Todd Bangz samples a beat. As the loop repeats and he begins to
fall into its groove, Bangz tweaks it, goosing the
drum machine with syncopated jabs of his hand. He listens.
“Wait,” he says.
“Where’s the bass?” A couple of knob twists and the floor of the little studio
in his Frost
Avenue
home starts to shake. You can feel it in your heels. Bangz grins.
“Yeah.There it is.”
This 32-year-old
rapper’s hip-hop hits hard, hits solid. But by the time the groove travels to
the hipbones, sending ’em east and west, you realize
something ain’t standard here. The lyrics are rapid
fire and intense and Bangz delivers them with
muscular hip-hop machismo and flavor — yet they’re undeniably Christian.
No bitches. No bling. No thugs.
Bangz raps for Jesus.
“What’s really good?/My God’s
really good/It’s necessary/To bring the words like a missionary,” he raps on the cut “Breathe Ya
Last.” By the time he hits the chorus, the intensity builds. “Run wit thug crews, do the dirt thugs
do?/Act tight when I say Jesus loves you/You ain’t got
a clue but claim only God can judge you?/ And he will when you breathe your
last breath.”
“I’m a Christian who
raps,” he says. “And I take the approach of ministry more than, like, a hip-hop
approach. I used to take a hip-hop approach — which was gangsta,
murder, death, drugs — talkin’ ’bout the stuff that
I see, but no solution.”
Bangz’s new CD, Think It’s A Game/The Forbidden Memoirs Of Todd Bangz,
drops April 25. It’s a powerful double disc with an equally powerful
message: salvation, redemption, and beats.
The redemption part comes fromBangz’s past. Prior to finding
his Christian calling he lived the “gangsta” life. He
sold and used drugs. He also gave undue priority to his music.
“I can honestly say I
made music my God,” Bangz says. “That was all I
wanted. I lost my wife, I lost my kids, I lost our
house. Because I wanted to be in the basement bangin’ on the drum machine. And that’s all I
wanted. I didn’t eat. I didn’t do anything. My passion was there.”
That tenacity got him
noticed. In 1993 when Bangz was known as Tre-Z, his song “A Chip Off The
Roc” spent six straight weeks as one of WDKX’s Top 10
requests. He opened dates for Jay-Z on The Chronic Tour. Things were happening.
By 1996 bigger wigs started to notice.
“I was well on my way
to getting a record deal,” he says. “Def Jam was courting me. And right around
that time I just kinda got deeper and deeper into
drugs and kinda fell off.”
Then Bangz had an epiphany — delivered via burning blunt, not
burning bush.
“We were blunted and everything
— we were high as a kite,” he says. “I was in my studio on East Main Street making a beat for one of my artists. And, like, the spirit
of God came on this guy and he started telling me my music was destroying God’s
people.”
The same scenario
played out again two weeks later in Brooklyn as Bangz and crew were smoking
and drinking in front of a church.
“It was like God was
trying to talk to me and I ran from the church so far he had to use the closest
person to me. Right at that moment I realized that I really, really needed to
get it right with God. It was a time in my life I’ll never forget.”
Bangz 180’d.
“I stopped,” he says.
“I sold equipment. I just put everything on pause so I could get my life right
and understand ‘OK, if this is my journey, I need to understand the journey
first.”‘
There were a few obstacles.Bangz worried that the fans of
his hardcore secular rhymes and beats might dismiss him as washed up, a sell
out.
“At first when I
wasn’t doing any music they’d say ‘Yeah, yeah Tre’s
soft,'” he says. “But once they started hearing my music, they said ‘Oh, he
didn’t skip a beat. He didn’t lose anything.’ I actually have gotten better
because now I’m not under the influence of drugs. I think a lot more clearly,
I’m concise. I have family, I have my friends. We have a whole team now.”
He
also has to overcome assumptions some Christians might make about hip-hop,
Christian lyrics or not. The music itself is guilty by association.
“A beat is a beat,”
he says. “The message is what counts.” A message, that
for Bangz, supersedes the art.
“I’m a Christian
rapper,” he says. “Outside of the message, I’m no longer a rapper. I made it my
God before, I really did. I mean, I lost everything. I could never lose that
again.”
Todd Bangz’s CD release show with guests B. Dill, Big Nate, R-Swift and hosted by Christopher “Play” Martin (of
Kid N’ Play fame), happens Friday, April 21, at The Body Shop, 14 Anson Place,
527-8356, doors at 6:30 p.m. $5 (includes dinner). All ages
www.bangtheory.com
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2006.
