ride
But getting to this point was not a simple or quick journey for Sekou. It was the path you might imagine it would be—bumpy, messy to navigate, and a lot longer that he first thought. In fact, the journey he thought he was taking when he first held a microphone was to be the next big hip-hop artist.
“If I think about this journey, I didn’t set out to be about poetic voice. This was not what I was planning on doing,” Sekou admits as he looks around the empty conference room. “I was going to the open mics as [a hip-hop] artist.” He laughs as he begins to tell the story of a young man fresh out of college who was writing his own music, being rejected by record labels and feeling an obligation to earn a reluctant living as a law office clerk and part-time substitute teacher.
To really appreciate the way Sekou locks onto his personal perspective, it’s important to check in to his earliest days of the journey. Growing up, his parents were an eclectic combination of art and science and instilled a pride in his skin color and heritage. While they split up early on in his life, they both spent quality time shaping his character to be responsible, embody a sense of adventure and be accountable while showing an appreciation for his gifts.
“With both Mom and Dad being educators and artists, I got to see both sides of the equation,” Sekou admits. “They stressed the arts and liberal side, but also instilled a work ethic and appreciation for formal education. If you think about my business and my work, it’s a hybrid of education, artistry, and entrepreneurship.”
The end result was an appreciation for the artistry, the entrepreneurship, the education and his heritage. “Because all that was inside my parents, it was natural that it would be nurtured in me.” It was also clear that he received a healthy dose of drive, passion and willingness to take risks. Both in high school and college there was an equal emphasis put on the arts and a more traditional education.
After high school Sekou landed at Pitzer College, a private liberal arts college in southern California. While he declared a pre-law track, he was attracted by the opportunities to act and focus on his music talents during non-class hours. “I created a play that focused on race relations that was really popular. I had this breadth of experience that really crossed through education, entrepreneurship and artistry.”
Teaching himself to survive
With his college diploma in hand, Sekou put on a shirt and tie and began clerking at a law firm by day while continuing to write songs and look to be “discovered” by night. “I was just sort of testing out the law thing while I was really focusing on my music. The only reason I was working at the law firm was because I thought I needed a “real job.” I kept reading these articles about starving artists striking it big after living on their friend’s couch for a year, and I began to think I was screwing myself by having a job.”
His tough mentality and fend-for-yourself upbringing would not allow him to just quit his job. “For me, it was very much about being a grown man. I wanted to pay my bills, to be responsible. I did not want to go begging and be so desperate. But I was afraid of being seduced by the comfort, and the complacency, of a full-time job.”
Still, the law firm job was not working out so well. Filing papers all day and seeing the practice of law was depressing. Luckily, his family’s love of teaching kicked in. With a mother, father and aunt all in the education profession, he saw teaching as something more noble and much more palatable. Within a few days of looking, he was offered an opportunity to substitute teach and immediately knew it was a lot better for him than filing motions in a law office.
The risk he saw was the possibility that teaching could easily derail him from his dream of becoming a recording artist. “I remember the very first day I started substitute teaching, and I made a vow to myself that I would not allow myself to become a full-time teacher.”
As much as he promised himself that it wouldn’t happen, it was only six months before he was offered a job as a “long-term replacement.” He tried to rationalize that it was still temporary, but after six months that job description changed to permanent teacher. A job he was still working four years later.
Hip-hop convergence
For those years, he attempted to work days at the school and write his music and get gigs in the evening. Several events happened during those years that triggered a convergence of sorts. First, record labels were routinely rejecting his submissions as quickly as he could turn them in. But they were very nice about it. “All of the label executives were encouraging my unique style, saying they loved my lyrics and that it moved them, but it wasn’t something they could sell. It wasn’t angry enough,” he says with a laugh.
The second key event happened by fate one night at an open mic night. Sekou, on the spur of the moment, decided to deliver his lyrics without music and without the typical hip-hop beat. He took a risk and delivered it spoken-word style, mostly out of frustration.
I decided to free myself
“The tragedy of what was being done at the time is that I was putting all this time into crafting these words. I was being told the words were awesome, but people couldn’t catch ‘em because I was so focused on the cadence. I just decided to free myself from the beat. Free myself from the cadence. When you have the beat, you gotta stay locked in. That’s hip-hop. But now I didn’t have a beat, I just freed the words and delivered them more like a poem.”
His new approach caught on very quickly. “I liked not having to worry about the beat and the hook, and the remix, and the music politics, and I was just talking about something that resonated with folks. And people just started coming up to me saying the same thing these record labels execs were saying—that they loved the words and the message.”
Sekou began rising in the LA scene, but was still holding on to the safety net of his teaching job and the salary it provided. “I was really struggling internally, because I knew that I just couldn’t be a career teacher. But I also felt that these kids needed my 110% and I felt like I was a good teacher, and I was making a difference.” But he was adamant that he would not become one of those tenured teachers who were robotically handing out worksheets, grading papers and talking on the phone all day. “I had both factors colliding at this point and I kept looking in the mirror asking myself, ‘What’s stopping you?’”
“I knew when the voice inside me kept yelling, ‘What are you waiting for?’,” Sekou told himself, “either you’re gonna jump off or you’re not. So, I put on the blindfolds, strapped on my wings and said, ‘Let’s go.’” He formed his own record label called Blind Faith Records, and mustered up the courage to quit his teaching job.
The next steps were quick ones. After quitting his teaching job, he took his tax return check and what little savings he had, and upgraded a home recording studio so he could record and cut his first CD. “You reach that point that you’re just out of excuses. You have to operate off of pure faith. I just began saying, ‘I’m gonna make it. I’m done talking. I’m fresh. I’m good. It’s all or nothing.’”
Ahhhhh… freak out!
His master plan was to stage a big show of his new material, and after the show sell the newly minted CDs that he’d invested his life savings in pressing. The only problem was that the CDs did not show up on the morning of the show. “I’m freaking out. It was the day of the show, and they still don’t have them done. I was literally watching my whole dream go up in that moment.” Luckily, he got a call in the early afternoon that they were ready, but he’d have to drive an hour to pick them up and an hour
