For rappers in Knoxville, a new album or mixtape—no matter how good it is—is never quite enough. Making music is one thing; getting it heard is another. The city has never been as supportive of aspiring rappers and hip-hop producers and DJs as it has been of rock bands.
“One thing I’ll say about hip-hop in Knoxville is that it’s definitely here, but a lot of people are stuck in their basements or bedrooms,” says Jarius Bush, a veteran of the local scene who founded the on-hiatus hip-hop/rock hybrid group the Theorizt and is set to appear at the Rhythm N’ Blooms Festival this weekend. (He performs and records as J-Bush.) “The biggest block for the community knowing more about it is the lack of venues and that artists don’t know how to book shows. But it’s definitely here and I see it really growing.”
Bush, 28, hopes that his late-night appearance at the Americana- and indie folk-heavy Rhythm N’ Blooms on Friday night is a small step forward not just for himself but also for the local hip-hop community in general. Bush and a small group of like-minded local hip-hop veterans—like DJ Wigs, Black Atticus, Mr. Kobayashi, and a handful of others—are currently working together as the Good Guy Collective to establish an infrastructure and build some shared creative momentum. Members of the collective took part last week in the Big Ears festival’s small program of spoken-word performances.
“We support each other with equipment and we have a space to record our music,” Bush says. “It’s sort of like a record label but also just artists supporting each other. … I see us being a support unit for other artists in the community, helping artists get out in the city and touring, spreading our message.”
Bush is bringing at least a few of his Good Guy colleagues to Rhythm N’ Blooms. DJ Wigs will be providing beats for the performance, and rappers Black Atticus and Mista will also be on stage. They’ll be playing songs from Bush’s solo mixtape Visions—a collection of positive ’90s-era throwback hip-hop in the style of A Tribe Called Quest, Black Star, and Nas that Bush released in November—and tracks from an ambitious concept album he’s working on called Dreams of the Limelight.
“I’ve been working on it for the last five years, and I’m still writing it,” he says. “It’s all about the whole idea of what the limelight is and having a dream to be in the limelight, but it’s also about identifying what that means to me—and it’s morphing over time, what that means.
“The whole album is going to be inside a dream. It’ll be produced so it’s like going through your subconscious. I’m a big fan of Inception and The Matrix, so I’m finding ways to make it sound like it’s really a dream.”
Bush’s dreams are big—he’s inspired by self-help and positive-thinking books that promote self-realization and other methods of unlocking personal potential. That’s the source of Visions, which was the result of a particular self-improvement project last year.
“I made a vow to make music a bigger part of my life,” Bush says. “The biggest hindrance in getting where I want to go with my music is my lack of belief. I gave myself the task to create a vision board to visualize what you want to see in your life—hence the album title. So it’s what I want to see in my life and I’m writing rhymes about it.” (The track titles on the mixtape run together to form a kind of mission statement, and the cover artwork is a collage of images from the vision board—a notice to “create your dream” alongside images of the New York skyline and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.)
As he’s worked on Dreams of the Limelight over the last five years, Bush says, his own dreams have changed.
“There’s a sense of disbelief because we haven’t seen local artists have success,” he says. “We’ve seen it with the Dirty Guv’nahs but you just haven’t seen it in this style of music. There’s an ingrained disbelief in a lot of us. But there’s room to build here. I thought for a long time that I need to get signed so someone would carry me to success. One of the biggest myths I hear out here is that there’s nothing in Knoxville—if you want to make it in rap you can’t be in Knoxville. But that’s something I don’t necessarily believe. And making it is all relative. It means what you think it means.”
J-Bush performs at Pilot Light on Friday at 12:15 a.m. as part of the Dogwood Arts Festival’s Rhythm N’ Blooms music fest. For a full lineup and schedule and ticket info, visit the RN’B website.
Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.
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