MERCY

QUIRI BEATO which means MERCY BLESSED (as told to her by a professor at Columbia) was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in the clinic of San Rafael on Valentines Day, February 14th, 1987. The Beato family moved to New York City when she was 2 years old and raised Quiri in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Quiri started her performing arts career when she was only in the second grade in Anna Silver School P.S.20 when she was chosen among all her classmates to dance a solo for the school's Christmas production of, "The Nutcracker." She improvised her solo in modern dance form and ballet ensemble. Her passion and talent for dance was so great that her music teacher spoke to her mother about giving Quiri a scholarship to a ballet school. However, her mother who was firmly planted in the Seventh-day Adventist Christian faith did not want any of her three daughters to enter the world of dance, music, or modeling that could corrupt them, so she turned the offer down. But Quiri kept performing in all of the school productions, acting, dancing and even becoming the lead of the school chorus.When Quiri left elementary school and went on to junior high and high school, she did not continue taking an active role in the school productions for her new schools did not involve its students in the performing arts as much as her elementary school. However, Quiri grew as a writer for she had always written poems, short songs, and short stories.It was not up until high school, that Quiri realized that her love for music and writing could clash together to make her a lyrical, conscious female rapper. She realized this in small stepping stones, when she wrote a small rap for her high school crew, PTG, and when she freestyled one day with her friend afterschool. However, her biggest influence unto the rap game was when she started going out with a local spanish hip hop and reggaetton artist of the Lower East Side. When "Bonnie" started listening to "Clyde's" music, it soon hit her that she could also really rap because his lyrics sounded like poetry on a music beat. Quiri tried telling him she could do it too but she felt like he didn't quite believe her until she battled him one day playing around. After that day, she felt like he still didn't take her seriously but Quiri knew she could do it. It took Karen, another female rapper from Spanish Harlem to pull Quiri in after her friend from high school who had heard her freestyle told Karen Quiri could rap. The same day Karen and Quiri spoke, they put their heads together and wrote their spanglish song, "Tocame," in the course of one night. The next day or two they presented their song in the studio that "Clyde" recorded in, and "Clyde's" buddies, "Falcons," from the Lower East Side liked the song, which they had provided the beat for. Quiri felt like "Clyde" soon grew confident of her overnight skills, when she started performing her song in Star Lounge in the Lower East Side and Bamboo Lounge in the BX because soon after, they wrote their song, "La Seductora," which they performed together on Quiri's first year at Columbia University. On this song Quiri rapped, sang the hook, and then bellydanced around "Clyde" while he spit. After this song, Quiri wrote a club song called, "Rotate it," which she performed at Club Speed. In this performance, her sister, Darlene and best friend Jena danced to moves she had choreographed.Even though Quiri knew she could write "commercial" for-the-club songs she didn't just want to write what would sell, she refused to sell her self short and feed into the mainstream, degrade-women music. She began writing more poems, like "Breaking Down America," and "Wriggling Through the Cracks" and sharing them at open mics at Columbia and at Marta Valle J.H. and H.S. in the Lower East Side. When she went to this school in the Lower East Side, she told the kids how she had made it to Columbia full scholarship from a neighborhood like their own, and how they could do it. She made them conscious of the world around them by tellin them that they should do well in school unless they wanted to fall under the statistics of the many minorities who went to jail or didn't make anything of themselves and that by educating themselves they would learn more about how society worked in the larger context or "the world beyond the block." By going on to college, she told them they would learn more about how society and the government worked and with these tools they would be able to do whatever they wanted, that it was not just limited to becoming a doctor or lawyer, because by being educated they could learn the ropes, so to speak, of how to work through the "system" of government. The students wrote her letters and told her she had inspired them to do the best they could do in school and life. The students also told her that music had a big impact on how kids were by promoting drugs and violence. She soon realized that as an artist she could serve as a positive role model (since urban communities seem to lack positive role models), and that she had the power to spread her voice through music and impact youth in a positive way.It was not until she was born-again-in Christ the summer of 2006, that she brought her mission to a higher level, a spiritual level, to touch hearts just like she did in this school but now with bigger and more pertinent purposes, to uncover truths about how the world operates backward: bad being good from the good popular music that degrades women, to how it is good for urban youth to be violent instead of having real power with word psychologically, to "good-feeling" drugs that just give people more problems instead of taking them away from their problems (temporarily at least). Her main goal is to "open up" young people's minds (like the title of her first song as a born-again-christian suggests, "Open Up Your Mind,") and at the same time put out a variety of topics in order to make her product marketable in a world that often rejects conscious music.Quiri, known to be a fighter for a cause, whether on the street or at Columbia, will use the gift God has given her with words and music to enlighten and help bring back the REAL HIP HOP.