Dare Mighty Things. TM Smith
songs and look to be “discovered” by night. “I was just sort of testing out the law thing while I was really focusing on my music. The only reason I was working at the law firm was because I thought I needed a “real job.” I kept reading these articles about starving artists striking it big after living on their friend’s couch for a year, and I began to think I was screwing myself by having a job.”
His tough mentality and fend-for-yourself upbringing would not allow him to just quit his job. “For me, it was very much about being a grown man. I wanted to pay my bills, to be responsible. I did not want to go begging and be so desperate. But I was afraid of being seduced by the comfort, and the complacency, of a full-time job.”
Still, the law firm job was not working out so well. Filing papers all day and seeing the practice of law was depressing. Luckily, his family’s love of teaching kicked in. With a mother, father and aunt all in the education profession, he saw teaching as something more noble and much more palatable. Within a few days of looking, he was offered an opportunity to substitute teach and immediately knew it was a lot better for him than filing motions in a law office.
The risk he saw was the possibility that teaching could easily derail him from his dream of becoming a recording artist. “I remember the very first day I started substitute teaching, and I made a vow to myself that I would not allow myself to become a full-time teacher.”
As much as he promised himself that it wouldn’t happen, it was only six months before he was offered a job as a “long-term replacement.” He tried to rationalize that it was still temporary, but after six months that job description changed to permanent teacher. A job he was still working four years later.
Hip-hop convergence
For those years, he attempted to work days at the school and write his music and get gigs in the evening. Several events happened during those years that triggered a convergence of sorts. First, record labels were routinely rejecting his submissions as quickly as he could turn them in. But they were very nice about it. “All of the label executives were encouraging my unique style, saying they loved my lyrics and that it moved them, but it wasn’t something they could sell. It wasn’t angry enough,” he says with a laugh.
The second key event happened by fate one night at an open mic night. Sekou, on the spur of the moment, decided to deliver his lyrics without music and without the typical hip-hop beat. He took a risk and delivered it spoken-word style, mostly out of frustration.
I decided to free myself
“The tragedy of what was being done at the time is that I was putting all this time into crafting these words. I was being told the words were awesome, but people couldn’t catch ‘em because I was so focused on the cadence. I just decided to free myself from the beat. Free myself from the cadence. When you have the beat, you gotta stay locked in. That’s hip-hop. But now I didn’t have a beat, I just freed the words and delivered them more like a poem.”
His new approach caught on very quickly. “I liked not having to worry about the beat and the hook, and the remix, and the music politics, and I was just talking about something that resonated with folks. And people just started coming up to me saying the same thing these record labels execs were saying—that they loved the words and the message.”
Sekou began rising in the LA scene, but was still holding on to the safety net of his teaching job and the salary it provided. “I was really struggling internally, because I knew that I just couldn’t be a career teacher. But I also felt that these kids needed my 110% and I felt like I was a good teacher, and I was making a difference.” But he was adamant that he would not become one of those tenured teachers who were robotically handing out worksheets, grading papers and talking on the phone all day. “I had both factors colliding at this point and I kept looking in the mirror asking myself, ‘What’s stopping you?’”
“I knew when the voice inside me kept yelling, ‘What are you waiting for?’,” Sekou told himself, “either you’re gonna jump off or you’re not. So, I put on the blindfolds, strapped on my wings and said, ‘Let’s go.’” He formed his own record label called Blind Faith Records, and mustered up the courage to quit his teaching job.
The next steps were quick ones. After quitting his teaching job, he took his tax return check and what little savings he had, and upgraded a home recording studio so he could record and cut his first CD. “You reach that point that you’re just out of excuses. You have to operate off of pure faith. I just began saying, ‘I’m gonna make it. I’m done talking. I’m fresh. I’m good. It’s all or nothing.’”
Ahhhhh… freak out!
His master plan was to stage a big show of his new material, and after the show sell the newly minted CDs that he’d invested his life savings in pressing. The only problem was that the CDs did not show up on the morning of the show. “I’m freaking out. It was the day of the show, and they still don’t have them done. I was literally watching my whole dream go up in that moment.” Luckily, he got a call in the early afternoon that they were ready, but he’d have to drive an hour to pick them up and an hour back to the show. And like a Hollywood script, he arrived just in time to go on stage, for the annual big event called “Fly-Poet Showcase.”
“It’s the best spoken-word and music showcase in LA. Actually, it’s one of the best in the country,” Sekou explained. “So, I drive up, jump out of my car, run in. The guy is like, ‘Where the hell have you been? You’re on in 15 minutes. You’ve been freaking me out.’”
Sekou went on to wow the crowd and, after the show, sell out of his CDs to fans on the street. “I’ll never forget when the crowd dispersed. I was just standing there in the darkness, looking up in the sky, and I just thought, ‘Wow, I can do this.’”
In the coming months Sekou embarked on a national tour called “The Underground Poet’s Railroad” and was named one of the top poets in the country. “I did a national tour where we registered a million people to vote. It really felt like God was saying, ‘What took you so long? I’ve been holding your blessings. My arms have been getting heavy and tired, waiting for you to come and get your stuff. Here, take it.’ I think that’s the point. You have to be bold enough, daring enough, risk-taking enough, disruptive enough and playful enough to believe in yourself enough to say, ‘That is there. That is there for me. And maybe this wasn’t the perfect route to take, or maybe I hit this doorway and I got blocked and I ran into a detour.’ So just recalculate your route. You gotta ‘Waze’ it.”
But there was more in store for Sekou. He was certain he hadn’t yet reached his full potential and believed in his heart that there was more runway to explore. And he had to have another difficult conversation with himself. He had to be sure he was willing to make the necessary sacrifices that lie ahead.
“I call it my joyful challenge. Because being an entrepreneur is always a joy and it’s always a challenge. The joy is what gets me to the challenge and the conquering of the challenge is what brings the joy. So the big question I had to ask myself was if I was willing to make my art my commodity.”
Sekou understood that by being paid to perform and entertain he was expressing himself. And people were enjoying that expression. But what if he was being paid by a client to express their point of view? Could he make that happen?
Just do it
It didn’t take long for him to find out. And he didn’t start with a local chamber of commerce client. Nope, he started with one of the most well-known global brands—Nike. In 2005, the shoe giant was introducing a line of clothing called “Battlegrounds.” The launch was going to be massive, with a feature film release and partnership with MTV. And Nike was looking for someone to create an impactful spoken message for this big reveal.
“I submitted this poem that was kind of a ‘Braveheart’ meets the street speech, and I was thrilled to be chosen for it!” Sekou says, laughing. “So, they paid me to write 12 or 13 poems and I ended up narrating all of the poems as part