When Q Ball, The 800lb Gorilla, fell in love with Hip Hop, it was during a period after He finally came to grips that Bruce Lee is not coming back, Richard Pryor was everywhere, The Star Wars Saga was revolutionizing cinema, Reaganomics was in the works, and a steady stream of New York City transplants invaded South Florida to soak in the sun year round. The time was approximately 1980 -1981 before He even knew it was called Hip Hop.
When He fell in love, the Fatback Band’s King Tim III was telling us to “catch the beat.” Then The Sugar Hill Gang showed us why because the beat is a Rapper’s Delight. The Treacherous Three encouraged that delightful joy and moved us to Feel the Heartbeat. The next thing Q Ball knew he was part of a movement, a culture, a family, a nation, a new world baptized as Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and The Soulsonic Force. He was experiencing the new movement called Hip Hop. It wasn’t just the sound, the style, or the art like it was at first. It wasn’t what He was doing with it either. It was when the sound, the style, the art and what He was doing in it peeled the layers off showing Hip Hop was already inside of him! It was life he was already living!
It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five delivered The Message and described his neighborhood as it was in song! It was a neighborhood where children would pull out old dirty mattresses and use them as trampolines amongst broken beer bottles. A neighborhood where his childhood friends would take discarded wooden palettes and used them as platforms to make a multilevel treehouse. It was a block where old abandonded cars and homes would be used as props for a game of cops and robbers. A communtiy where single moms and old people were selling candy and “freeze cups” from their door steps, and the streetside was a front row seat for watching junkies and cross-dressers roam up and down the block acting the fool.
Overall, it was a childhood experience stimulated by imagination and good people who practiced ingenuity by working with what they got and not what they don’t have. It was a jungle sometimes. This neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, Florida was dubbed Tater Town; named after a corner produce company between Broward and Sistrunk Blvds off NW 27th Avenue.
Childhood days turn to years while traveling through his adolescence, teens, twenties, and thirties… from Graff Writing, Lyricism, to producing tracks… living from jungle to jungle in South Florida to Atlanta and back again, Q Ball evolves into the 800lb Gorilla because the jungle became a small thing to a giant. And all that is Hip Hop remains his life and inspiration which is why he writes for Old School Scholar, and his objective is to give back and edify the World with what has been a blessing to Him from the True School bone marrow of Hip Hop culture.
