Self Discovery

Editorial By: Stuart Clark 2.21.22

 “Euphoria Lane”: The Starving Artist, the Witch and the Phoenix

“Have em hooked like Rue to euphoria/Gatsby throw a party just hoping that baby notice us…”

I was told to write a peace, no-an article. Yes, I see the way I wrote that this is the juxtapose. Pay attention. Music is for the sad man and the path of the artist leaves you starving. I have to say that I'm not eating 100 dollar plates nor am I starving, so I'm a float. I feel that the saying can be a double entendre. I am always hungry. Looking for the next idea. That next spark. I feel the best artist truly never finds it. They search till the afterlife. Making new and exciting additions into the world as they go. I’ve loved cartoons since I was a kid. Even more than comic books. I loved the art of key animation, especially in anime. Let’s take it back. Back to 1999. It’s my 10th birthday and my mother gives me money and says, “Pick out your own gifts this year!” I’m hyped. We go to the video game store and the record store. I picked up Lil Wayne’s debut album “The Block is Hot” from the record store. I already knew I was looking at a legend. It was this feeling, some call it intuition while others laughed at me. That day I also picked up this random Japanese role playing game called “Thousand Arms”. Blasting Tunechi (Lil Wayne’s nickname) while watching the cut-scenes from the game, which looked like fluid fight scenes from a real anime show, it was the smoothest thing I've ever seen. Not knowing I grandfathered the concept “Anime & Music'' better yet “Anime & hip-hop” all while just being myself. Mixing the two worlds I have had many visions of smooth ballads with martial arts in the background or symphonies with a kick and snare with a repeated closed hi hat meshing seamlessly in harmony. These days that world is more of a reality all over the place than just my imagination. Pioneering can be a path unseen and not all heroes wear capes. Being a kid it was more listening to rap while drawing. I freestyle’d with my brother and friends, made a bunch of nerdy punchlines like any other African American kid of my era, but the game changed for me when I started writing lyrics with the same passion and upkeep as my drawing. Those days didn’t begin until my early twenties. The birth of “Euphoria Lane”. Norco pharmaceutical raps mixed with Naruto references. No one in the world was doing it in 2011. Anime, LSD, and p*ssy. Young, sex, drugs and rock & roll kind of lifestyle created a bond, a friendship and a future.

 I wasn’t ready for reality. I wasn’t ready for it to hit. I thought I was. I'm 23 and I’ve graduated to an age where if I want to go to college, well damn, that's what I'm gonna do!! So I did. I packed up my one suitcase, full of everything I owned, and went to “The Art Institute of Minneapolis.” Little did I know that a degree wasn’t at the end of my journey there but something even bigger. A child. A beautiful Polish Black American girl was made September 17th of 2013. Me being 23 I felt like Michael [Jordan] in his prime. I felt this feeling everyday. So when school got too expensive and I had to drop out unfortunately. But I had an absolute priority. My baby girl. It was time to make real life decisions and not just coast on a dream. The more the reality of being a father set in, the more I feared my future as an artist. A future being myself. To exist in my new world I had to give up everything that made me an artist. Or at least at the moment it felt I had to give it up. The more that feeling dug in; the less I was myself. This was the beginning of my downward spiral into depression. Which is a feeling every good artist goes through. You can’t know light without darkness. It took years to understand this concept. So in the beginning I just felt my life was going to shit because I was shit. I was a victim of my terrible decisions to move in with the mother of my child’s family, I was a victim of poverty. I was a victim to my own insecurities. IN THIS is where the phoenix appeared…Read More