Richard
@dj hellfire
Keyport, NJ USA
Joined Oct 10, 2002
Straight out of Trenton, NJ, comes an 80's baby born to a 19 year old mother. Hellz was in love with music for as long as his memory serves. He used to sing Luther Vandross, Barry White, Whitney Houston, and many other legendary artists' songs, while sitting in the back seat of the car as his mother drove. At the of age 3, his mother and stepfather moved into their own first apartment in the Roger Gardens housing projects in West Trenton, where you could literally find hundreds of crack cocaine vials scattered all over the complex grounds, and was also home to the then 'up-and-coming' legendary Hip-hop group 'Poor Righteous Teachers'. But things weren't completely bad. Little did he know, what was then considered a "fad" would be the thing that would keep him uninterested in the many dangerous life styles surrounding him. These housing projects were where he got his first taste of Hip-hop music in the late summer of 1988 when Rob Base released the classic "It Takes Two", which was being blasted in every corner of Roger Gardens at that time. It was here that he began his elementary school career, attending Stokes Elementary, which was a short two blocks from his home.
As he got older, around the age of 7, Hip-hop music began to catch his ear. This was shortly after his family moved to a bigger apartment in East Trenton. He would always hear the older guys on the block playing Rakim songs and several other Hip-hop tapes while walking home from Paul Robeson Elementary, where he attended grades 2-5. He would always rush home to try to catch BET's "Rap City", which he often missed due to the show airing while school was still in sessio. But he would always find himself "beat-boxing" and drumming on table tops.
As junior high school approached, his family then moved back out to West Trenton; this time in the area that went by the street name "Down Da Hill (DDH)". At the age of 11, his mother bought him his first cd player boom box for Christmas. His Aunt Kim also gave him his first Hip-hop album that Christmas, which was Ice Cube's "Lethal Injection" album. At that point, he was hooked. A couple of short years later, Helly started rapping at the age of 13 while attending 8th grade at Junior 3 middle school. He would write numerous songs and verses and walk around his neighborhood with all of his newest lyrics folded up in his back pocket, ready to perform one for friends. You could hear his Wu influence through his intricate word play and punch line filled rhyme flow.
Around this time, Hellfire found out his childhood friend, who now goes by the name of 'Ampkilla' and is the younger brother of Trenton's R&B sensation, 'Link' (of POV), had a studio in his basement. While link was gone, Amp would be in the basement making beats on an old Ensoniq keyboard with a built in sequencer paired with a really old Roland half rack sound module. Ampkilla would make his own songs recorded to 8-track ADAT cassettes and eventually taught Hellfire how to make beats. The two would spend hours making beats and songs with other neighborhood friends. The sound of beats has always been Helly's main attraction to Hip-hop and although he loved everything about making beats, he did not have his own equipment to be able to get into it as he really wanted. Instead, he focused on sharpening his rhyme skills.
Hellfire attended half of his 9th grade school year at Trenton Central High School before his family bought their first house in Ewing, which is one of the many suburbs of Trenton. His new house was a far walk from Ampkilla and his other friends that he started doing music with. So he kept writing songs and began recording songs himself using an Awai stereo with built-in Karaoke. Since he had no beat making equipment, he would loop up open instrumental sections from other Hip-hop albums that he owned using a cut/copy/paste technique on a Sony Mini Disc recorder with a 3"x1" screen. He would run the beat from a tape on deck A and rap o
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Aye yo dogg, I seen ya lil' vocal booth setup with them colored blanket type things. I been seein' em' everywhere, what they called n' where you copp them at? I'm settin' up a home studio, hit me up man. Sota_Water@yahoo.com