Occasionally my brother Daniel and I produce videos like Ball’n 1, Ball’n 2, and a rope swing trip just for fun.  This week, we raised the bar.  A result of a rap battle between my he and a friend of ours, Daniel and I spent the better part of a week over Christmas break producing a rap video.  We wrote it with the help of our older brother Michael, recorded, and filmed the video around our hometown of Vandalia.

While rap sometimes gets a bad rap for being unartistic or coarse, making the video was an awesome experience to understand how artists do what they do. I’d venture to say I learned more about poetry and hip-hop through this than I did in years of reading Shakespeare, Whitman, etc in class. Writing was relatively easy, and so was recording, filming, and editing. Content is not the hard part. I would expect continuity is. Creativity over time would be. It would be incredibly difficult to have life experiences worth performing about if I were stuck in Nashville or LA recording all day, every day. And if one has to perform art written by someone else, what’s the value of that? Fortunately, we only had to write one. Enjoy!