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Ghais Guevara<\/strong>: I\u2019m not sure if it’s a question of \u201cwhat made me want to become a rapper\u201d. There\u2019s not a lot of black urban landscapes where the people don\u2019t want to be rappers. Shit, nowadays the whole world wanna be rappers. It\u2019s like asking a member of the church who wants to be the Pope, it\u2019s 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\u2019m viewed as a Black boy and why. <\/p>\n Maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019d think. I was great in school, straight A\u2019s and what not, but rebellious. I didn\u2019t \u201csee the point\u201d so I rejected it. I lost interest in academia for the same reason anyone does. It didn\u2019t \u2018help me grow as an individual\u2019\u2019, it costs too much, it\u2019s no black people in those spaces and if you\u2019re from a HBCU then your degree gets this social asterisk next to it, as if to say: \u201cHe\u2019s a special case.\u201d <\/p>\n Despite that rejection, I was well educated, my parents didn\u2019t play that. My father had a strong \u201cnever throw away a book\u201d rule in the home. If I told my mother I was bored the default response was, \u201cRead a book\u201d. Need to know something? Look it up and find out. Not only was it encouraged but it was enforced lol. \u201c30 minutes of reading a day\u201d, 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ll wither up and cease to exist! Essentially, it\u2019s sort of that age old question of knowing what to do with your capabilities without confining yourself to a path that didn\u2019t feel right for you, so you see what I mean by \u201ccircumstance\u2019.<\/p>\n I just figured rap is my calling. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201cyou could do this\u201d. I didn\u2019t 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<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Buy your copy of Huck 81 here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>\n\n
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