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Photo by Graham Cullen
Local grown hip-hop artist Jamaal "J-Mill" West poses for a photograph at Social Study on North Market Street. |
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Jamaal "J-Mill" West has been writing rhymes for 17 years and he has hundreds of full composition books to prove it, plus raps saved on his phone. But he just recently got serious about making music his career -- promoting, marketing, booking himself throughout the region and the Internet."I read in a book somewhere that if you have an idea that sticks with you, you gotta run with it," he said, sitting at Social Study in downtown Frederick . He's 33 -- 28 music age, he said. "I just decided to invest in myself ... and my royalties go up more and more, so I'm doing something right." As an eighth grader in Frederick , West started listening to 2Pac and Biggie, his earliest hip hop influences. It was these big name artists who inspired him to start writing his own raps, which were more like poetry, in the beginning, he said. They "made me want to pursue it as a career," he said. "They were young, fly -- it just did something to me. It made me want to follow that." He started recording himself, usually buying or leasing beats from people on the Internet, and released songs under his label, selling through Internet markets such as iTunes and Rhapsody. His song "Like Dat" is on the Rockstar Games video game Midnight Club Los Angeles. "I just got an e-mail one day," he said, smiling. Rockstar Games wanted his song. He's the only independent artist, that he knows of, featured on the game. He's up there with big timers like Naz. He said his plays on MySpace jumped from 50,000 to 400,000 a month after the game was released. After listening to snippets sent over e-mail, West bought the music online from a guy in Egypt for the song "Like Dat." A lot of times people create beats and look for hip hop artists or singers to buy them. "Most of them come that way," West said, "at the click of a button." West was born in Salisbury and moved with his family when he was three to Frederick , where he has lived ever since, graduating from Thomas Johnson High School. He has no desire to live in Baltimore or D.C., he said. Frederick is perfect -- an hour from each city. He's played in Baltimore at Sonar, the Belvedere and Five Seasons, among others, and in D.C. and Virginia. "For a while I was booking two or three shows a week," he said. "I got, like, 260,000 miles on my car." He's played Frederick a few times at Cafe 611 and Social Study. Only a handful of hip hop artists live in Frederick , that he knows of. "There's so much stuff to rap about," he said. "I try to mix it up. "To me, it's just entertainment," he said. "You can take the listener with you wherever you want to go. I call it a little mini-commercial. I don't think a song is any different than a movie." The listener will catch the usual references to other rappers who have come before J-Mill -- Pac, Slick Rick. He was mentioned in Ozone Magazine last month and is ready to release his next EP. He's already recorded it at Omega Studios in Rockville and is awaiting the last details to come together, like the album design and bar code. When he released "Certified Hustle" CD in early 2008, he gave copies to local businesses and handed them out to people at shows. Most of his music is sold online. The same goes for his book, which is a story in itself. West didn't realize he was writing a book when he began taking notes in high school to help him with his rap game. He tried finding a book that would help him fine tune his rapping style, but none existed. "Then I had a high moment," he said. "If I needed it, someone else might need it." Already having a lot of notes himself, he compiled them and, in 2000, self-published the book he was looking for, hoping other rappers would find it useful. "The Official How to Rap Manual" starts at the beginning -- Chapter One: Grammar -- and shares what West learned. He's sold about 400 copies throughout the country and to the U.K. and Canada. He released it as an e-book in 2004. Rick Edwards, vice president and director of marketing at Makaveli Branded, is West's business manager. West wrote the song "I Know," which features the rapper Grafh, who is "doing some pretty big things in the industry," he said. He's currently working on a song with Smash, a rapper from Baltimore whose song "Bit Too Much For Me" gets played on 92Q. In March, six of his songs will be featured and distributed on Coast to Coast Mixed Tapes by Lil Fats. West listens to T.I., Young Geezy, Jay-Z and 50 Cent these days, but his favorite era of rap is still "the Biggie era," as he called it. "It was just something new at the time." He works part time with the City of Frederick and just left a part-time job in Hagerstown so he could focus more on his music and get more shows. He'll perform three or four songs during the Masquerade Ball at Cafe 611. "This is what I do," he said. "When people ask me what I do, I tell them I'm a rapper." — — — www.myspace.com/therealjmill
How2rap.com
J-Mill.com
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