90's Nostalgia Commemorative Issue April 2017 | Page 40

MADEXXXX
THE BRAINS
BEHIND THE
Paint
GENESIS THE GREYKID
Photo Credit: @Flumpf_
MADE: Tell us a little bit about how you started everything.
Genesis: Well I started in the music industry, I started ghostwriting and that’s initially how I got in. Poetry
was always the way for me to kind of express the world around me and to kind of make sense of it all and I
didn't really understand how poets can make a living. So I kind of gravitated towards ghostwriting and hip
hop just through wanting to express my poetry, but knowing that through music I could actually pay some
bills in the process. I love music and I love hip hop and so I was ghost writing for a little bit and then Cre-
ative Control TV, who are wonderful brothers, they picked me up and brought me into the family.
MADE: Wow. From poetry to ghostwriting and then to art?
Genesis: I got exposed to a lot more things in the industry which ended up leading to working with the
Remedy with Atlantic Records and continuing to write more. Eventually it was just the power of language
and poetry that was still resonating in my bones and so I had to figure out a way to be inventive and inno-
vative within my culture or what I see as a culture in poetry. I never really liked performing, I guess that’s
why I usually just wrote or just recorded things in the studio. I wasn’t big feeling handcuffed to a stage or
obligated to a performance and so I just started to really dive deep into the poetry and I created this work-
shop called “Words in Gray” and I just worked with all kinds of groups. Brothers in the hood, and different
athletes and then these creative agencies started to come by for ads like Vander Media and Fancy Rhino.
MADE: That’s a wide range of people that your work appealed to. Where did it go from the workshops?
Genesis: So from the workshop I decided to take a trip around the country and I had a meeting with the
mayor at All Def Digital, him and Russell Simmons have this thing called All Def Digital and they both have
a copy of the book Words in Gray, which is kind of like a version of the workshop that you can travel with.
It has my poetry broken up in colors, like the titles are colored by whatever mood I was in that’s the color I
would put to convey that mood. And towards the back would be creative exercises that we do in our work-
shop with blank pages. But they really rock with the book and wanted to see how we can get it online so I
thought, “I will just make a whole trip out of this so we took a few weeks to travel around the country.
MADE: How was that nationwide experience?
Genesis: With just a book bag, a sonola, a journal and a train ticket and it was a beautiful experience. I
talked to so many people, a lot of one-on-one workshop type vibes where I just go up to a random person
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