West Virginia Hip Hop Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Dapper Rappers Celebrate Homegrown Hip-Hop in Wheeling

West Virginia’s small but active hip-hop community is striving to normalize hip-hop as an art form. The YWCA in Wheeling recently held an event called Hip Hop: A Black Tie Affair to help bring legitimacy to the community in the Northern Panhandle.

Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, who was one of about 175 people in attendance, said this event aims to break the mold of what is considered typical for West Virginia.

“An event like this, doesn’t fit any stereotype of what you’d think you’d experience in West Virginia,” Elliot said.

The event combined local art based in hip-hop culture, a DJ who played old hip-hop samples on vinyl for the duration of the event, and a video with rappers from around the Ohio Valley reciting freestyle verses.

One of the rappers featured in the video is Chermayne Davis, or as she’s known in the hip-hop community “Mz. NewYork”. Davis was encouraged to see the crowd that came out to support homegrown hip-hop.

“It is a beautiful thing to tap into the different parts of Wheeling and the surrounding areas and get the love, and to feel that, to see it,” she said. “Everyone came out dipped in dapper, dressed to the nines for hip-hop.”

The classy dress code was intentional, said Ron Scott, the YMCA’s cultural diversity and community outreach director.

Scott, who also organized the event, said it was a way to bring something unexpected to the hip-hop celebration.

“The idea of blending elegance and hip-hop was big to me because I believe it gives it a level of maturity that I don’t believe hip hop has yet, but we’re getting there,” he said.

The night capped off with a hip-hop tradition: the cypher. This is where rappers pass the mic around, and freestyle over beats that they haven’t heard before in what’s kind of a friendly competition.

HipHopCypher.mp3

Listen to the cypher.

It requires a lot of skill to be able to publicly spit out coherent rhymes that tell a story or comment on a given scenario, under pressure, but Davis said for her, nothing could be more natural.

She said when she freestyles her mind is clear.

“Like hip hop is a part of me,” Davis explained. “It’s coming from, like, my heart, and I don’t want to sound mushy like a Care Bear, but it’s coming from inside of me.”

According to Nielsen ratings, in 2017, hip-hop became America’s most consumed music genre. Young people across the country and across West Virginia have taken up rapping as a hobby, and there’s quite a bit of talent in the region.

Yet, it remains an underground artform that’s poorly embraced by the larger community here — if at all. Scott said he hopes to change public perceptions with this event, and others like it.

“I love these artists,” he said. “I really love the work that they put into their craft. I like that I view it as a craft, as an art. So they have to get acknowledged for that, and if I don’t, I don’t know who else will.”

Q&A: Photography, Hip Hop and Making Art in the Ohio Valley

In addition to musical artists, a recent Wheeling event — Hip Hop: A Black Tie Affair — featured visual artists such as photographer Rebecca Kiger. Kiger photographed members of the hip hop community including the artist Joshua Lamar Pethtel — also known as Poetic Peth. Kiger and Pethtel sat down to talk about creating art in the Ohio Valley, and how a photographer and a rap artist collaborate.

problems__prod._by_beatsbyemani_.mp3

Poetic Peth – Problems (prod. by BeatsByEmani)

get_somethin___prod._by_rob_kelly_.mp3

Poetic Peth – Get Somethin' (prod. by Rob Kelly)

Rebecca Kiger: I really loved it because what I found in working with other artists is that there was synergy that’s different than working with people who aren’t used to creative flow basically. That’s something these guys are adept at, they’re really good at, except they do it with words.

Glynis Board: The resulting images — were they what you expected?

Joshua Lamar Pethtel: It exceeded my expectations to be honest with you. I thought I was just going to take a couple pics in like a suit and that was that, but we got this one cool image where I’m wearing some sort of cloth. It’s like around my face and there’s like these glowing red lights in front of me, and I’m hitting a jewel or whatever. And there’s like smoke everywhere. It definitely exceeded my expectations for sure. And it was an honor to be honest.

Rebecca Kiger: The reason it worked is because I felt like I was in a space to play. I mean, basically we just had to play and you were …

Joshua Lamar Pethtel: I was open to it!

Listen to hear the rest of this conversation between artists about realities of making art in the Ohio Valley.

Inside Appalachia Inspires English Principal's Trip to W.Va.

Our podcast “Inside Appalachia” inspired Matthew Shirley to take a trip to our region. This is a pretty cool fact by itself, made even cooler by where Matthew is from: England.

By pure chance, Matthew was staying as an Airbnb guest with our health reporter, Kara Lofton. Imagine her surprise when she found out why he came to West Virginia!

Matthew is a primary school principal in Callington, England. He became fascinated with our region after listening to the “Inside Appalachia” podcast. So he decided to come here to see it for himself.

When we found out, we invited Matthew to the station for a tour. He says there are many similarities between Appalachia and his region, Cornwall, the rugged southwestern tip of England (it’s where “Doc Martin” is filmed.)

English native Matthew Shirley in front of West Virginia Public Broadcasting HQ in Charleston

“Certainly, each episode of ‘Inside Appalachia’ reflects things I could think on for Cornwall itself,” he told WVPB’s Bob Powell.

“There’s a really good balance on ‘Inside Appalachia,’ Matthew said. “You sometimes get the heart-rending stories about things like the floods, but you also get the variety, stories about hip-hop in the hills, or discussing the murals on the backroads.

You never know what you’re going to get each week…I can remember the controversy over the Sheetz pepperoni roll, which quite amused me,” Matthew said.

He said he was also affected by episodes about people coming from out of state and “showing West Virginians in a bad light,” he said.

For every Matthew we find out about, I wonder how many people inspired by Mountain Stage or West Virginia Morning to come to West Virginia that we DON’T know about.

If Matthew’s story doesn’t prove our impact, I don’t know what could.

Southern West Virginia Festival Dubs Hip-Hop 'Legends'

This story is featured on an upcoming episode of Inside Appalachia focused on hip-hop culture throughout the region. To listen to this episode and others, subscribe to the podcast.

In southern West Virginia, The Movement Entertainment Group has hosted an awards ceremony for the past four years. It’s part of the DubV Fest, a weekend music festival like Floyd Fest, Clifftop or Bonnaroo. Only it’s held indoors, usually at a nightclub, and features mostly hip-hop artists from out of state.

It started about seven years ago, including performers like Hoobastank, Saliva, and DJ Unk. But it also supports local talent and even hosts an award ceremony for West Virginia artists. This summer will mark the 8th anniversary of the DubV Fest and fifth anniversary of the awards.

“The talent is so heavy in the hip hop world in West Virginia that you wouldn’t believe it,” said DubV Fest organizer and promoter Brian Reznor.

The awards include Artist of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Up and Comer of the Year, Best Single and Best Video. Some past winners of Artist of the Year include:

Ponce De Lion from Wheeling, West Virginia

FamZ from Princeton, West Virginia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9nCEdmm9dM

Last Year’s ‘Legend’: Jamie Smith from Beckley, West Virginia

The Legend Award honors those who have influenced the scene in West Virginia.

Rezner said it’s a sort of “hall of fame.” Back in the early 2000s, Jamie Smith was one of the only artists creating or producing hip-hop in the region.

“It was like Jamie inspired a culture that didn’t exist in this region before,” said Rezner.

Jamie worked as a hip-hop DJ, working on turntables and mixing sounds live–quite unlike what was once imagined of a radio disc jokey in years past.

Jamie had gained legendary status around the region for his work behind the turntables (also known as vinyl record players) and the award was meant to recognize his talent.

Jamie Smith grew up in a musical family. He started playing guitar at a young age.

From Guitar to Turntables and Beyond: Jamie’s Musical Evolution

Jamie’s music can be described as a hybrid of traditional Appalachian music with a hip-hop break beat. His father, who had played in a band himself, influenced Jamie’s love for music at young age.

Jamie taught himself how to play guitar, started a punk band and had his first gig at 13. He said music, of all sorts–bluegrass, gospel, classic rock–were a regular part of family gatherings

“When everybody is in a circle like that and they’re all on the same level,on the same page, on this tune. It inspires the same emotion in everybody that you’re sitting there enjoying that moment with. It’s just incredible,” Jamie said.

Playing in a circle with some of his family is still a part of his life.

Jamie and his friends started entertaining themselves in the small town by experimenting with electronic sounds with a hip-hop rhythm.

“We were producing it in my mom’s living room when I was in high school, making beats on crappy keyboards and using borrowed four-track tape recorders to produce singles and albums and stuff,” said Jamie. “We were emulating in a lot of ways the guys that we loved.”

“We were just doing it to be the dopest DJ and the dopest rapper around,” he said.

Jamie started putting out mixtapes under the label Illkenetics. A mixtape is basically taking mainstream music or produced music and putting your own style, blends and sounds in a compilation of music.

The music was gaining popularity in southern West Virginia and Jamie was pretty confident in his work–until he heard from this crew out of Morgantown led by Eric Jordan and artist 6’6″ 240. The crews eventually met up and wound up collaborating on Illkentics Mixtape: Volume 8.

Jamie usually worked with one of his childhood friends, Beckley native rapper that went by the name Nauseous, because as he said, “his lyrics made ya sick as in – you’d be sick with jealousy because his raps were so dope.

Jamie Smith Becomes DJ JLS

Then Jamie was robbed. Someone broke into his house and stole all of his production equipment including beat machines, samplers, a keyboard–everything–but the turntables and records.

“That’s really where the monster that became DJ JLS was born was out of this necessity of not having the stuff that I wanted to be doing,” said Jamie. “That wound up being I believe one of the most profitable adventures that I ever did, which happened completely out of accident.”

Jamie moved away to California with Nauseous and continued to work on music projects. He said California introduced him to a lot of musicians, producers and rappers and some of them produced what he considered good material. But a lot of them didn’t.

He said that there just weren’t as many standouts there as there were and stil are in West Virginia.

“Here it’s just condensed raw talent and everybody has the same you know everybody wants to get something off of their chest about the struggle here because it is a struggle here. It’s certainly not easy,” Jamie said.

He doesn’t work much as a DJ any more he’s still producing music as part of his company Kid in the Background. But now instead of making music with a crappy keyboard, he works in a professional studio. It’s not all hip-hop these days. His latest project is with Matt Mullins and the Bringdowns.