WHO IS SAMUEL VINCENT?
1, 2, 1, 2. What’s the word? Sam here. Guess this is the first entry in my little blog series about my life and this upcoming project. If you’re reading this, that means either I know you or you dig my sound. Or maybe you just had nothing better to do.
Either way, welcome.
So the question is; “Who am I?”
The short answer is I’m a normal dude on the East Coast who loves hip-hop, shlocky cinema, good vibes, and heaps of sushi.
But the actual answer is a bit more involved.
When I was 7-years-old, my mother took me to the Pathmark near our house. There was a small shelving unit near the cash registers that had a bunch of CDs. Of course my young ass wanted the explicit version of Capital Punishment, but my moms wasn’t having it. Instead, I picked out the only clean record. It had about 8 tracks on it, but the first song happened to be Rapper's Delight by The Sugarhill Gang. This introduction into the world of hip-hop is shared by many, but this degree of relatability aside, something clicked inside of me. It almost felt like I had been missing out on something so great for so long. From that moment on, I was obsessed with listening to as much as possible.
Because I was still young at this time, getting access to the good shit was still difficult. So I had to rely on clean versions of gangster rap classics or listen to like the Now That's What I Call Music library. Now obviously the internet was around at this time and I did manage to sail the high seas for some stuff in later years, but for now I resorted to what I could get my hands on. Because song lyrics weren’t as accessible to me at the time, I would replay a track dozens of times and try to write out all the lyrics. This was especially hysterical and challenging when I tried to do this with Raise Up by Petey Pablo. I’ll give you a minute to go listen to that joint.
Okay, you get the point.
It was around this time I finally decided I wanted to make my own music. Although I didn’t have an idea of what direction I wanted to go in, I would just start imitating some of my favorite artists. Whether it was Biggie, Eminem, NWA, Big Pun, Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss, or any of the dozens of other artists I listened to, I would blast their sounds in my headphones and just get lost in the rhythm. This quickly turned into me trying to freestyle and copy lyrical styles I was already acquainted with. So I’d jack my dad’s tape recorder he used for guitar practice, break out my Yamaha keyboard, play some preset beats, and just go for it. I’d even imitate censored sound effects. My dad played one of those tapes in front of me one day and just laughed, but I knew one day I would actually be taking this seriously.
From then until now, a lot transpired that launched me on my current musical trajectory, but I won’t bore you with all of that for now.
I’ll go more in-depth at another date about my original artist name, unreleased shit, and some behind-the-scenes bull I was going through. But until then, this is SV signing off.
Peace,
-Sam