Healing With Hip-Hop

A few stories above Lake Street on a recent Friday night, Adam Levin leans over a social worker's desk and selects a few tracks to play over the desktop computer's speakers.

Like a cloud, the music is released into the room, and the teenagers sitting on the office's long sofa relax and begin to listen. Heads nod. Toes tap.

It's among the first sessions of the Organic Beat Market, the co-creation of Levin and Chicago producer Troy Brundidge.

Levin quizzes the teens, prodding for answers about the raw content Brother Ali's track Room with a View — "we don't have Bar Mitzvahs/we become men the first time our father hits us."

Levin, 22, has been deeply involved with spoken word poetry for almost a decade. A 2007 graduate of Oak Park-River Forest High School, Levin is a Young Chicago Authors "teaching artist" who's led workshops across the city and helped organize that group's Louder Than a Bomb spoken word competition. He performs under the name Defcee.

Brundidge, 24, is a producer and DJ who led Beats and Rhymes, a radio show broadcasting to the University of Illinois. He's now a behind-the-scenes producer and occassional DJ for the Hip-Hop Project on 88.7 Chicago's WLUW-FM, working under the name Sev Seveer.

Both say hip-hop unequivocally changed their lives for the better.

In learning to write lyrics, Levin said he learned to grow into himself. He started gaining confidence, looking people in the eye. Brundidge grew up in a musical household, later introduced to hip-hop through a video game soundtrack.

"From then on, it became an infection," leading to an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre's origins and evolution, he said.

Their collaboration in this Oak Park office building began as an experiment: Can hip-hop heal?

Baby G thinks so.

The adopted son of a single mother, Baby G started partying when he was "damn near 8 or 9 years old." He gained a reputation for his impulsive antics, including an incident in middle school where he was caught in a sexual act with a girl.

That was about five years ago, about the same time he began counseling with Jerome Damasco, a former alternative school principal with his own private practice in Oak Park. Damasco had been trying to set up a project, a sort of offshoot of the teen mentoring programs he'd seen succeed.

So Damasco sent Baby G and another one of his teenage clients, AB, to Levin and Brundidge in the summer of 2011 for the first sessions of what would become the Organic Beat Market.

Those lessons started with a loose mix of exercises in lyricism and lessons in hip-hop history. They evolved into intense, therapeutic writing workshops. Levin and Brundidge then gave the students a goal to create a project.

The result is the stunning five-track EP, The Promise, available for download on iTunes. Backed by Brundidge's beats, the songs are as every bit provocative as the experiences from which they were inspired. Baby G's solo, Thousands of Words, is a rapid-fire portrait of a troubled teen struggling to do good. Another track, Oak Park, cuts to the realities of life in the near west suburb, with its economic and racial diversity.

Damasco paid for the professional studio time.

"The only thing I could ever wish is for two high-risk kids to hopefully see themselves in a different light and maybe, just maybe, it would evolve into something positive," Damasco said. "Who would've thought it would turn into this?"

Brundidge and Levin are currently with their second crop of students. During one recent session, Levin put on a special playlist and asked the teens to start writing.

"Write a poem. Write an essay. Write anything," he said.

The exercise, he said, "not only gives us a sense of who the kids are, it gives the kids a chance to express themselves in a way maybe they hadn't before."

Sharing their work out loud is optional, but Organic Beat Market's students mostly take advantage of the time to get things off their chest.

"I think it allows them to be heard," said Peter Kahn, an English teacher at OPRF, leader of the school's acclaimed Spoken Word Club and Levin's mentor. "A lot of teens don't feel like they are heard, particularly for the kids going through things, it can be cathartic to say things and say them in public."

Just outside the office door, Brundidge is preparing a session on music production. He's disassembling "stems," or parts of songs, from the likes of Sam and Dave and Diamond D. The students will learn to put them back together.

Teaching these tricks of the hip-hop trade won't pave the way to fame and fortune. Levin and Brundidge are careful to tell potential students, and their parents, that the $25 an hour they'll pay for the Organic Beat Market isn't about churning out young hip-hop stars.

"One thing missing from modern hip-hop," Brundidge said, "is that it's no longer used as a vehicle to spread knowledge. It's being used as a vehicle to be successful, not to do well in school or get a steady job.

"And so the Organic Beat Market in my head, ideally, is a place where young people who enjoy hip-hop are going to get together and be surrounded in it and in the process learn about things that don’t have anything to do with hip-hop."

For Levin, a tall white kid who grew up in River Forest loving hip-hop, he sees the potential in providing outsiders a platform for expression.

"Gimme any kid yo, any kid show that wants to pursue something and give them them the space to pursue it, and you're going to seem them do it so well."

Now 17 years old with good grades and a nearly sterling discipline record, Baby G is headed to a big midwestern university. Inspired by Damasco, he's planning to major in psychology and minor in business. He wants start a spoken word or writing club, or maybe try out for the school's gymnastics team.

Here inside his office, Damasco interjects.

"That's a happy problem to have!" he said, beaming.

But first, Baby G has to deal with other things. With prom. With his past and future. With not caving into those pressures from the hard-partying high school jocks who used to berate him in grade school.

"Any good poetry or rap is about experience," he said. "Thankfully in my life I've got a lot of stuff to talk about."

Editor's note: Levin and Brundidge requested anonymity for the Organic Beat Market's teenage participants .