Rapping About a Lifetime of Pain

Paul had been shot in the side of his face, but the freckles of gunpowder on his cheeks were covered with makeup now, and so from certain angles he looked almost exactly the same to those who knew him: an 18-year-old kid with a wild spray of braids and a few thin brushstrokes of beard. The red bandana was missing, but otherwise he wore what he always wore in summertime, jeans and a polo. And his silence—that was typical, too. Paul never felt much like talking.

The talker was Matt, and he was talking now.

"Get up," Matt Talley remembers saying in August to his little brother, like they were in the foster home again, late for school. "Get up."

Paul stayed still. Matt turned away to face the crowd that stretched into the depths of the Phillips Funeral Home. All of Boone Street was there, and he recognized faces from the surrounding blocks in Harwood. The Bloods, too, were out in force, flaunting their bright red scarves and hats and carrying big bottles of Remy Martin that they'd later raise in toasts to their fallen member. Those who were there remember people crying and screaming and clutching each other. The mother of Paul's daughter fell to the floor and had to be carried outside into the mid-August heat. Someone got arrested. Grandma sat speechless through it all, dressed in black.

The eulogies began, and Matt felt his mouth fill with garbled words, a sound like wailing. The boy in that box was two years younger than he was but looked like his lighter-skinned twin. Together they'd hustled drugs, watched their parents die, and dreamed about riding in a limousine to somewhere that wasn't a funeral. Growing up they'd shared everything, from beds to basketball shoes.

They'd shared so much that when Matt rose from his folding chair to say a few words about his brother, it was like preaching over his own body. For a moment he couldn't speak. He felt consciousness waver.

But suddenly other guys from his group were standing beside him in front of the crowd. Matt began to rap:

Dear Paul, dear Paul

Why you had to go?

I'm still sitting here waiting for you at the door ...

They rapped for several minutes; the sobs in the room seemed loud enough to rip the roof off. Afterward everyone asked Matt how they could buy a copy.

And so it was, at his brother's funeral, Matt delivered a Boone Street hit.

For months afterward, the sound of Matt's words echoed through the neighborhood as car stereos and boom boxes played "Dear Paul." Maybe music could get him out of this life, Matt remembers thinking. Maybe he and Paul shared a past, but they didn't have to share the same fate.

Life on Boone Street

Michelle Blue remembers growing up on the 2600 block of Boone St., a few houses down from her grandmother and her great-grandmother, in a community of several dozen rowhomes off Greenmount Avenue. That was the 1980s, when mothers, she said, still scrubbed their front steps obsessively and fathers came home for dinner. On summer nights, people sat outside together as the teenagers harmonized on the corner, slapping a beat on their chests.

Now, the soundtrack is sirens. Drug dealers lurk on the corner in the summertime; 9-year-olds hop-skip through gang dances. And Matt Talley lives in the house where Blue spent her childhood.

Blue, now 33, met Matt and his little brother Paul when she moved back to Boone Street in 2001. Orphans in their mid-teens, they'd come from about six blocks away to live with their grandmother. Paul was the quiet one, mechanically inclined, dismembering his bicycle in the street, still a child and very sweet, though a little too handy with a can of spray paint. He slept in the basement room that had once been Blue's. Matt was older, angrier, and not always around because he fought with his grandmother. Once Blue had seen him sitting in the sun, holding a photograph of his dead mother.

"They had it hard," she remembers. "So hard."

Blue wanted to help the kids of Boone Street, and the first step, she decided, was to clean up the place. As she dragged trash bags down the sidewalk, children rallied around her, showing up unasked to plant flowers or build benches. "You don't have to live in Beverly Hills to treat it like Beverly Hills," she told them.

After being back home about nine months, Blue plunked down $40 to found Follow Your Dreams, an arts-oriented youth center. It was based in a weedy yard at the end of the block and fueled largely by the proceeds from bake sales, but the kids had a place, at least on sunny days, to express themselves, to shake off the sadness of their home lives, to dance and sing. She watched their faces as she played their performances back for them on videotape.

"Once they hear themselves, it just opens doors," she said. "They think, 'If I can hear myself, other people can hear me, and maybe I can make it. They get to say what they want to say, and that's what voice is."

The first major Follow Your Dreams activity was a talent show. And that's when Matt, then about 17, came around.

He performed twice, a dance and a rap. And when he learned that Blue had been away trying to break in as an agent in the music business, that she'd been to a Diddy party and had her picture taken with Bobby Brown, that she'd lived in Brooklyn and near L.A., he started hanging out all the time, asking questions.

It didn't matter to him that Blue's dream "flopped," as she puts it, that she'd ended up back on Boone Street, practically broke. Nothing that she said about the music business frightened Matt. He was a rapper, he told her, and he was going to make it.

Last year when—bolstered by grant money—Follow Your Dreams finally found a home in a vacant Boone Street rowhouse and began offering workshops in digital photography and video editing, Matt was a near-constant presence—"the Lil' Bow Wow of Boone Street," he occasionally called himself.

At the same time, Paul, who was then about 17, was becoming known in the neighborhood for driving a red Ford Taurus and a Lincoln Town Car with televisions in it, and having money that he liked to hand out.

Blue worried for him. But for Matt, she had high hopes. As violent as some rap music could be—and the lyrics Matt wrote were not G-rated—it had steadied the young man for five years.

And his songs were improving. Along with several other talented kids, he'd started a rap group called SOT—Straight Off Top. They'd begun recording in a basement studio across town, layering their rhymes over computer-generated beats. Blue sometimes sat in on their late-night sessions, listening.

She was there on the evening of Aug. 7, when Paul was killed.

Natural Poet

Maybe Matt Talley became a rapper the night his mother's death chant made a beat in his head:

Lord-take-the-pain-away-Lord-take-the-pain-away.

He was 13. She was dying of AIDS.

He and Paul spent those days cooking her soup and staying up all night to pop in Disney movies, anything to make her smile in the bed upstairs.

Yet even before his mother's agony became a rhythm in him, language was Matt's gift. In elementary school, he'd been chosen to perform in a poetry recitation, a point of pride for years. "I didn't win," he remembered. "They had to take me off stage. Tears everywhere."

As a teenager, he started reading poetry on his own: Maya Angelou. Langston Hughes. To him, there wasn't much difference between their verses and the hip-hop anthems young men spit while walking the streets, or standing in the tight huddles called ciphers, where rappers go "straight off top," free-styling.

"Poetry ain't nothing but rap slowed down, something that's rhymed, that's said with expression, and just feels good," Matt decided.

Today the only book he owns is a volume of Tupac Shakur's poetry, The Rose that Grew from Concrete.

Matt first tried to join a rap group when he was 15, the year his HIV-positive father, whom he'd been seeing more of, died. He was writing a lot, sometimes twice a day. He rapped about what he didn't know: gold chains and diamonds, killing people, pretty groupies who'd do anything for him.

He also rapped about what he did know, and what Paul knew, which was misery.

"When something devastating happens, you just write it down," he said.

The devastation began with Matt's earliest memories, when he, Paul and their mother, a heroin addict, went to live with a man who sold her children's Christmas presents for drugs. His words stayed in Matt's head: "I'll blow your brains out in front of your kids!" he screamed one night, after bath time and before bed, his gun shoved in her mouth. Sometimes he took the two little boys down to the basement and strapped boxing gloves on both of them. "Fight," he commanded.

And they did. Matt was older, so Paul always ended up with the black eye or the busted lip. Later, when they were back up in their bedroom, Matt swore to his brother that he'd never hurt him again.

"Paul never said anything," Matt remembered. "He never talked about it. He didn't know how to."

When Matt was about 10, someone called the police, and men in suits stuffed the boys' clothes into trash bags and drove them to a foster home. They stayed for a year, until their grandmother came to pick them up.

As teenagers, because their grandmother didn't have anywhere near enough money, the brothers started dealing together—crack, dope, needles: the stuff that destroyed their parents, he said.

"We changed," Matt said. "We wasn't always that way, but we couldn't understand why all the worst stuff happened to us. We thought we might as well be bad too."

One night, the year Matt turned 18, the brothers got picked up for dealing cocaine. Paul, still a juvenile, was back on Boone Street in a few hours, but Matt spent a night in a cell with a fidgety junkie, thinking about the music he might never get to make.

My life is worth more, he remembers thinking.

He quit dealing the next day, he said. To make money, he lifted boxes in warehouses and hosed down animal cages in a Johns Hopkins laboratory. He and other members of Straight Off Top spent their free time at the basement studio, where the owner—who thought they had potential—let them record for free. Matt holed up there like it was a bomb shelter.

Because Paul was still selling drugs, the brothers spent days apart for almost the first time in their lives. Sometimes Matt got jealous of his brother's new friends, with whom he stayed out all night: "He was getting closer to the dudes on the street and shying away from me."

Then one morning last year after they'd both slept at their grandmother's, Matt came downstairs and saw the red bandanna sticking out of the pocket of his brother's jeans.

"And I knew," he said.

The record skips

When I first heard the news that you was shot

I was in the studio, my heart damn near stopped.

The studio is in Ashburton, in the finished basement beneath a white house with a neat green lawn and a black Benz truck parked in the driveway. When they have an idea for a song, Matt and the other SOT members stay up all night writing, then recording in a soundproof bathroom rigged with a microphone. The reward is listening to their voices reverberate through 1,000-watt speakers.

It was Michelle Blue's cell phone that rang that summer night.

"Slow down, slow down," Matt heard her saying.

Then: "Matt, we gotta go. Paul's been shot."

Matt ran from the room.

Paul was killed in his Taurus in a parking lot a few blocks from Boone Street. Someone, who may have been sitting beside Paul in the passenger seat, fired twice into his head, although there was so much blood that witnesses thought he'd also been shot in the chest.

The gunfire had echoed through the neighborhood, but in a way it was a quiet death for a quiet boy. A neighborhood kid remembers that a football game nearby continued, and that old folks on the street barely looked up until the ambulances arrived.

But later that night, when Matt returned from the hospital, Boone Street erupted in graffiti, and rage. He and the rest of SOT spray-painted Paul's name on walls and curbs and the trunk of the tree that shaded the spot where he died. Matt drank, cursed and wept.

For two days, Blue watched his grieving anxiously. Matt was talking about retaliation.

But, on the third day after the killing, Matt lay down on the floor of his living room. "I got the hook into my head in like two seconds," he said. Then he wrote a whole song. Later that day he drove to the studio to record "Dear Paul," which SOT performed at the funeral:

Going through my mind all I seen was you.

Then the doctors come and said they did all they could do.

That's when I realized life wouldn't be the same.

And it just adds on to a lifetime of pain.

And to my best friend: I love you man

I just want you to know—your life didn't go in vain.

After Paul's death, "there was so much that Matt could have done," Blue said. "But he went into the studio. He made a song. This music is what's keeping him alive. Do you understand what I'm saying? He wrote a song."

Hip-hop dreams

In December, Michelle Blue received nearly $50,000 from philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute to fund a community recording studio at Follow Your Dreams.

The studio has microphones, a drum machine and a computer that Blue plans to upgrade soon. On the walls are portraits of 50 Cent and Eminem. But ultimately, Blue isn't hoping for a legion of hip-hop moguls.

"We're not trying to make rappers here," she said. "Rappers in the 'hood come a dime a dozen, but big rappers are as rare as basketball stars."

That's why the kids must take weeks of classes on hip-hop history, theory and the business of music before recording a word. When the subject of professional skills comes up, she passes out lists of colleges with relevant coursework. Blue is looking for potential communications majors and sound engineers among the dozen or so teenagers who show up each week in sunglasses and skull caps.

"With most of these kids, hip-hop is just my way in," she said.

Maybe not with Matt, though. He turned 21 this winter but remains fixated on rap stardom. Over the winter his career got a boost when 92Q, a Baltimore radio station, started playing an SOT song called "Sippin'"; it was also played in April. But a record deal that the group said they were negotiating fell through recently, and since then Matt hasn't been recording as much.

Now he's working at a clothing store on Greenmount Avenue. He sells spray-painted T-shirts that say "Murdaland," and also cell phone ring tones, some of them clips from his own recordings. "Dear Paul" is one of the options. So is "Revenge," a song Matt wrote about five months after the funeral. It's a fantasy about gunning down Paul's killer, whom the police still haven't found.

Sometimes, when Matt tires of the chaos of his rowhouse on Boone Street—the mice droppings in the living room carpet, the overflowing garbage cans in the kitchen and the eerie absence of his grandmother, who is now dying of a brain tumor in a nursing home—he walks down the stairs to the basement, to Paul's room.

It has the air of a tomb, with its exposed brick archways, shadowy corners, and absolute silence. The walls are spray-painted with the letters "R.I.P.," and there's a poster from the movie Scarface. "Me, I want what's coming to me," it says. The stereo with huge speakers next to the bed is usually on, even though there's nothing playing. Paul bought it proudly with drug money, and he used to blast the hardest gangsta rap, although sometimes Matt would catch him listening to Toni Braxton or the Temptations turned way down low. Paul thought the world of Matt's music. "You can get us out of here," he used to say. And now the lights glowing on the stereo are like his brother's muted presence.

Copyright © 2006, Baltimore Sun