As the hour approaches, I gather my thoughts and escape to a room with the bare necessities. I transform. I enter the zone.
I stare at blank walls until they become movie screens giving me a front-row seat to the world.
Until the Earths high pitch sound multiplies in my ears only muffled by my thoughts. My mind superseding body I force my life to flash before my eyes again and again. Before I know it, Im somewhere between conscious and subconscious. My universal awareness heightens.
Seeing vicariously through everyones eyes. I can astral project to any place, any time. Past, present, and future. Imagination challenges my reality. Creative juices start to take over. Try to tap into that divine universal source of knowledge until my art speaks as many languages as possible. Try to broaden my horizons and in return achieve omnipresence.
Then finally it hits me. The original idea.
Im focused.
I hear the same questions all the time. Whats it mean to be a writer? A rapper? A lyricist? Where do I go in my mind to create the perfect rhyme? What energy do I channel to move an audience? To manipulate syllables into syncopated flow and paint a story with words and music? How do I get someone to stop a record, rewind, replay, and rethink everything they thought they heard the first time?
What made me sit down thirty years ago and say, My name is Rakim Allah, and Im about to flip the whole script?
My writing starts in an empty room. It doesnt really matter where because I have written everywhere. Its just me and Four White Walls. Maybe one that just has some paint peeling in a corner of the ceiling or maybe one that has a window that looks out over the lights of a great city with those million stories bouncing through the streets. It can be a studio, a hotel, or the back of a bus. Probably they arent even white, but when I sit down, in my mind, its four walls that are as blank as the notebook Im staring down at.
It has to start with dead silence. I have to turn off that mornings music and distance myself from the distractions of lifes cacophony. No phones, no kids, no entourage or onlookers. I need to completely tune out so I can start to tune in.
I focus on my purpose. Thats what has brought me into this room and thats what will guide me now that Im here. I dig back into the bag of observations and experiences that inspire me and start to craft a storyline. I inject the spirituality that gives so much of that inspiration a greater sense of place and remember that my Self, my listeners, and my culture expect and deserve more than simplicity. They deserve a conscious message delivered through a thoughtful collection of ideas that are more than the words on the page.
And thats when I start to hear it.
Just a pitch or a tone... a buzzing energy emanating from origins beyond each of us individually but encompassing all of us universally. The energy takes a frequency, and the frequency forms into an idea. That idea takes inspiration from everything Ive learned and observed, and blends it with awareness of my self and my artistry. And it breaks the silence with music thats blended with memories and molded into something original.
My pen starts to flow. The lines in my notebook fill up and spill over to paint pictures on the white walls around me. The rhymes come from anywhere. They come from everywhere. I might have a story in mind that unfolds step by step or I might just know the end and have to work my way back. I could start with one bar or one phrase or even one word and circle around that, guided by the frequency, until the track takes full form. I draw from my knowledge and add the tricks of my technique to slip in messages that range from subtle to unavoidable. I wrap around wordplay and push boundaries of form.
I stay focused on my intentions. Make something original. Outdo what Ive already done. Write something to force the conscious listener to think, the music lover to clap, and every other rapper to turn their head and say, Damn. I want to build monuments of monologue that stand the test of time.
To guide artists and non-creatives alike through these revelations, Ive channeled my reflections into 5 Pillars of Creativity: Purpose, Inspiration, Spirituality, Consciousness, and Energy.
This is who I am and this is how I do it.
I was born in Wyandanch, New York, about an hour outside of New York City in Suffolk County, Long Island. At four and a half square miles with around eleven thousand residents at any given time, Wyandanch isnt even a town. Its a hamlet, one of seven that make up the larger town of Babylon, but if you lived in Wyandanch, thats what you identified with. Wyandanch didnt have a bunch of big buildings; it didnt have any projects. It was pretty much a bunch of single-family houses built in the 1950s, studded with fruit trees in peoples perfectly manicured yards branching out from Wyandanch Park, Carver Park (named after George Washington Carver), and Lincoln Park. The main strip was called Straight Path, and it was filled with your typical barbershops, tailors, hardware stores, and food spots. At night, thats where the little social clubs and bars would light up, and its where the dealers and the hustlers would come out of the shadows.
My neighborhood wasnt rich, but it never felt poor. And it was predominantly Black. In the 40s and 50s, Long Island had a lot of communitiesLevittown, about twelve miles west, being the most historically famousthat didnt allow ownership by Black families. The developers would prohibit non-white occupants right in their contracts, so when a real estate agent would advertise a community as interracial, thats where the Blacks would buy... and only the Blacks. Wyandanch definitely had a working-class community, but because of that openness in a sea of segregation, you also had lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, teachers, and all sorts of professionals with dreams of financial independence. In a place like that, everyone knows almost everyone, and if you dont know them directly, you know their brother or their sister or their cousin. Its one of those places where a kid can get raised by the village. And its where my parents settled and decided to start their family.
A few years earlier, Cynthia Harewood saw a man across the room in a nightclub and told her girlfriends she was going to marry him before she even knew his name. Willie Griffin, his legal name, fell in love with her as well, and they would go on to spend over thirty years together as husband and wife and mother and father. I was the youngest of their five children, after Ronald, Robyn, Steven, and Stephanie, but people always called me an old soul. Maybe that was because I was always running around going to parties with my older brothers and sisters... maybe it was the whiskers I developed a lot younger than most. Maybe, and Im not proud of this, it was getting my first gun charge at age twelve or, and this I am proud of, not backing down from anyone who would challenge me or my family down on the strip that I was definitely too young to be hanging on.
But I like to think my tendency toward maturity was a little more destined. I was conceived during the urban riots of the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and born on January 28, 1968, three months before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My mother heardand, by extension, I believe I heardthe words of Dr. King while I was still in the womb, and that sparked a connection to the man that resonates with me still. My parents thought about naming me Willie, after my father, so I was almost a junior. At the last minute my father said no. I dont want him to be a junior. I want him to be his own man.