According to fellow Pro Era member Dirty Sanchez 47, he and STEEZ were continuously racially profiled by police, with them getting stopped and frisked on at least seven different occasions. Perhaps it is fitting; a diary is where you go to vent when you have no one else to vent to, a place to outlet the feeling that no one is listening.
It is a feeling which this current generation — with their views on climate change, politics, and racial injustice growing ever more divorced from the solutions offered by an aging political class — know all too well. Generation Z, a generation that has been polled as having lost trust in every major American institution, is practically in lockstep with this MO.
Brooklyn-born rapper Capital Steez made a huge impact on the hip-hop scene before his tragic death in From hip-hop, steez spread into Black and mainstream slang more generally, especially as it relates to popular culture. This is not meant to be a formal definition of steez like most terms we define on Dictionary. Feedback Tired of Typos? Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. Joey was ecstatic Steez had approached him.
Pro Era began to coalesce the next year, in Originally four members—a lanky rapper named CJ Fly in addition to Powers Pleasant, Joey and Steez—the crew began linking up in the auditorium at lunch to trade bars with each other, with Pleasant on the piano or drums. He was raised in a relatively religious household, with church as a regular family function. By high school, though, he had concluded that conventional religion was full of lies.
They talked about how they were beings of a higher dimension. Soon, Pro Era started meditating together in Prospect Park and rapping about opening their chakras.
And we decided that we wanted to change the world through our music. Even as Pro Era began to include many different personalities and egos, like rappers Dessy Hinds and producer Kirk Knight, they decided to stick together. A few months after they formed, Joey was contacted by Jonny Shipes, the CEO of Cinematic Music Group, a boutique management company and label, who had stumbled across a video of the teenager freestyling online and was interested in signing him. Joey was just 16 at the time, but his mother, Kimmy Virginie, worked out an informal arrangement with Shipes for the two parties to work together without signing any contracts until she and her son were ready to do so.
Shipes urged the young rapper to work with him as a solo artist. But the teenager was adamant that Pro Era be a part of whatever situation they worked out. Suddenly, the crew had the backing of a manager and a promotional team while most of its members were still in high school. For Steez, the connection with Cinematic and the timing, coinciding with his high school graduation, were the first signs that his passion could be more than just a hobby.
He dropped out of the community college in Brooklyn he had enrolled in, telling his family that it was distracting him from his music, and started to hone his image, growing out his dreadlocks and working hard to lose weight, buying a fixed-gear bike that he began to ride everywhere. Steez also began putting everything into his first solo project, which he planned to release in early Though he already had the rhyming skills, he was also coming into his own as a thinker, developing an anti-establishment view of the world that many teenagers could relate to.
Rey Sanchez says he and Steez were stopped and frisked by NYPD officers at least seven times together, and that Steez had grown increasingly critical of the government and police through those experiences.
The two visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment and spent a night at Zuccotti Park, excited by both the ideas that the movement espoused and the more adrenaline-worthy aspects of the demonstration. As his views became more militant, in person and on Facebook, Steez seemed to relish in his role as an iconoclast.
But the thing is, as you grow, this world makes you take your eye off of things like that. As he readied his debut solo mixtape, AmeriKKKan Korruption , he began thinking about a design that he would make into stickers to promote it. Steez had become fixated on the number 47, which he felt was a perfect expression of balance in the world, representing the tension between the fourth chakra—the heart—and the seventh—the brain.
Ever the provocateur, he also put the design in a white circle surrounded by red—the same color scheme used by the Third Reich. He and his friends began papering the city with the stickers, particularly in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood around Murrow.
He was ready to engage with people who criticized the logo. Steez seemed to enjoy the controversy the sticker caused beyond his Facebook page as well. It was an impressive debut, a track collection of acrobatic lyrics and rich beats, but beneath the wordplay and rhymes was a paranoid visionary commenting on bleak prospects for inner-city youth, US-sponsored violence overseas and what Steez deemed was a coming apocalypse. Steez was painfully sensitive to the lack of recognition for the project.
Short for Progressive Era, the group had two primary goals: to respond to the dominant success of West Coast hip hop by putting New York back on the map, and to introduce a more spiritually focused message to the culture. With crazy rhyme schemes, liquid flows and consistently clever wordplay, Pro Era began making a splash in the East Coast rap scene. STEEZ began setting himself apart from most other rappers with bars that seemed far too socially conscious for an eighteen-year-old.
His anger was never expressed through violent lyrics, but through a sort of wisdom that remained perpetually bleak but impressively intelligent and always a little bit weird.
The hook samples the Moody Blues , creating a dreamy, emotionally distant feeling while the rest of the beat thunders in with aggressive drums and haunting riffs from a piano. His lyrics question American politics and his own community from every level. The music video shows him sitting on his couch being numbed senseless by a TV that skips through channels rapidly. He mouths out the song as if in a daze.
Even as the song builds and his voice is almost screaming the lyrics, the STEEZ we see in the video warps his mouth to the lyrics emotionlessly, trapped in hypnosis perpetrated by the media.
He claimed it was the number of universal balance.
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