Rising Son
CLICK HERE TO WIN A FREE COPY OF HOODSTARR - THE GIFT TAPE AND SIGNED PHOTO AUGUST 06 UPDATE
"Hoodstarr: The Gift-Tape" Hoodstarr is the first official release from Rising Son on KMC Records. This collection of songs is not available for retail, only as a free giveaway CD or as a free download from the Official KMC Records website (hence the subtitle “GIFT –Tape”)
The aim of this release is to let people know who Rising Son is (for those who don’t know) and to give people a chance to hear what he’s been doing since his appearing on NAS’ “Street Disciples”
The mixtape is 17 tracks deep and features the legendary “Thief’s Theme Remix” with NAS, The controversial “Dear Common”, “Who’s to Blame?Pt 1”, and of course “Rising’s Theme”. One of the CD’s many highlights in a remix of this years Summer anthem “Touch It” with Rising Son Kicking off the verbals followed by Lloyd Banks, Busta Ryhmes, Papouse, DMX and more . There is even a sneak preview of the eagerly awaited Blood sweat and Beers album due for release later this year on KMC records.
This release comes just ahead of the Hip Hop Kings Tour 2006 for which Rising Son is the Headline act.
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Profile
Many artists would happily throw in the towel after recording with one of their idols. Not so for West London's
Rising Son. In October 2004 he won the Sony Records
Rhyme with Nas competition. He was hand picked by the man himself to feature on his track
Thief's Theme on the UK version of 'Streets Disciple'. Then in March 2005 he also joined Nas on the UK leg of his tour playing to packed audiences such as Brixton academy. Following such an achievement you'd think that the labels would be falling over themselves to sign him up. Asked if the attention he received was as expected he replied; "I didn't really know what to expect because I know how the industry is. You can do one big thing which is really huge but they still want to see what else you can do. At the moment people are just waiting to see what else I can do, how successful I can be. So it's all on me really to make things happen", and making things happen he is.
Rising is no stranger to working with big names and has collaborated with the
Outsidaz and
Edo G. "The Outsidaz thing came about because my old manager was personal friends with the Outsidaz and they came over to do some promotional work. I hooked up with them guys, hung out for a bit, and they were cool. I thought I would be silly to let this opportunity go by so I spoke to Young Zee and I said " If I get a studio are you guys on it"? and he was like "yeah for sure". So we got in the studio with Harry Love and Reveal from Poisonous Poets and we wrote our verses and laid the track down, which I think Harry Love was supposed to put that on a mixtape. It didn't happen though so I used the verse on something else. Oh well, that's what happens when you waste time innit.
Born one of six children, Rising was surrounded by music as a child. "My dad is a musician so there's always been music in my family. J-Lo sampled one of my dad's old tracks for 'Jenny From The Block' children growing, women producing men go working some go stealing, everyone's got to make a living. That's a sample from a track my dad wrote. That's the level of my family's influence on the music game so there's always been music in my life. At around age seven Rising discovered break-dancing and thus his love of Hip Hop was born. Funnily enough it was being a huge fan of Michael Jackson that kicked it all off. I learnt the moonwalk and that's what got me into break-dancing. So you could say Michael Jackson indirectly got me into Hip Hop.
He got into the scene in a big way and started to build up his catalogue of music. If I can think back to the first hip hop tape I ever had I think it was a Fat Boys tape. No wait! Before that. It was
Electro 4. Electro 4 was the first hip hop tape I ever had and then it moved on to rap music and then it was the Fat Boys first album
Big and Beautiful. Run DMC, those are kind of my first Hip Hop tapes. Other than that I used to tape stuff from Westwood and just get things you just acquire music from different people your mates and stuff. I'd listen to UTFO & Full Force, Roxanne, Roxanne Shante, Kurtis Blow. Those were my first Hip Hop influences. His favourite Hip Hop albums of all time are, in no particular order, anything by Tupac, Nas 'Illmatic', N.W.A. 'Straight Outta Compton' and Ultramagnectic MC's 'Critical Beatdown'.
He got his first taste in '96 when he was able to cut his gums on a DJ Phusion project called
DJ Phusion Philes Vol.1. "That's how I got my first taste of hearing myself and being on an actual product. It was a good project but the guy who put it together DJ Phusion, I don't work with him anymore. He actually produced 90 minutes of a mix-tape where he just remixed classic Hip Hop tunes and just got local MC's me being one of them" to come and bless his beats. It did quite well, it made some noise in the U.S. as well."
It was from this project that the crew
P.G.M (A Phu Good Men) was born. The crew consisted of Rising Son, Reveal, Doc Brown, T. Dangerous, 10 Faces and The Phantom.
Their first release was in September 1999 it was an E.P. called
The Truth Is Right Here. The E.P featured a solo track from each artist, my track was called
Ascend to Higher Levels. It made quite a bit of noise on the underground
Homegrown Entourage put us at No.1 in their Hip Hop chart. In couple of other Hip Hop charts we did quite well, all top 10. We had a very successful launch party at
Scala, over 1000 people turned up to see the show. We more or less had the entire UK Hip Hop scene perform all on the same stage on the same night and it went on till about 4am from 10pm. It was packed!
The next release I did was the following year, a couple of months later. We did a single called
The Key myself, 10 Faces, Phantom and Reveal. That did quite well on the underground.
The group have since split and all members have gone their separate ways. I think in the end we just had creative differences. I wanted to try and do some mainstream stuff and other artists weren't really on that. Everybody had their own ideas about what they wanted to do, and the images they wanted to create for themselves. Talking of mainstream many UK Hip Hop artists shy away from 'making it big' so to speak and instead opt to 'keep it real' in the belief that they will be watered down and thus not taken seriously.
Rising on the other hand, with a young daughter to support, has mainstream success in his sights. "My attitude towards the game has changed. Before it was all about keeping it real, its all about the music and all of that, which is fine and I did all that and made nuff friends and made a name for myself but they're comes a point in your life when you get a bit older and its like I'm not making any money. This is my one talent that I've been given and I'm not that academic skilled because I went to a crap school where I was not encouraged to learn. I'm into my music, so I feel that this is my gift and if I don't do something beneficial to me as a man with that then it's a waste of my time. I can't carry on pleasing a small community of people, and try to 'keep it real' for those people. What is 'real'? At the end of the day I don't think anyone is the epitome of real unless you are specifically an underground artist and that's what you're going do and that's how you're going stay. For me it was never that, I just wanted to make a name for myself and let people know who I was and then move on from that. Like I said its time to make some money now otherwise what's the point."
Don't be fooled however this guy isn't all about the paper. His quest for money doesn't get in the way of the message he wants to send out to the masses.
Rising is prepared to go for success at full speed. He is the first to admit that not many people share his vision although he does prefer being in a crew. "Just because of who I am , my personality, I'm a Gemini so I like to be around people I like to have fun with it. When you're on your own on stage it's a bit more pressure. When you've got your crew they know your words as well so if you forget a line you know man's is gonna jump in there and say the line so its also helpful when you need to take a breath, so at least to work with a hype man. But if I have to go out there on my own, I'll go out there on my own 'cause they're not a lot of people out there who share the same vision as me everyone's too busy on this 'keep it real, keep it real' thing, which, is not gonna do that much for the scene as a whole I just think that the
'urban' music scene is so much bigger than that. The Hip Hop scene is a lot bigger than that. There are so much talented kids out there but I don't think they're given the opportunity because there is conflict right now between what the industry wants to promote and what the Hip Hop world wants to put out. So there's a fine line there and I want to be the artist that breaks that line. I am a progressive revolutionary. After listening to a couple of his tracks I actually think that he could be the guy to do it. Keep your eye on Rising. Success has been a long time coming and with his new material mainstream recognition looks to be on the horizon. He's being very 'hush hush' about his new project, except that it's to be called
Blood, Sweat & Beers. He's let a few tracks be heard, you can hear these on his page at
www.myspace.com/risingsonuk and he has his own page on
www.hip-hopkings.com
Rising also verbally attacked US artist
Common recently regarding his comments about mixed race relationships. The track received daytime radio play and received mixed responses, most of them positive. Rising states "Common had no right to say what he said. My father is no 'Sellout' just because he had a white girlfriend in the form of my mother. He was a
Black political activist and done lots for black people during the civil rights movement in the 60's and in his home country of Trinidad". Common has since commented during an interview with 1Xtra's Dj Semtex alleging that he has not heard the track but "hopes whoever it was got whatever it was off his chest".
Rising responds to this by saying "if someone disses you, I don't care who you are, you will want to hear it, regardless of who it was. He tried to play it off like he never heard it but as an artist myself I can tell you that it MORE than likely that he did. And he knows that if he responds negatively he will lose most of his fanbase because most of his fanbase is white. So he can't say NOTHING. He just doesn't want to apologise which is fine with me because I said from the gate that I don't expect or even want an apology, I just want him to know." So now he knows “ Mission accomplished", now on to the next, and the next is
"Blood, Sweat & Beers" Look out UK!
