Today we’d like to introduce you to SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE.
Can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Among my earliest memories are identifying as an artist and loving music. My mom, Linae, a lifelong English Language Learning teacher who passed this last year, sparked my love for storytelling in time spent on the couch swing on the back porch of the house I grew up in; talking about the cosmos, stardust, the paranormal and supernatural, and so much about my cultural heritage as a Xicane, or Mexican American. She also encouraged my creativity at every turn of doodle, painting, poem, and song.
So I had a foundation of curiosity and support to match a spirit of exploration and experimentation from basically the start of my life. That has carried me forward to this day as a full time artist and teaching artist.
I became more serious about music through high school as I began regularly jamming with friends at house party ciphers and small studio spaces around the cities. I started a band shortly after graduating high school and we did a few shows that were a lot of fun but had zero draw, so a group of mostly previous teen strangers were only going to push so hard to make it work.
After that, I mostly spit in rap ciphers wherever they happened to pop up, and continued writing and producing – growing – as an artist in my ever present home studio, where I hosted and recorded ciphers with other hip hop heads I had met in high school.
When I was about twenty years old, I moved to Chicago on more or less of a whim, and that’s where I really made a name for myself. Oddly enough, I had only gone to my first open mic just weeks before moving to Chicago. When I arrived, I went to several open mics religiously, met a ton of artists and was invited to do my first feature set. Someone else had backed out and they asked me if I could do a 45 minute solo set. I had never done such a thing and obviously said yes. I worked tirelessly putting together a set, rehearsing for hours and hours every day that week. I basically never looked back.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Well, that first band ended after a short series of shows that concluded with a set to one or two people where the band quit one by one, from the stage!
I’m not sure how smooth any road is in life when you’re doing anything worth doing. The shape of stories in our society is such that even though there is very little that could be accomplished without artists and art, there is a limited understanding of the value of art, and of what it means to be an artist – especially under the rise of fascism. So, on the surface, that could look like people who don’t respect Hip Hop, or any number of ways the general public misunderstand, and in turn, end up expressing a baseline of socially acceptable disdain for the arts. But more systemically, this looks like underpayment, little consideration for time/skill/expertise, receding resources for the arts, lack of healthcare, and unreasonable expectations that artists perform more and more like cookie cutter services. There’s the pandemic and how that’s impacted artists and the arts at large. There’s just kind of a lot stacked against us. The way AI is given any space for an argument of relevance says a lot about how little corporations value art and artists. To say nothing of scene politics, personal challenges, and just surviving in the world. But that’s just life, and without struggle, we learn very little about ourselves and the world we live in.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am primarily an interdisciplinary Hip Hop artist drawing on waves of tradition and connecting to inspiration from everywhere in life and history. My art is nerdy, joyful, and politically direct. I am a writer, performer, painter, composer, producer, live MPC (sampler) and Loop Station (vocal and beatbox loops) musician, and tinkerer of lost objects. I’m mostly known as a Hip Hop artist (MC/Producer) or Spoken Word poet, depending on who you ask. I’m also a film director/editor/cinematographer, a graffiti artist, projection mapping artist, and from time to time, a cosplayer of sorts (hello homemade time pack). I’m often playing, always learning, and consistently putting together my interests in unexpected ways. I also independently contract as a teaching artist, teaching graffiti hand style, writing, performance, and music production.
I’m proud of having taught thousands and thousands of youth in Poetry and the Hip Hop Arts all over the USA and with students from all over the world; to have taken so many opportunities to learn and collaborate, like writing rap and spoken word verses in a cultural adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, or collaborating with classical musicians on a live mash up of Chamber music and original Hip Hop and Spoken Word. I’m proud of the ways I’ve studied different crafts and put them together in my own work, like the cinema graffiti projection mapping project for the inaugural Wakpa Triennial arts celebration of n the face of the George Latimer Downtown Saint Paul Central Library and performed the soundtrack live on the MPC.
My proudest moment has to be performing the main stage for the flagship No Kings 3 march, the largest day of action in the United States, in front of a crowd of more than 150,000 people and millions more online, with friend and collaborator KTM as our duo, Secret Rivers.
Any big plans?
The biggest shift these last couple years has been slowly rolling out two new bands; the aforementioned Secret Rivers, and SkySpiders & the Imperceptible Web with singer/songwriter Kat Parent. They’re very different from one another, and I’m excited to keep creating and sharing and performing new work!
I’m also supporting Kat’s ‘Swampling’ shows, album, and video, which will be ramping up soon with some special shows in nature.
I’ve also been writing a lot of solo songs, so look out for new music soon. In the meantime, check out the first releases from Secret Rivers and SkySpiders; ‘Spring Is Coming’, and ‘Slept Dawn’, respectively.
I’m always looking forward to the next class visit, residency, performance, artist talk, recording session, mural and poetry commissions, and all of the weird and cool collaborations that ate bubbling under the surface – so please feel free to send me an inquiry!
Pricing:
- Workshops: 200/hr – prep included
- Primary School Performance – Spoken Word: $500
- Primary School Performance – Hip Hop: $700
- College Performance: $1500
- Mural: $500 6×8 – $1000 10×12
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.patreon.com/seemoreperspective
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mr_seemore
- Other: https://www.seemoreperspective.com
