Texts from Bennett Read Online Free
Author: Mac Lethal
fluidity. I devoured every rap album I could find, picking apart each rapper’s deficiencies, adopting my interpretation of their strengths. I would freestyle rap for hours in my bedroom into a handheld tape recorder, while doing jumping jacks and push-ups. This helped me simultaneously improvise new rap ideas and develop lungpower, projection, verbal articulation, enunciation, and breath control.
I was methodical. I drilled constantly, pushing myself to improve. I never set out to be famous, or even make a living off music. I just wanted to impress kids in the high school cafeteria with my freestyle raps, while I made fun of Margot Glasscock’s last name, or rapped about sleeping with Miss Steele, the school’s foxy, thirty-two-year-old algebra teacher.
After honing my rapping skills, I set up a makeshift studio in my mom’s basement and recorded my first album, Mixed Drinks . The writing was funny, weird, and quirky. I made songs about not being able to find my car keys, and getting broken up with by a girl I didn’t like in the first place but wanting to win her back just to have bragging rights on who broke up with whom. While it was lo-fi and sounded like crap, the people I passed it out to seemed to enjoy it for what it was. So I dropped out of high school and decided to pursue being a rapper full-time. Backup plans are for pussies.
Touring seemed like the best way to expand my career, so I spent years networking with other independent artists, driving ten to fifteen hours every day, just to play free shows for crowds of fewer than fifty people. I passed out free tapes (and eventually CDs) that I assembled myself at Kinko’s and slept on the beer-stained apartment floors of random weirdos my crew and I would meet at shows, to avoid paying for a hotel room. I could fill an entire book with tour stories from my early years, most of them unfortunate.
Touring and building a fan base from scratch is immensely hard, and most people don’t even achieve moderate success doing it. Most people quit the first time they fall flat on their face. Believe me, you have to be partially nuts to endure the things that traveling, working entertainers endure.
Only 1 percent become megastars. The other 99 percent of us are on a daily grind, dreaming we can one day pay off our bills from music.
Luckily, my dreams started to come true. After giving a passionate decade of my life to being a rapper—I started to turn a profit. My tiny, scattered, local following had enveloped into a dedicated worldwide fan base. I could play just about any part of the world, and pull at least one hundred people—one thousand in some places.
I sold T-shirts, CDs, trucker hats, sweatshirts, dog bowls, backpacks, fanny packs, socks, girl panties, pint glasses, shot glasses, et cetera—all with my logo printed on them. I was a working, self-funded, independent rap artist, selling out shows, paying the bills, and living a dream that is oft never achieved by a majority of musicians, let alone rappers.
For once in my life, music was no longer a struggle. It was a highly lucrative roller-coaster ride that afforded me the ability to travel anywhere and purchase anything I wanted, which was new to me, and slightly unsettling. I knew there was no way this could last forever, so I decided to invest my money wisely while my chips were up. I found an amazing, albeit slightly gaudy, house in the Brookside area of Kansas City, Missouri, put down a giant down payment (since touring tends to lead to bad credit), and moved in.
I had my own home (I bought a house!), and it felt great.
ME: Hey fucker, guess who?
BENNETT: ?
ME: Guess who this is, you little-dicked twerp.
BENNETT: hoe i told u to stop texten me my girl gonna c dat shit
BENNETT: bcide u wuz luven my big dicc in da parkin lot da otha nite lol slut
ME: Lol, you think this is a girl.
BENNETT: dis is ashly duh
BENNETT: look.. u ever seen a tigger or a lion git married?
BENNETT: u ever seen a
I was methodical. I drilled constantly, pushing myself to improve. I never set out to be famous, or even make a living off music. I just wanted to impress kids in the high school cafeteria with my freestyle raps, while I made fun of Margot Glasscock’s last name, or rapped about sleeping with Miss Steele, the school’s foxy, thirty-two-year-old algebra teacher.
After honing my rapping skills, I set up a makeshift studio in my mom’s basement and recorded my first album, Mixed Drinks . The writing was funny, weird, and quirky. I made songs about not being able to find my car keys, and getting broken up with by a girl I didn’t like in the first place but wanting to win her back just to have bragging rights on who broke up with whom. While it was lo-fi and sounded like crap, the people I passed it out to seemed to enjoy it for what it was. So I dropped out of high school and decided to pursue being a rapper full-time. Backup plans are for pussies.
Touring seemed like the best way to expand my career, so I spent years networking with other independent artists, driving ten to fifteen hours every day, just to play free shows for crowds of fewer than fifty people. I passed out free tapes (and eventually CDs) that I assembled myself at Kinko’s and slept on the beer-stained apartment floors of random weirdos my crew and I would meet at shows, to avoid paying for a hotel room. I could fill an entire book with tour stories from my early years, most of them unfortunate.
Touring and building a fan base from scratch is immensely hard, and most people don’t even achieve moderate success doing it. Most people quit the first time they fall flat on their face. Believe me, you have to be partially nuts to endure the things that traveling, working entertainers endure.
Only 1 percent become megastars. The other 99 percent of us are on a daily grind, dreaming we can one day pay off our bills from music.
Luckily, my dreams started to come true. After giving a passionate decade of my life to being a rapper—I started to turn a profit. My tiny, scattered, local following had enveloped into a dedicated worldwide fan base. I could play just about any part of the world, and pull at least one hundred people—one thousand in some places.
I sold T-shirts, CDs, trucker hats, sweatshirts, dog bowls, backpacks, fanny packs, socks, girl panties, pint glasses, shot glasses, et cetera—all with my logo printed on them. I was a working, self-funded, independent rap artist, selling out shows, paying the bills, and living a dream that is oft never achieved by a majority of musicians, let alone rappers.
For once in my life, music was no longer a struggle. It was a highly lucrative roller-coaster ride that afforded me the ability to travel anywhere and purchase anything I wanted, which was new to me, and slightly unsettling. I knew there was no way this could last forever, so I decided to invest my money wisely while my chips were up. I found an amazing, albeit slightly gaudy, house in the Brookside area of Kansas City, Missouri, put down a giant down payment (since touring tends to lead to bad credit), and moved in.
I had my own home (I bought a house!), and it felt great.
ME: Hey fucker, guess who?
BENNETT: ?
ME: Guess who this is, you little-dicked twerp.
BENNETT: hoe i told u to stop texten me my girl gonna c dat shit
BENNETT: bcide u wuz luven my big dicc in da parkin lot da otha nite lol slut
ME: Lol, you think this is a girl.
BENNETT: dis is ashly duh
BENNETT: look.. u ever seen a tigger or a lion git married?
BENNETT: u ever seen a
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