Camp Zama soldier mines his past for rhymes on upcoming rap CD
By Rick Chernitzer,
Stars and Stripes
Rick Chernitzer / Stars and Stripes
Army Sgt. Ronald Taylor stands in his office at Camp Zama, Japan, near a promotional
posters for his debut album "Southern Eclipse." Taylor, who goes by the name,
"Shadeaux", will be releasing the album June 30. |
CAMP ZAMA, Japan — Army Sgt. Ronald Taylor has a lot on his
mind. So he often puts pen to paper and jots it down. And somewhere in those words, he
hopes, hides his fortune.
The 25-year-old soldier is set to release his debut album,
“Southern Eclipse,” June 30 on a Los Angeles independent label, PnP Records.
Using the stage name “Shadeaux,” Taylor paints a picture of dark streets,
violent justice and the hard-core life of the ghetto. The spelling of his rap name is a
nod to his Bayou heritage.
“I was born just across from Louisiana,” he said. “My
Southern accent was pretty thick when I was younger.”
He’s lost most of that twang now, although it occasionally slips
into casual conversation. If rapping is about telling a story, as he says, then Taylor is
right for the task. Talking is one of his strong suits, he claims.
“My mind never stops coming up with (stuff),” he said.
“I can sit anywhere and make up a rhyme from just about any situation.”
When challenged to create one at that particular moment, Taylor took
a second, noticed a little piggy doll on his desk, then began:
“Sitting here, chillin’ with my man from Stars and Stripes,
Kicking back, laying back, got my piggy on my right …”
It’s not much, he admits, but it’s an example of the speed
at which he works. He got an offer to record with PnP last July and flew to California the
following month. Over a weekend, he and producer/co-writer Jimmy Pascale laid the tracks
for two songs. Taylor returned last March, completing five more songs during a weeklong
stay, and returned again in April, recording seven songs over two weeks.
“He’s pretty amazing when it comes to putting lyrics
together. He’s one of the quickest writers I’ve seen,” said Pascale, 33, in
a phone interview from his office in Santa Monica, Calif. “He can lay (lyrics) down
(on a recording) as sure as he can write it. I mean, he gets it done before the ink even
dries.”
Each time, he went there with nothing on his pad, but just pulled
from a library of thoughts and rhymes he jots down all the time, he said.
“I have tons of stuff I’ve written down as it came to
me,” he said. “I’ve almost had a car accident because I needed to write
something down before I forgot it and,” he paused, smiling, “well, you know how
narrow some of these roads are.”
He speaks softly but firmly. Perhaps it’s the inevitable side
effect of a man who’s building a fledgling career as a rap artist. Maybe it’s
from learning the ropes of being in charge of people in the Visual Information Division of
the 78th Signal Battalion here.
In either case, it’s a far cry from the rough streets of a
Beaumont, Texas, ghetto where he spent his nights huddled with his five brothers on a box
spring. And life in that hard place almost took a detour that most of his brothers took.
All but two are in jail.
“It wasn’t easy living that life,” he said. “I
won’t lie; I did some pretty stupid, knucklehead things when I was younger.”
Taylor joined the Army in 1993, attending boot camp the summer of his
senior year. In his early years in uniform, he let his creativity work for him.
“I redid the Army song twice, made up a song for one of my
units. I made a video production about (the single soldier’s program) at Fort
Ritchie, Md., using a song I wrote as the musical backdrop. That won $1,500 for my command
and got me an Army Achievement Medal.”
Taylor has had the music in him, in one form or another, since he was
3. After a brief stint with the drums, he moved into singing, first in the choir at his
Baptist church, then as a member of various R&B groups in junior high and high school.
“I got to meet some big people,” Taylor said, “like MC
Hammer, R. Kelly … it was really cool.”
He won several talent shows, and many people used to joke that the
muscular Taylor was “too big to be singing,” he said.
But the turn toward hard-core rap came as a challenge one day in high
school. During lunch, another boy was rapping, and had a crowd of girls swooning around
him.
“It made me mad,” he recalled. “I said to those girls
‘you like that junk?’ That guy said to me ‘oh, so you think you can do
better?’”
The challenge and the bravado spilled into the next class period.
Spurred on by a substitute English teacher who overheard the pair arguing, Taylor and the
other boy were summoned to the front of the class for a rap showdown. Taylor said he blew
the other guy away.
It wasn’t long before Taylor saw rapping as a skill he needed to
develop. He received inspiration and advice from an unlikely source: his mailman. As a
member of a local rap group, Undercover, he would listen to Taylor and “taught me how
to connect words, but not in that Dr. Seuss sort of way when people think of rhyming. He
taught me the difference between rhymers, rappers and those with flow.”
Rhymers are people who end every line with a word that rhymes with
the preceding line. Rappers have a rhythm for their rhymes, but it’s consistent and
rarely changes. People with flow let the words pour out of them with fluid intensity.
This, Taylor said, is what he does.
“I catch hell in the studio for it, too. I’m out of breath,
but I’m not ready to stop because I haven’t gotten to that natural pause in the
lyrics. I usually can make it right up to the end, but I lose my intensity. And you got to
maintain that intensity to keep people interested.”
The tracks on his debut album are an autobiography of growing up in
Beaumont. With songs like “My Time to Shine” and “Father Forgive Me,”
Taylor said he wants to show where he came from and where he is today. Pascale called his
style a cross between the late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur and Master P of the group No
Limit.
“He has a variety of styles; that’s what makes him so
different,” Pascale said.
Many of Taylor’s live performances are at small clubs in
Yokohama. He’s opened for artists such as Outkast and Mystikal. He was supposed to
open recently for rap mega-star DMX, but what he calls “political decisions” of
the Japanese promoter yanked that rare opportunity from his hands.
“The promoter wanted to get some Japanese R&B acts into the
show, so I got pulled,” he explained. “For some reason, R&B and hip-hop get
lumped together over here, but they’re not the same thing.”
Pascale sees a bright future for Taylor.
“Oh, very strong potential. He’s coming out with a new
style, a different style. I think he’s got a good presence (on stage) and on the mic.
He knows how to woo a crowd,” he said.
Yet whatever comes from the tough, competitive world he’s
entered as a hip-hop artist, Taylor said he knows he owes the Army plenty for
straightening him out. Unless he suddenly finds himself signing a multimillion-dollar
contract, he plans to stay in the Army.
“Music is my life, but the Army is my second love,” Taylor
said. “The trick is being able to balance them. They’re both so demanding and
unforgiving. Music means constantly being in the spotlight. If you do something good,
that’s great. If you don’t, that’s all people will remember. And
that’s the same thing in the military.”
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