so I could try out my verses. 

I used to truant from school a lot. The first few years at secondary school were tough for me; apart from the obvious, there were a lot of difficult changes happening in my life and I think it just all got too much. Looking back, I see the school really let me down. They had low expectations of what I could achieve and I got no support at all. It didn’t seem like anyone cared if I skipped lessons, or even the whole day. They completely neglected my emotional needs and their duty to make sure I was safe. To me the thing that says it all is the fact that I dropped Music as a subject as soon as I could, I knew I loved music, and I was interested in making it, but I hated the way that it was taught in school. It was so uninspiring and geared heavily towards kids who could read music and were having lessons on piano, clarinet, or some other posh instrument outside of school (paid for by their parents of course). People like me were only allowed to play the coconuts or the wood block alongside them, if we did anything at all, it was just a boring “mess around” lesson. Plus the teacher was crazy! 

When it came to GCSEs, my school didn’t enter me into some of them and the ones they did enter me in I didn’t do too well in. Although I got close to the highest possible marks in some of the tests (the highest possible mark on my Spoken English test which I made up on the spot), due to the examination structure at the time, I basically left school with no qualifications and went into unskilled manual work. I was making bits of money wherever I could and not getting very much fulfilment from life at all. I was just trying to exist, and contribute to my mum’s household bills whenever I could.

All through that time, I guess I always had a hope in the back of my mind that music was somehow going to work out for me. I was still always writing lyrics, and visualising a me that was good enough and confident enough to perform them on stage. Back then I was doing temporary agency work; picking in warehouses and labouring on building sites. I would write bars in my head and have to memorise those lyrics as I was walking around the warehouse, or doing whatever manual task on site. When I would get home I had to write them down straight away before they ran out of my head. I had to. It felt like something very important. Back then, not a lot of people knew that I was writing.

 

MENTORS

My first encounter with people on my estate who were into music was actually through drum and bass DJing. My friend's older sister's boyfriend was well into DnB, he'd taught a lot of my mates at the time to mix Drum n Bass before I met them, so they were all into it too, I guess he was a bit of a mentor. Everyone was getting their own little DJ set ups and we would make the rounds of our smoke filled bedrooms trying out new mixes and listening to the new records in each other's collections. When our mentor got a new pair of decks, I bought his old ones off him for about 20 or 40 quid; it seemed like a lot of money at the time but looking back, he gave me a great deal. I’ve got so much to thank that guy for but I can't even remember his name now. I've still got the decks, they aren't set up anymore though. Once, they were the centrepiece of my bedroom, alongside my collection of speakers rescued from skips and various acquaintances’ old surround sound and hifi systems - the number of speakers I had attached to my little hifi was ridiculous! I started off mixing a bit of drum and bass, but quite quickly moved into Hip Hop, it was more my rhythm, my speed. I could appreciate DnB, but it was always something I listened to mainly because my mates loved it. The big plus of getting Hip Hop records was that the B-side would often have the instrumentals on, I made a few tapes using those beats, messing about with a couple of friends and recording lyrics through headphones. We did share those tapes with a few trusted others, these were the first times I ever heard my words and voice played back to me and saw other people’s reactions to them. This was in the very early 2000s; around 2001 or 2002.

Up until that point I hadn’t really shown anybody my lyrics, I hadn’t even told anyone I was doing it apart from maybe two or three of my closest friends. They were complementary but didn’t really get it. It was definitely something I was doing mainly for myself. I look at it in the way that people keep a diary, they hide it, keep it locked away. I used to hide my writing book underneath my bed or in a drawer in my desk that my mum wasn’t allowed to look in. It was definitely something I was doing very privately in the beginning, but in my late teens or maybe early twenties, I found other people who were interested in making music and writing.

 

SHARING

I eventually found connections with other people to make music with more earnestly; a friend (Stanmore - who is unfortunately no longer with us following an episode of police brutality and prolonged multi layered systemic neglect), introduced me to someone he knew who was making Hip Hop mix tapes; getting a capellas and remixing them on different beats, then burning his own CDs using a PC, putting them out under the name Danger One. His dad was a reggae and dancehall DJ, and Danger was approaching his hip hop mixes very much from a dancehall perspective even blending the two genres together at times. I had never encountered anything like it before. I found out that he was getting loads of instrumentals – he was downloading them from the early file-sharing networks like LimeWire, this was very interesting to me. It was in his bedroom that I had my first experience of performing lyrics on a real microphone, he had borrowed a one from his neighbour Barry (who was a Drum n Bass DJ) to record voiceovers for his mixes, and it just happened to be set up when I went round one day, we were all messing about with it and I decided to drop some of my verses which I had memorised. They went down very well. Almost immediately we formed a group, but had no clue where to begin. We didn’t know where to buy a microphone from, let alone how to set one up to record! Eventually we figured out, “There’s this shop in town that sells microphones!” We all chipped in and bought our first microphone as a crew. Later, while I was a participant on a 6 week course he was running at his studio; Soundworks, (where I would finish top of the class and gain my first ever formal qualification) a local music legend Dave Norland sold me a much better microphone for cheap and we were away! 

We started recording our music and putting out CDs on our estate for free. We used to go into Tesco and buy a stack of 100 CDs and 100 plastic wallets each, burn our music onto the CDs, print out covers (designed by Danger One) on my mum’s printer, and then give them out to anyone that wanted one, it was kind of a self-imposed membership fee. The group grew to about 12 members at its peak, and over the next two or three years we must've put thousands of CDs all over the UK and beyond. If I ever went anywhere a stack of CDs would be coming with me! I still sometimes get feedback on social media about those CDs, from all over the place. During that time we made 5 collective mixtapes, each with around 30 tracks on them (that was the most tracks you could fit on a CD at the time), plus a heavy smattering of solo projects. In that two or three year period we must have released over 200 tracks between us, plus a DVD showcasing other local talent, all self funded while we were performing various other hustles to make money to survive at the same time.

That was hip hop being a therapy for me because I was talking about the things I was going through. With my friends, it was a forum for us to share our feelings and opinions with each other, record our experiences, put it out on the estate and collect feedback. It wasn’t really a conscious decision but that was the effect, I think we all needed it. One thing that always sticks in my mind from that period, something that still gives me motivation to this day, is when a total stranger came up to me in the pub saying, ‘you’re Rawz aren’t you? That album you made helped me through my divorce’. It was the first time I thought ‘Wow, what I’ve been doing has actually helped someone get through a hard time, in the same way that other people’s music helped me all those times’. That gave me the motivation to keep going, but also the confidence to think ‘I must be alright at this, people are enjoying it’.

 

UNDERSTANDING

I started to want to develop and understand my craft a little bit, and went to a poetry course that was being run at a local community arts centre called Fusion Arts. Firstly, that opened my eyes to seeing what I was doing as a form of art: I had never looked at it in that way before. Secondly, it gave me more tools and made me think more about what I was writing: thinking of every word that I’m putting on the paper being a choice, thinking about what I was saying and who I was saying it to. 

The leader of the course; a poet named Steve Larkin, was impressed with what I was doing and asked me to help out the next time that he ran it. That led to me travelling all over Oxfordshire with him over the next year or two, working in different spaces, teaching poetry to young people. This helped me grow as an artist, to refine my craft and, to think about how I was doing it, why I was doing it. Around the same time, I was asked by a veteran youth worker called Marsha Jackson, to take part in a youth project in my local area run by The Leys Community Development Initiative (CDI). Knife crime was really on the rise in the area at the time, so the local youth club was doing anti-knife crime projects. I started working with 11 and 12 year-olds at Soundworks (which was attached to the local community centre) exploring the subject of knife crime with them. We ended up making a track which was them expressing how they felt about the stabbings and violent crime that was going on where they lived, helping them to share that with people. I still see a lot of those kids, I think that project really bonded us, a lot of them are involved with some kind of community work themselves now. We ended up doing a conference at the Oxford United football stadium (which is on my estate) with the Head of Thames Valley Police in attendance – I was able to have a conversation with him and let him know my opinions and how I felt. It was Hip Hop that got me in that chair, through the work that I had been doing.

 

EMPLOYMENT

Then the funding ran out for both of those projects at the same time – I was told ‘Don’t come into work next week’, it was literally that abrupt. I was feeling that I really wanted to keep doing this work, and a couple of my friends (Kymel and Daniel) wanted to carry on doing it as well, so, encouraged by my mum, we started the Urban Music Foundation – this was in 2009. I feel it is important to note that, as I write this, both of the community centres I mentioned are scheduled for demolition in 2022, and both of the charities that facilitated this life changing work for me are under threat through lack of available space and constant battles to find funding. I honestly don’t know what I would be doing now had I not had these opportunities, and I worry about a generation that may not have these positive influences in their lives.  

When I started the Urban Music Foundation, I wanted to share with people this therapeutic tool that had taken me from leaving school with no qualifications, to starting my own business and becoming a much more well-rounded person, knowing myself well enough to help others get to know themselves. I’ve been running the Urban Music Foundation ever since, Daniel an Kymel moved on to doing other things with more secure incomes after a year or two, but they were both happy for me to keep it going on my own – it’s 13 years old now. I’ve worked with people from the age of 5 to 95 in all sorts of different settings using mainly lyric writing and poetry (other art forms too) as a tool for connecting people with each other, connecting people with themselves, and helping people to express themselves. I do a lot of work now with young people who are engaged in the criminal justice system and young people that are struggling in mainstream education. 

I’ve done an annual summer project with the Youth Justice Service here in Oxfordshire for the last 10 years or so, the most recent iteration is in conjunction with IF Oxford Science & Ideas Festival (which I am a trustee of) and is called ‘What IF?’. We work with small groups of, as they call it; their most “hard-to-reach” young people – people that other services have struggled to “engage with”. I’ve never had any trouble working with those sorts of people. We start off with the question ‘What If?’ and we let them expand on that to tell any story they wish. We’ve had tracks about ‘What if the world was ending?’, ‘What if I never got arrested?’, ‘What if my Mum would have never divorced my Dad?’, ‘What if my brother hadn’t died in that car crash?’. That’s our starting point and then myself and some of my colleagues help them to make a track around this question and record a video for it. Social workers, probation officers, parents and whoever else are always amazed at the insights they get into these young people’s lives and their psyches from just a three minute track. They say things like “I’ve been working with this kid for a year and they haven’t let me in as much as they just did in this three minute track”. 

I look at it now as a language, for me music is a language. Someone once said to me that music is what emotions sound like. That makes total sense to me. You can hear a chord on the piano, or a strum of a guitar, or a sample, and that can express feelings more vividly than hours of conversation. It’s an amazing tool for engaging with people and helping people to express themselves, and for understanding people. The strap line on my Urban Music Foundation business cards reads ‘Connecting people with themselves and each other through music’.

 

THERAPY

That’s what’s so powerful about this therapy. I call it a self-guided therapy. I still look at it as that in my own practice as well. It’s me giving myself a therapy session by asking myself questions and answering them, then sharing the results with other people in the hope that it will help them too.

I developed a project recently called ‘Digging Crates’ working in collaboration with friends and colleagues from our Hip Hop collective Inner Peace Records (formed in 2015) and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The museum was basically set up as a military research facility; they were trying to gather information from all over the world to help them create more effective weapons for expanding the British Empire. In it’s essence the Digging Crates project is about healing multi-generational trauma – the legacy of colonialism and slavery. We worked with a group of African musicians to explore the museum’s collection of African musical instruments and some of the other items that were taken from Africa by British colonisers. We worked with the African musicians to reinterpret the objects from the collection, taking audio samples from some of the instruments in the collections and also from recordings we made of the musicians playing their own music inside the museum. We then used these samples to create new Hip Hop tracks that we also wrote and recorded inside the museum. This is Hip Hop as a tool for healing from trauma in a very deep sense.

This was a hugely spiritual experience for me. I had underestimated the spiritual impact that it would have on me – I thought that it was just going to be fun to make tracks in the museum and sample some old instruments but actually, the project gave us a way to talk about the weight of the history of slavery and the outrageous abuses of the British Empire and colonialism, and share our views with each other. It gave us a chance to inform academics and researchers in the field about the impact that it’s had on us as non-academic people that are living with the legacies of these events. We made a documentary film and an EP (available at diggingcrates.bandcamp.com) from all of our reflections.

 

GIFTS

Now, I am an experienced youth worker, teacher, mentor, musician and entrepreneur. I have performed my craft all over Europe, both as a solo artist and with the Inner Peace Records collective. I have collaborated with musicians from all over the world and shared stages with some of my childhood heroes. My music shares my exploration of our interconnected worlds, and my responses to them, promoting outer change and advancement through inner reflection and positive action. I do this while covering an unlimited range of topics, including love, capitalism, nature, community, crime, science, religion and more. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t stumbled across this tool in the mud, and been helped to polish and sharpen it by so many caring people along the way.

I think that maybe the most important thing that writing lyrics and making music has given me, is that it helped me to realise the power that I have to control my own destiny, and the power and influence that I hold over others through what I choose to do and say. I think the reason that I started writing was partly because I felt voiceless, powerless. I had a vague notion that if I could get good enough at rapping, people would start listening to what I had to say. Now people are starting to listen.

I would like to share a piece of spoken word with you that I was commissioned to write for a three day fringe event called MARMALADE held by a group of community, arts and volunteering organisations in Oxford, bringing together funding bodies, charities, community groups and other organisations to focus on issues linked to community action. I performed this piece to begin a debate on the subject of power and how it could be shared differently.

​

POWER

Powerless

Done to

Not with

Devoid of the ability,

Influence or resources to create meaningful change

 

“They won't help me so how can I help myself?”

“If they don't care, why should I care about my health?”

“We’ve been waiting for so long

for somebody to do something

we’ve given up asking”

 

We’ve Given up trying

 

And the power

And the buck just keep on passing

 

And the power

And the buck

Just keep on passing by

 

How can we do things differently?

 

A lack of power means no hope

Hopelessness is my friend’s neck

In a rope

Hanging from a tree

Feeling like he had no power

To decide who he was going to be

 

Power

Is an opportunity

An opportunity rarely

Truly afforded to my community

 

Is power given?

Or taken?

Is power given?

Or taken away?

 

How can we do things differently?

 

Devoid of strength

A powerless victim

Lacking the capacity or authority to act

Seeing someone in need and being powerless to help

Anger

Sadness

Disgust and Mistrust

Of power

 

Who can give me power?

 

If I ever had power,

Who took it away?

 

I know

That my power is hidden

Concealed

By those that claim to hold it on my behalf

By those that would give out fish everyday

Before they would issue a permit

To cast my line in waters owned by no one

And only cared for by me

My power is the basis of their authority

Their power is my community

If I refuse to let my power be used

Their sovereignty becomes defused

Illusory

Useless

Ineffective

Powerless

 

Is power given?

 

Or taken?

 

Is power given?

 

Or taken away?

 

How can we do things differently?

 

I have power

The power of speech

The ability to do

The ability to say

Whatever I choose

The ability to act

To help

To nourish

My community

 

Power is time

Power is resources

Power is truth

And influence

And support

 

Power is mine to give

Power is mine to receive

 

Who can give me power?

 

Who can take my power?

 

Greed is hoarding power

Holding power

Withholding power

Controlling power

Spending no time

Wasting resources on ticking boxes

Giving out tins of sardines

When there are bigger fish to fry

Wasting time

Bending truth

To keep the illusion of power

At the top of the tower

Out of reach

Behind a screen

A screen to cast shadows on

Shadows of hope

 

How can we do things differently?

 

Who can give me power?

 

Is power given?

 

Or taken?

 

Is power given?

 

Or taken away?

 

Power is mine to give

Power is mine to receive

 

Power is knowledge

Knowledge is power

Honesty

Knowledge of self

Knowledge of the power we hold in ourselves

Trust

Not needing a permit to improve

Or to feed each other

When help is needed, who can we turn to

Who can we trust?

If not our brother?

Or our sister?

Our grandmother?

Who knows us better than us?

 

If we have knowledge

Of ourselves

If we have time

For ourselves

If we have resources

For ourselves

If we have influence

And support

And truth

Then we have power

 

Now

​

How can we do things differently?

RAWZ

 

To close, I want to share another piece with you: the fourth track from my 2021 collaborative album ONE TWO, created with my good friend, the talented singer/songwriter Tiece (also part of Inner Peace Records). The track is called ‘One To My Two’. In it I talk about my first experiences encountering music as a form of expression, describing it as if it is a physical entity, my first love. On the album notes I wrote:

This one is an ode to the first love of my life. 

The beat has a nostalgia to it that had me thinking about old times even as I was making it, and the subject matter pretty much chose itself. The lyrics are about music, particularly hip hop music and culture. Music really helped me get through some tough times as a kid and is still a huge part of my life today. I imagined it embodied as a person and wrote a song for them.

Hear the full track along with the rest of the album at www.innerpeacerecords.bandcamp.com

These are my lyrics for the track. 

 

ONE TO MY TWO

You, you're a part of me

It's You that cause my heart to beat

You're my spark in the darkness

In the dance you move my feet

And bring love from my past to me

 

From the first time we met

I couldn't even talk to you yet

Had to build up my strength

Compose my first sentence

You stayed there in my head

It's like I couldn't tear myself from your presence

You were there when I first played the drums on the table

Showed me a style to relate to

Though I never stayed faithful

And you strayed too I could never hate you

I just played cool

Through the hard times you showed me the truth

We set fire to the roof

You brought bap to my boom

The sun to my moon

You’re the 1 to my 2

 

You, you're a part of me

It's You that cause my heart to beat

You're my spark in the darkness

In the dance you move my feet

And bring love from my past to me

 

Now look how we grew together

You kept me warm in the coldest weather

Just for that I'm yours forever

You brought gifts no bar can measure

Absorbed my devils

I feel sure when I talk to you

I just call on you

And you're there when I'm feeling blue

This plans never falling through

It's all for you

You set me free

 

You, you're a part of me

It's You that cause my heart to beat

You're my spark in the darkness

In the dance you move my feet

And bring love from my past to me

RAWZ

 

You can find more of my work and connect with me online in the following places. I will be genuinely pleased to hear from you regarding this chapter or any other related thoughts or actions as it has been a very cathartic experience writing it.