This Song Changed My Life | Real Talk | PragerU

I was in the house one day, we had like just got our power back on. By the grace of God we somehow paid rent and had groceries that month. I smoked cigarettes at the time and didn't have any money for cigarettes and I had like half a cigarette left in this pack. I was sitting in the house listening to the radio or something and this song came on the radio. I don't know if it was like Drake or like G-Eazy or like some rapper at the time who was like sort of talking about how fame was actually this terrible thing and having all this money was just terrible. It was just like this woe is me like story about the hardships of fame and I was like deeply offended by it because I was like these guys are living the life that like I would do anything to have and I was in this house that's falling apart. There's holes in the ceiling and water coming through when it rains and there's mice running all over the place and it's just we're just totally in poverty and this guy's like complaining about fame and money and fortune and all this stuff and I and it just it really pissed me off. Yeah because even in in this culture even a rich person has to win oppression olympics. Yeah everybody is just wants to be a victim so bad including the people that have it all. Yeah I was just really irked by it and um I grabbed this little half a cigarette out of the cigarette pack and went sat on the front step in our yard and started writing this like open letter to hip-hop and the first thing I wrote was Dear Rappers and then uh I honestly like don't know what happened. It was literally like God just like spoke through me that day. Like I don't remember stopping to think what rhymes with this or pausing to sort of formulate what the next line was going to be. I just wrote this song and by the time that half a cigarette was done and we're talking like five minutes the song was done and I sat there and looked at my phone and I literally was like oh my god I just did it and then I ran in the house and Nova was on her computer or something and I said to her I just wrote the song it's going to change our lives. Um grab the camera like let's shoot a video and she's like don't you need to like record the song and I was like I'm going to record it right now like while I'm recording it just like pull down the backdrop we had this little $20 light from Amazon that she put a little piece of red plastic over so it was like a red light and uh I jumped on my computer recorded this song in like 10-15 minutes and then got up and stood in front of the backdrop wrapped the whole thing. The next day I borrowed like $200 from my mom, $200 from my sister which was brutal to do to call your younger sister and be like I need 200 bucks and you know I've been a dreamer for many years at this point so there's no telling how many times I've said I need to borrow $100 because I figured it out. We all know somebody like that. Yeah so um that was me so I borrowed like a couple hundred bucks from four or five people and I had like a thousand dollars and the next day I dropped the music video I put the thousand dollars on like a Facebook ad and 24 hours later it had a million views and my page went from 2,000 likes to 20,000 likes and uh we were off to the races and like I said I don't even remember anything about the writing process of that song it was literally like God was just like screw it kid this is your time and just like spoke through me wrote the song and it literally changed everything. Did you get any hate for this song? Yeah tons. What name did they throw at you? Uh well racist was like the was probably like the top comment. Yeah that's the one right off the shelf. Because yeah it's I mean because there was this thing where like I was you know I was writing a letter to hip-hop to rap I was I was criticizing the status quo like of the genre as a whole and everybody was saying like oh he's he's hating on black rappers and and he's criticizing black rappers and he's criticizing this culture that he didn't create but he's using the culture to criticize it and it was just like to me it was just like I'm not criticizing any rapper of any particular color I'm just criticizing the message and the narrative and as a whole but the genre and there's lots of rappers out there there's white rappers and black rappers and Asian rappers and Indian rappers and all types of rappers out there. Yeah. So and everybody the common denominator seemed to be at that time the message is in the music so that's what I was speaking to. So yeah you know like I've been called a lot of things. Do you care what people think about you? No.