Member Since: 11/18/2007
Band Website: Contact Me [email protected] or AIM jcdotnaledge
Band Members:!!!!!!MY WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE CHECK IT OUT!!!!!!.....................
"Rap Opportunity, Only Just Across El Rio Potomac"
-----By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page M01------------- Reggaeton is the closest Spanish-language form that gets airplay. With the zero-sum ferocity of sub-subcultures dueling within subcultures, the rappers disdain the reggaetoneros. That's party music, they sneer.
Hip-hop is message music. The words are in Spanish. Or Spanglish. Or English peppered with Castilian. There's now a critical mass of fans who don't need a dictionary.
True, some of the song subjects are staples in any language. Give an MC a mike, chances are he'll bray and boast, and celebrate chicas moviendo las caderas (girls shaking their hips). Because that's what MCs do. But these local rappers and the kids who follow them have found another theme that charges them up almost as much as chicas: immigration.
Beyond the switched-on outrage and rebel posing, the raps take a surprising turn. They end up being personal, from crossing the Rio Grande to taking English-as-a-second-language classes. These are family stories, lived firsthand by the rappers, or handed down from parents and grandparents, passed around the community.
At bottom, it's generational music. More talkin' 'bout my generation, again. There's a generation gap, too, all right, but not the one you expect.
The parents don't care much for the music -- they're into Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, if not salsa and merengue -- yet the lyrics bring tears to their eyes.
On a Saturday at midnight in Gaithersburg, one of those parents, Neftali Granados, is closing one of his three Morazan Grocery stores after another long day. Now 52, from El Salvador, he crossed the Rio Grande on a tire 26 years ago. He washed dishes, built a home improvement business, started the groceries, raised a family, became an American citizen.
His son Juan Carlos, 20, is a business major/music minor at Montgomery College. He's also a rapper known as JC Naledge, who recorded a CD called "Sangre, Sudor y L¿grimas" -- "Blood, Sweat and Tears."
"There's nothing I can say bad about this country," says Naledge, who was born in D.C. "But I don't think 50-50 is fair at this point. I feel like I'm 100 percent Salvadoran and 100 percent American, you know what I mean?"
He played his rap "Our Struggle" at home and saw his father cry for the first time. “My father crossed over Rio Grande on a tire/ trying to look American with Levi's attireâ€
It was the whole story -- the founding of an American family -- the way Granados had told his children over the years, always wondering if the embedded lessons of sacrifice and gratitude meant anything to the younger generation.
In the second verse, Naledge pictures himself in a cool car at a stoplight in Langley Park, a Latino who's making it, feeling glares from those still on foot, desperate.
“Awkwardly ashamed like what they thinking of me/â€
"You feel your son know your history," Granados says in his store, his face sagging with fatigue. "He understand. He feel it."--------
Influences: Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, Nas, Rakim
Sounds Like: Nas with his knowledge.....Biggie with his swagger
Record Label: unsigned
Type of Label: None