“It
was all a joke, but it wasn’t too funny/I remember day’s
mom’s scraping up ends for lunch money.”
–
from All I Ever Knew
By Bear
After dark, the mean streets
of Trenton, New Jersey are not a place most folks would
describe as “safe,” “nurturing,” or “a family environment.”
Granted, that’s true of a lot
of cities, but there’s a certain aura to the place, maybe
it’s the mob movies set there, maybe it’s the ingrained
vision people have of New Jersey as a hard scrabble,
polluted, industrial hell-hole.
Let’s face it, as anyone who’s
had the misfortune of driving through it can tell you, it
isn’t the kind of place you’d want to raise the kids. So
when a young Kevin Frost would bail out of his house to run
the streets and raise hell, his mother Barbara would get in
her beat up Honda and cruise the streets looking for her
son. She’d roll through the projects, alone, trying to rein
him in and keep him safe. When the older cats would see
Kevin, they’d tell him “Yo shortie, your mom was just here,
you need to get your butt home.”
Nobody
will ever know for sure how much of a role those late night
excursions played in keeping Kevin safe, whether it was
luck, fate or the love of a mother for her son that kept him
out of jail and out of the cemetery.
Sitting
at Starbucks in Seattle’s University Village, sipping an
overpriced cup of coffee, Kevin, who has been making music
under the moniker Mista Ock (shortened from Mr. October to
avoid confusion with baseball legend Reggie Jackson),
clearly credits a mother’s love with him being here.
“Just to
see her going through Jersey, going through the streets
looking for me in the middle of the night, that showed me
that the love was there and she just wanted to see me
survive and make it outta there,” Ock says straightening the
76ers jersey on his large frame.
Ock is a
big guy, not fat, but definitely imposing.
“She
pretty much stopped having a life to raise me,” Ock said.
“Growing up, just me and my mom, I saw her do a lot of
sacrificing for me. That’s something that I learned, pretty
much anything that you want, you gotta sacrifice.”
Being raised by a single mom in a place like Jersey gave Ock
an up close look at all the dirt being done in the
neighborhood and made life a daily struggle to persevere.
Music was one of the things that got him through it all.
When he first heard Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di,” he knew he
wanted to rap. He sat down with a pen and pad
and wrote down all of Rick’s lyrics - write, pause, rewind,
write, repeat – until he had them all memorized. Somewhere
around the age of 16, Ock got a hold of the manager for a
local Trenton group who had just dropped a record played his
stuff for him.
The guy
liked what he heard and wanted to sign Ock to a contract. As
a minor, Ock had to ask his mother to sign the contract, but
in his words, “Moms wasn’t havin’ it. She wanted me to
graduate and get outta Jersey. She wanted me to go into the
Service. Which was cool ‘cause I learned a lot.” So
straight out of high school a seventeen-year-old Kevin Frost
joined up with Uncle Sam’s Navy. He got out in ’99,
after a tour on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln,
where he worked in the supply room.
He was in
Seattle and decided to stay because he had a good job and it
looked to him like a good place. After sixteen years
of messing around with the idea, it was time to finally get
serious about his musical aspirations.
But it
damn sure wasn’t easy.
After
dropping a seven song EP and getting a track on the All or
Nothing Soundtrack, Ock was still looking for a label to
call home. Then in early 2002, a friend took him
through to MadPassion Entertainment’s studios, where Matthew
“D” Wong was putting together a compilation for his label.
Ock expressed some
interest in doing an album, and when it became apparent that
there was some chemistry, the two decided to get together on
a more permanent basis and make it happen.
When
asked what it was about Ock that had Matt excited enough to
sign him, he answers without hesitation, “Aside from
delivery and raw skill that I obviously thought was there,
was the determination, his ability to keep his commitments,
to have that drive in him as an artist that wanted it.”
And that
brings us to Ock’s latest work, “The Coldest Winter.”
This
album is an impressive freshman effort. A diary of struggle
and making it past the negative to build something positive,
Ock touches a number of topics without overdoing them, and
deals with the serious without forgetting to have some fun.
“The
whole thing with The Coldest Winter is making something out
of nothing,” Ock said. “A lot of us, you know, regardless
of color, a lot of us come from humble beginnings. We don’t
really have a lot. And me coming from Jersey, I come from a
bad environment, a lot of drugs, crime, all that stuff. So
instead of me just falling victim to that, I just used it as
a stepping stone; and to me all these challenges were just
to help shape me into the person I’ve become.”
From club
tracks like “Come Home With Me,” to thug tracks like “Ride
Tonight,” to conscious tracks like “Countdown to Genocide,”
Ock covers a lot of ground and does so credibly.
He feels
like an artist shouldn’t be afraid to tough different
things, show diversity. He likens his album making process
writing a novel, he wanted to show diversity, he feels as an
MC when you put out an album, you’re putting out a book, and
that book has different chapters.
The end
product has a maturity that you don’t find very often in an
artist’s first album. One of the things that will catch the
listener’s attention is that a theme of responsibility runs
through the album.
Yes, Ock
has been involved in some street situations, yes, he has
done his share of dirt, but he’s not using that as his claim
to fame the way some artists do.
“I did my best to keep it movin’ dodging the slugs/But soon
I was laying in a puddle of blood/with my back on the ground
starin’ up at the moon/And at 2:27 I had met my doom.”
– from Countdown to Genocide
“You
gotta be balanced, I mean, just comin’ out hardcore, da da
da, I do this, I do this,” Ock said. “You know, you wanna
show the flipside, You wanna show what happens, the
consequences, so people get a better picture cause (if you
don’t) you misleading them,” he explains. “There’s a way to
talk about something, and tell it like it is without
glorifying it. We all make mistakes, we all do things we
not proud of so I wanted to talk about it but not glorify
it.”
Ock also touches on more
personal subjects, showing his audience pieces of himself
and his struggles that folks will be able to relate to.
One of the things that come
across in his music is how much his children mean to this
father of three and how much he wants to be there for them.
You can tell that not having a
father has helped shape his views towards it. He says having
kids gave him a sense of purpose and helped stop him from
being selfish, refocused him on what he needs to do to
provide for them.
One of
the most personal areas of the album is his relationship
with his own father, whose battles with the bottle led to
him walking out on his son.
On the
last track of the album, “Forgiveness,” Ock touches on his
father’s battle with alcohol, and rather than be bitter, Ock
has chosen to forgive him, he says he understands what he
was going through and that he has learned from it.
He’s
witnessed other family members deal with that demon and over
the years has come a point in his life that he doesn’t want
to make those same mistakes and as a result gave up drinking
himself.
“To have
the diversity that Ock brought to the table was unique for a
quote “local” artist,” Matt says of making the album. “We
attempted to make a diverse project that would show kinda a
360 view of him and his struggles, his life.”
You get a
sense that this is a guy who has seen more than a lot of
people, and unlike the majority of people who have dealt
with the same struggles, he learned from them at an early
age, and isn’t going to repeat those mistakes just because
that’s the environment he was brought up in.
Listening
to the album you the sense that Ock came up back when Hip
Hop was about more than the bling bling, when you had to
have something to say.
It’s a
notion he readily agrees to.
“I love
the Old School,” Ock says. “Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Kool G
Rap. I always wanted to come across as having something to
say, not just rapping to be rapping.”
Finally,
after 16 years of struggle, Ock is in a good place. He
loves his situation at MadPassion and feels like company has
a sense of family that is giving him a strong foundation to
build a career on.
“I’m just
happy to be doing what I’m doing,” Ock said. “I think I was
blessed to come in contact with Matt and the whole
MadPassion family, ‘cause they gave me a platform where I
could speak.”
And as
much as he loves his people, they’re just as happy to show
some in return.
“He’s the
coolest artist I’ve ever worked with,” Manat MacLeod, one of
MadPassion’s in-house producers, said. “I’m dead serious.
In the studio there’s a really cool back and forth that’s
always been present whenever we’re there. We can give ideas,
he can give ideas, there’s no ego tripping. We can disagree
mutually, and still come to a conclusion.”
Before we
finished Ock had one last thing to put out there: “The scene
[in Seattle] is good, but it needs more unity. I think
Seattle is on the verge of being one of the new places to
explode. People gotta support the local artists. In order
for Seattle to get on that map, and to get the attention,
people gotta support, go out to the shows, and buy the CDs.
Show love for the local artists in order for Seattle to blow
up.”
