LeeBangah

Another Day (STORY BEHIND A FRIEND GONE TOO

 

On the wall above his bed, Brandon Dudley has a picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb. Tucked inside the frame is a newspaper clipping with the headline “Brother Held in Girl’s Shooting.”
    The article tells the story of Quanmetrice Robinson, a 15-year-old girl accidentally shot by her 14-year-old brother in their home. News of the tragedy shocked the community, especially Dudley and the rest of Robinson’s close friends. Dudley and his friends took their grief to the Music Resource Center.
    “The kids were here in the studio the day after Quanmetrice was killed,” says Johns at the MRC. “What do you do with those feelings? They came to the studio. It gave them a place to immediately tease out their emotions, and to memorialize her death and what they went through with it.”
   In seventh grade, Dudley discovered a passion for hip-hop alongside Joseph “Jay Dot” Scott, his friend since kindergarten. Like most fledgling MCs, they started by rapping along with instrumental tracks of popular songs, then graduated to crafting their own songs using drum machines and synthesizers. “My friend told me one day there was a studi o. I started going, and that was it,” says Dudley, who raps under the name “Lee Bangah.”
    He learned to craft beats and soundscapes, the best of which induce a spine-tingling chill. Older rappers helped him write rhymes that now flow effortlessly off his tongue, fluttering with the playfulness and precision of jazz drumming. Most importantly, he learned to tell a story. The story of Quanmetrice Robinson, which affected Dudley deeply, eventually became “Another Day,” a rap ballad that implores listeners to cherish their fleeting lives, because you never know what could happen tomorrow.
    “You probably think this won’t happen to y’all,” Dudley raps, “until an accident happens, Lord Jesus just waits and calls.”
    After recording the song at the Music Resource Center, Dudley made a video with the help of Light House’s production studio. The video for “Another Day” is an elaborate effort, featuring Dudley and dozens of friends in various locations, including a cemetery and a packed church. The Listen Up! Youth Media Network selected “Another Day” as one of their best submissions of 2004. Another one of Dudley’s Light House videos, for the song “You’ll Never Know Me,” was a finalist for a Listen Up! award this year, and the video was also shown last month at the Future Filmmaker’s Festival in Chicago.
    If you still doubt Dudley’s commitment to his music, check out his forearms, which are tattooed with the words “Live Easy”—his personal philosophy, and the title of his upcoming debut album.
    “When I write, I just think about things that happen in my own life,” he says. In songs like “The Survival” and “You Don’t Know Me,” he tells of the age-old teenage quest for identity in an often unfriendly world.
    Part of teenage life is trying on personas like clothes, looking for an identity that feels right. More than ever, today’s media-saturated culture gives teens millions of options, almost unlimited ways of being. Yet, in the pandemonium of sounds and images screaming for kids’ attention (and money), something often gets lost: the soft, true sound of their own inner voice.
    As Dudley says in the introduction to the “You’ll Never Know Me” video, hip-hop provides a way to reflect on his own life, to tell his own story in his own voice.
    “People talk about how I’m not going to be nothing in life, just an original black boy living where I’m living,” Dudley says. “This video is telling people, like, just listen to what I have to say. Don’t judge a book by its cover. ‘Cause deep down, I have some stuff to tell that people really need to hear.”

 

 

A brief history
of hip-hop