What is a Rapper?
or why I insist on introducing myself as "ZENtheRapper"
What Is A Rapper?
“Yo, nice to meet you. I’m ZEN… ZENtheRapper.”
It comes off very confident these days, because I have rehearsed this line to many people, in many different contexts.
This is how I introduce myself on the basketball court, in the grocery store, at a performance venue, and even in a job interview.
My path and my purpose is largely about being. When I put out The ZEN Tape in 2021, I became a new type of being. Growing up, I was mostly known as a smart kid who got all A’s. This is because my mother took pains to make sure people knew how smart I was.
Although it was a point of contention while growing up, looking back, I don’t fault her for it, really. I was a young black boy going to a very predominantly white catholic school. I was the testament to many prayers and much work of my ancestors, and my mother wanted to make sure people didn’t confuse me as a thug or scallywag, just by looking at my skin. She wanted people to know that I was a genius, a black genius, and it was being proven by my accomplishments at school.
When I went to university, I relished in the new chance to redefine myself, not as some scallywag or thug, but also not as “the smart black kid” either. I wanted to find myself, for myself. I wanted to free myself from the burden of African American history that said I could be one or the other. That said I would only be looked at as one or the other.
That project was going well enough as I started working through school, and picked my major in history after being super inspired by a black history course I took. But it was somewhat derailed by a dramatic and prolonged mental health reckoning I encountered starting early in my sophomore year.
See, growing up precocious, people tend to leave you alone to your devices. I was kind of a quiet and shy kid, and the kind of love I got from my family was much more often tough love in the form of standards and expectations, than “soft love” in the form of hugs, kisses, and attention.
So I’ve always had my own way of being. In a black family, this gets joked about as “yeeeaaahh, we know Donte is special, very… special.”
It was OK, though, because I was special in such a way that helped me maintain straight-A’s. All I would have to do was keep performing well in school, and then I would grow up to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or something like that. And I would make a bunch of money. And it wouldn’t really matter how special I was. I would be a success, no matter what, by virtue of this special-ness, and despite what it might mean as specialness.
To make a long and important story inappropriately short, I began having what the doctors called “Manic Episodes” in college. (When I was having these similar kinds of “episodes” growing up, nobody really saw them or made a big hubbub about them). Thinking back now, I guess my parents probably felt partly guilty for not “noticing” these episodes before. That’s probably why they so whole-heartedly allowed and encouraged the doctors to keep me under clinical study for so many prolonged “vacations.”
To them, I was getting the help I so desperately needed, and that they had so desperately been trying to ignore concerning me.
For me, this experience was torture. Characterized by people who didn’t know the second thing about me diagnosing me with all kinds of fancy shmancy mental health prognostications, and assigning me this medication (that I would have to take forever and ever until I died in order to live a “healthy” life) and then being like, “wait, no… THIS is the medication that you will have to take forever and ever until your dying breath in order to lead a “healthy” life.”
I was still being ignored. Only this time, in a much more destructive way. I learned a lot about myself during this time, in spite of the ways I was pathologized and experimented with.
One of the things I learned was that I was an Old Soul. Despite a full and completed matriculation through University, I wasn’t sold on “Science” as the pinnacle of humanity and progress.
On the other side of this intense and incredibly traumatic process, after flushing all those random pills down the toilet (forever and ever until my dying breath, so that I could live a genuine life), I began to self medicate.
My medication was (and still is) a healthy balance of reading, writing, walking, and spending time in reflective and meditative thought.
I began to recover that “specialness” that always guaranteed that I would be successful as a child, this time buttressed by those harsh experiences of torture that I encountered as a young adult.
I was a fiery revolutionary spirit in college, partly because I had only encountered the story of African American slavery and the subsequent Freedom Struggle. Yes I took a “World History” course early on in my studies, but I didn’t really get many perspectives that weren't provincialized to racial politics and the realities of being broke and wanting (or deserving) riches.
It really started my senior year with my History Capstone course called “Revolutions in Science.” In this course, I learned about a few somethings called The Enlightenment, The Mathematical Revolution, and The Scientific Revolution. I learned that right around the time that the slave trade commenced and heated up, Europeans had discovered a scientific worldview. This view of the world was the birth of modernity, informing how nations would organize and how revolutionaries would fight back, from that time forward, pretty much.
That course inspired me to consider the “created” aspect of the world. I began to think about how much of the world I experienced, I struggled in, I was diagnosed and prescribed in, was the result of a relatively small set of catalytic ideas that won out a handful of hundred years ago.
It opened my perspective and widened my vistas. I was “enlightened” by the ideas of Big History and Deep Time. I was encouraged to venture past the horizons of my short 20 - something year experience of life on Earth, and consider life more so in its totality: as a process that had been going on for much longer than four hundred years.
During this time, during my post-graduate independent studies, I renamed myself Zen. Late in my college years, I had a creative alias that I began to develop, under the moniker “Citizen.” The idea then, was that I was freeing myself in a Duboisian sense. I was educating myself with a well-rounded humanities degree, in such a way that I was freeing myself to think for myself. I was going to join the Talented Tenth, and find a way to creatively redress and resolve all the evils of racism, not only for myself, but for my people.
I was a dreamer then. I still am.
The shift from Citizen to Zen came as my creative explorations led me to deciding I would become a rapper. My thinking, at this point, was that I was one of the most well-read and well-written people I knew (black or white), so I would be able to craft messages that were important, and that wouldn’t be hidden from my people in some dusty academic book.
I was still crusading for freedom. Only, I had evolved past provincial ideas of racial, political freedom. I was crusading for truer, more widely imagined freedoms of being, freedoms of self.
During this time, I had recently moved to Virginia, so it was a relatively simple matter to start going by a new name. I just started introducing myself to everyone as Zen. “Call me Zen,” I would say.
As I worked on the ZEN Tape, “ZENtheRapper,” was kind of a last minute decision when my producer/engineer asked me what he should write for my artist name on the distribution website. Chance The Rapper was one of my favorite rappers in high school, and he had a way of using language that I was very inspired by, and my producer/engineer was telling me “Zen” might be too simple to be a distinctive artist name. So I told him: ZENtheRapper.
Fast-forward three years and several projects later, and I have truly become ZENtheRapper. My most recent accomplishment, of which I am very proud, is that I secured my current job as a 7th Grade English Teacher with a “ZENtheRapper” resume, characterizing myself as a performance artist and youth development specialist… only because that’s what ZENtheRapper is.
When I first meet people, nowadays, they give me a look of confusion when I tell them with the utmost confidence that “I am ZENtheRapper.” They probably wonder why I don’t go by my given name of Donte Winslow. They probably wonder why in the world I would brandish the title of “Rapper” with such pride, in such professional spaces, when that is a term that even other artists sometimes scoff at and avoid using.
“Rapper” is a somewhat problematic term that conjures images of underclass miscreants parading as artists while touting foul language and promoting violence and sexual promiscuity. People think of the most popular rappers and they may even think about how even people in the Hip Hop community tend to distance themselves from that term, preferring to instead talk of “Emcees” and “Hiphoppas.”
They think about how Rap used to be about messages of freedom and political/social uplift. But how it has now lost its soul, and sold out to the corporate machine.
But me – I understand Rap as an art that transcends Hip Hop’s 50 year material history. Rap, to me, represents a somewhat mystical connection with African roots in oral performance and storytelling. It is an art form which links the past, present, and future in a creative matrix of poetry, literature, and experience, set to steady rhythms that mimic the human heartbeat and the pulses of reality.
Rap is Big History. Rap is Deep Time. Etymologically, it first referred to “a quick light blow, a resounding stroke.” Rap is the tool of the revolutionary, a simple but effective way to fight back against tyranny, against undue authority, and even against the idea that our particular political and social organization of the world is set in stone, that it represents the pinnacle of humanity and progress.
Rap evolved into a slang word meaning “a rebuke, the blame, responsibility,” in 1777, and became formalized as “a criminal indictment” by 1903. Rap, fundamentally, is a challenge to authority, a challenge to preconceived notions of being and doing.
Fundamentally, rap is rebellious, innovative, and not easily understood.
Its history speaks to the outcast in society, and when equipped alongside knowledge that “outcast in society” is a very relative idea, especially considering the way the criminals of the slave trade were initially heralded as the harbingers of society, the “enlightened men” bringing the gifts of civilization through their colonial exploits around the world, terms like “outcast” and “society” deserve their own re-reckonings.
In 1965, Rap was used to mean “to talk informally, to chat in an easy way.” This was the most recent evolution before New Yorkers started referring to Rap in the way we generally think of it now: as a musical, spoken word performance over a beat.
So… I ask again: What Is A Rapper?
A Rapper is a literary revolutionary. A Rapper is someone who uses language with a deep understanding of place, context, and history, and a trained expertise in poetics, performance, and prosody.
A Rapper is a freethinker who doesn’t use language to dominate and exploit, but instead as a tool to illuminate and enlighten.
This is the standard that Rappers should be held to. It considers a deeper timeline than what now finds ephemeral popularity on entertainment platforms. Please don’t be confused by the rappers nowadays who have succumbed to the misery of their experience, and are responding by using their sacred craft to, in turn, extract riches from a society that taught them that this is the way to freedom.
Because Rap, despite what you may have heard, is not even about popularity. It is about discovery, freedom, and practice. Practice of craft and practice of being.
Rap is about knowledge, wisdom, understanding, creativity, and freethought. It’s about the deconstruction and reconstruction of language. It’s about slang, regional dialects, connecting with experience, and reaching back into the recesses of time.
I am eternally grateful for this gift and this vehicle of wisdom, knowledge, and creativity that I have discovered in my young adulthood. It has been wholly enlightening for me, giving me a sense of intellectual freedom I could only have dreamed about in college. So yes. It’s nice to meet you. I am ZENtheRapper.
Thank you for reading.
