Mista Ock

Mista Ock

Pieces of a Man

By : Bear

"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

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 movie

s 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."