SURREY - Out of all the types of music, rap is perhaps considered the most controversial, but some local artists are proving that the genre can be a healthy creative outlet.
Rick Kumar and Calvin Tiu, both 21, make up the Surreybased rap duo of Big Love and Kalvonix. They each got into rap for similar reasons, but took different paths in music before teaming up."I was bullied a lot in elementary school and I didn't have a voice," said Tiu, who has cerebral palsy and walks with crutches or uses a motorized wheelchair. "I was bullied due to the fact that I look different to my peers."People used to call me terrible things like 'cripple' or kick me down to the gravel, and it was those kind of things where I would totally shut down."In Grade 7, Tiu heard Eminem for the first time and was inspired by how the Detroit rapper took struggles in his life and turned them into music. He bought a journal and started writing raps based off of his experiences with bullying."I rehearsed them to my parents and they said, 'Calvin, you should actually do this, you should start rapping,'" said Tiu. "It was an outlet for me to express my inner struggle."Kumar's interest in rap came after he started writing poetry in his early years of high school. At the time, he wrote solely for himself, but broke out of his shell around the age of 15."I was a pretty shy kid in Grade 8 and 9 - any time there was a class photo, I was the guy in the back peeking through heads," he said. "I get to Grade 10 and I'm like, 'I've got to change my life.'" After performing in a school play, Kumar and the rest of the cast were required to share their experiences with the production. Instead of just talking about the performance, he wrote a poem and recited it for his peers."I got into this flow and I didn't understand what I was writing yet, and I put the paper down and look and there's two girl's crying," he said, adding that his emotional poem inspired a classmate to call him Big Love, which stuck as his rap name.From there, he moved into doing slam poetry and spoken word to spread his poems. Soon after, a mutual friend introduced Kumar to Tiu and the two started sharing their passion for live performance."Calvin was like, 'Hey, man, I rap, you write poetry - we could create a link in between. Why don't you start rapping?'" The two are inspired by a wide range of artists, frommodern hip-hoppers like Kid Cudi to classic rock bands like Queen and Pink Floyd."You can't pigeonhole your music," said Kumar of his and Tiu's musical tastes. "Music is the flow of life. You take it as it comes."Most recently, Kumar and Tiu have put together a collaborative album titled The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, as part of an assignment for an English class at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The duo wrote eight songs based off of children's literature like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Where the Wild Things Are, as well as adult novels."I'm not going to lie, I hoped that maybe if I did a rap album, I wouldn't have to write an essay," said Tiu with a laugh.The class also read Tweaked, a novel by a local author that deals with drug addiction. The 192-page paperback influenced the duo to write a song about the dangers of drug abuse."Rap already has a lot of history dealing with drug addiction and people talking about drugs, but I think people think of rap as a type of music that glorifies drugs, but we didn't want to do that - we wanted to speak about addiction itself and give that a twist," said Tiu.Kumar added that one of the goals of the album was to shatter the public's negative perception of rap music by making something positive in the genre."People look at rap very negatively, and that was one of our focuses with creating this album. We wanted to show that rap is much more than just these negative, misogynistic ideas that we see on television."You can use it to learn, and that's what we did."jzinn@thenownewspaper.com