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Bringing that beat back — on the E train

by amy zimmer / metro new york

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FEB 20, 2006

WEST VILLAGE — Human beat boxers and MCs turned the E train into a roving hip-hop party last night.

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Using the last car of the subway as their peformance space, the band of old school rap afficionados stopped off at various stations to form rhyme cyphers and demonstrate their skills at musical oneupsmanship.

“It’s a jam session,” said Terry “Kid Lucky” Lewis, a 33-year-old Crown Heights beatboxer who organized the event and plans to hold it on the train every other Sunday. It’s his way to confront what he sees as a crisis in hip-hop.

“There’s too much degradation of women; everybody’s thugging and blinging,” Kid Lucky explained. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people making money, but I’m trying to show there’s more to hip-hop.”

Before the group boarded at West 4th Street, Kid Lucky said to them, “We are going to change the whole image of hip-hop, starting in the underground — literally.”

‘Hip-hop saved lives’

On the E train Back in the day, beatboxers would perform on street corners and on subway trains.

Now, Terry “Kid Lucky” Lewis wants to resurrect that grassroots sprit by hosting rap contests on the E train every other Sunday.

“Doing this on the subway is celebrating New York,” said Kid Lucky, of Beatboxer Entertainment. “Hip-hop was born here. It was a way to deal with violence. People now have a hard time remembering, but people used to break-dance against each other instead of fighting. Hip-hop saved lives.”

At yesterday’s kickoff for the “5th Element Subway Series,” as the event is called, Tah Phrum Duh Bush, an MC from Flatbush, said to other participants, “We’re all family. We need to build and come together.”

This was not the first subway cypher for Kryciss, a 27-year-old MC who relocated from St. Croix to Midtown, though it was the first organized one.

“Usually, there’s just a bunch of us doing this spontaneously after a show,” he said. But he was interested in another forum to demonstrate his skills: “I’m a shape- shifter. It’s all about the flow. I can talk about anything from war to macaroni and cheese.”

He’s also working on his first album.

“I’m putting it out independently, of course,” said Kryciss, who goes only by his nom de rap. “I don’t think labels would allow their artists to take the train. You got to drive across the street in a new Bentley.”

Kid Lucky thinks commercialization has softened hip-hop’s political edge, and he rails against artists like Jay-Z, who have admitted to “dumbing down” lyrics to make their music more marketable.

“There are absolute nos and yeses,” he explained. “We absolutely, 100 percent can’t be glorifying jails; we have to say no to gang violence and stop hiding by saying, ‘Society makes it like this.’ We have to hold our moral ground.”

Kid Lucky and other politically aware artists like Talib Kwali, Dead Prez and the Roots are known as “dirty backpackers” because “they, like a lot of consciousness MCs, would wear these backpacks that were kind of dirty on the outside and inside had all these pens and notebooks.”

But dirty backpackers’ music isn’t what people in his Crown Heights neighborhood are buying from bootleggers, he said. They buy 50 Cent and Jay-Z. “We have to start getting people to think about where hip-hop is going,” he said.

Kid Lucky had “no choice” but to bring the art form to the subway, “Because this is not getting in the clubs,” he said. “How much of a message are you going to get out at 12:30 a.m. when everyone in the crowd is drunk?”







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