Grammy-award winning hip-hop artist Speech came to a deep conclusion after losing friends and family as his career was taking off.
“Each one of us, myself, and each one of you are here for a reason, and you have a very unique purpose and story that you are meant to tell while you are here,” he said to about 90 Wilkes-Barre Area High School students.
He asked them: “What story are we going to tell?
Speech, whose full name is Todd Thomas, is the frontman for Arrested Development, a hip-hop group he founded in the late 1980s. They performed at the F.M. Kirby Center Wednesday.
Speech stopped by the high school Thursday and spoke to students from the creative writing and Creative and Performing Arts Academy classes.
"He was so well-spoken and so inspiring, but it's like he was speaking from the heart. It's not like he was trying to be inspiring," senior Aiza Butool, 18, said. "He was just saying things that he felt, and I think as like students, who kind of share the same struggles that he was talking about, I think we felt very seen in that regard."
The beginnings of hip-hop
Speech, 58, grew up in Milwaukee around the time when Hip-hop was emerging in the South Bronx in New York City.
In 1979, the Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight.”
That song blew his mind.
"At that time music was only R&B, disco, and you know, rock,” he said. “It was the beginnings, for a lot of people around the nation, in the world, the beginnings of hip-hop music, and it was clearly something fresh and different.”
Speech fell in love with hip-hop and its wordplay.
"In a given five-minute song or 11-minute song, now you got hundreds and hundreds of words that you have use for in order to express complex, if you choose, ideas or extremely simple ideas," he said.
Speech told the students the movement was revolutionary.
"And I always look at revolution, what it means is fundamental change, and it was that in every way,” he said.
Speech's first group was named Attack. He started it with his childhood friend from Wisconsin, T.A. Wiz, who was later murdered.
"There wasn't anybody from Milwaukee or ... even more so, there wasn't anybody from the Midwest period that was huge or even making it slightly in hip-hop," he said. "We did the best we could.”
Speech eventually moved to Atlanta in the late 1980s and started Arrested Development.
Atlanta, he said, was much different socially and systematically from Milwaukee. He said the city in Georgia was progressive and inclusive and there Black people had opportunities to build wealth.
'Tennessee'
Arrested Development's first hit single was "Tennessee” in 1992 — a song that still means a lot to Speech. He sang two verses for the students.
He said “Tennessee” was a prayer he wrote three weeks after losing both his grandmother and his 29-year-old brother in just days of each other.
"The root of the song was about my pain. But then trying to expand the meaning so that maybe you guys can relate to it," he said. "If you didn't lose anybody in your life yet, maybe there's still something that you can touch on. And then even talking about the realities of Black life in this world and what are some of the challenges.”
A student asked him “what’s your favorite lyric you’ve ever written?”
"When you ask, you know, what's my favorite lyrics, I think these mean a lot to me," he said about the song.
'Hip-hop was not guaranteed'
Speech wanted his visit to Wilkes-Barre Area to be a conversation between him and the students.
"I was in these seats when I was their age and I wanted to hear somebody's perspective that's been doing it, and I've been doing it,” he said after the talk. “So to me, it's a service that young people can definitely gather strength from and information from."
Freshman Emili Castro, 14, asked him if he was inspired by groups from the 1990s like Wu Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest and even an earlier group called Zulu Nation.
"Bottom line is hip-hop was not guaranteed to last forever at that time. People's perception of hip hop was that it was a phase and that it was going to fade out," he said.
Speech told Emili he was inspired by those groups, and said at the time the different artists were also supportive of each other in order not to fade out.
He encouraged them to do the same.
"You guys can push each other's projects, and when anybody does anything, you have a crew of people that you guys are supporting each other, and you can help each other do well,” he said.
A conversation
Towards the end of Speech’s hour with the students, hands raised for questions.
They wanted to know how he feels about hip-hop today.
Speech said inevitably new artists are going to tick off the previous generation. That’s what his generation did, he said.
"I've seen a lot of variations of what hip-hop would do. And one of the things that I've learned is that each generation is going to have their own revolution,” he said.
He said he tries to understand and appreciate what moves the new generation of artists.
They wanted to know about his struggles as a Black artist. He said he expresses that through his music. That’s his therapy.
They asked who inspires him.
Speech told them the loss of family and friends, but not in the way one might think.
"The deaths that were happening around me inspired me to write life music and on purpose try to create music that celebrated life or that gave solutions to a lot of the problems that we were facing and are facing," he said.
He told the students who are interested in getting into music to be authentic and to get in front of human beings with their art.
'A big inspiration'
Emili and Aiza sat in the front row of the audience, closest to Speech. They said he made them feel validated and that they could relate to him.
"Especially with art and music, we try our best to use it as a source to help or contribute to the things that happen in our world,” Aiza said. “He was just saying things that he felt, and I think as students who kind of share the same struggles that he was talking about. I think we felt very seen in that regard,” Aiza said.
Emili added: "It was very refreshing to see somebody that like actually cares and gives hope about today's day and age.”
Before leaving Wilkes-Barre, Speech said he was encouraged by the students' questions. He said their intelligence was obvious.
"They are thinking about what they're going to do and what they want to bring to this world," he said. "And I've seen that before, so it didn't surprise me. But I was happy to see it.”
