Rage Rocc Boy
GOD$ AMONG U$
2016 | Hip Hop
— track 12: "WOOD GRAIN”
Raymond Janis: When I was in middle school [during the mid-90s in Kyle, SD (recently renamed to Little Wound, SD)] we had a principal named RJ Trujillo who, he brought a big boombox to school. He was in the military. Gang violence was real bad, real prevalent in our school, in our communities. It’s crazy because you don’t think of it as a gang, like, “Oh you guys live out on the rez? What are you guys fighting about?” We have, like, six different towns that go to our school, so our town might like wearing blue because our school is blue, and we don’t really think of it as a gang, but then another kid that comes from another, they don’t like wearing blue and it turns into gangs, and gang violence. So our principal, he set it up different where, like, “Alright, if there’s no fights, no gang violence the whole week, on Fridays, no matter what, the last hour we’ll have a dance.” And what those dances would turn into would be — one of my buddies, he wanted to be a DJ, and he had records, had it all, and he would come, and they would let him set up, and pretty soon it would turn into rap battles. And so in middle school I didn’t really rap battle, but I liked the vibe, like, seeing older peers, seeing friends spit, I was like, “So that’s cool.” And it was a kind of way to, like, if I don’t like someone then I could say it and they couldn’t say nothing, like, “It’s just a rap battle. What are you getting mad about? You want to fight me and ruin this?” Because that’s the whole thing, “You fight me and you ruin this for everybody,” but if you’re good at rapping they’re like, “Are you going to say something?”
In high school it was, like, on a bigger level. So, like, our little gym is where they’d have the dances monthly, and every time there’d be at least twelve rappers. There’d be a dance, then there’d be, like, a whole hour where it was just people battling. And in high school our amphitheater’s a circle, so people would chill out there, and people would bring their boomboxes and just rap, not so much about battling, some people would battle but most people were just rapping just to rap, and it was, like, really popular. So I would spit, and I was learning how to freestyle, building my skill, building my craft. And then in high school, me and that DJ, his name’s Ill Dubb [Will Spotted Eagle] and he makes beats, we made a project together. That project’s lost in the files somewhere, but we had a song that was popular at dances, so we felt like, “I’m famous.”
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GOD$ AMONG U$ wasn’t going to come out, like, I wasn’t going to put it out. Lakota Nostra was going to be the last album that I did. At the time I was moving back to where I grew up and I was thinking about doing school board type stuff and writing more grant work type stuff, and so I was thinking, like, “Is this who I want to —” because I always did music, I always did music, but I didn’t want people to think, like, I’m a kid, like I don’t know what’s going on. But I do. You need this representation. I’m not really young, but I am the youngest person on my school board and I feel like they need that interpretation from the young adults in our community that are still trying to better our community. And so I was thinking about, “Ah, I don’t want to put this out.” Especially, like, I want kids to do good, but at the same time I want kids in art, and this is the stuff that kids like. And I was just like, “Shoot, I think I’m just going to put it out,” and surprisingly everybody liked it. I think people were expecting me to put out full length songs, and I didn’t. It’s like, “I’m going to show you how I rap, show you my skills.” Not just saying, “Oh I got the coolest car,” or, “I got the most money.” I just wanted to spit on it. I didn’t care.
I don’t make beats. All of the beats are all beats from other people, like, some people I don’t know, some people I do know, some people I follow. Other than that everything is done by me, like, I mix all of it. Even the cutting and splicing, some of those beats don’t even go together, it’s just me taking, like, “Oh, I like this guy’s beat, but then I like this on another.” All of these guys that I find, they’re not, like, on all the traditional — like, they’re not on BeatStars where you can, like, sell your beats. I found them through Bandcamp, and I’d be like, “Hey, can I spit something on this?” And they were just more like, “Go ahead. Do it.” GOD$ AMONG U$, when I made it, it was really experimental. I wasn’t just trying to make, like, a regular album where the same old, “Oh I need a hook. I need these three verses.” I wanted to rap. I wanted to, I guess, push myself lyrically. I was writing more, but at the same time some of them I wasn’t writing, I was just rapping and just freestyling and saying stuff, and then listening back, and if I thought it was cool it stayed, and if it didn’t then I didn’t put it out. Some of those came out really cool. But for the most part, I was really, really working on my penmanship on that album. I really wanted to spit bars because people in the indigenous hip hop scene all were saying, “I’m the best rapper,” and nobody’s on my level. So I wanted to prove to people, “No, no. I’m the best. I spit. I’m the best rapper.” Kind of my little challenge to everyone else.
I started rapping, I felt like it was my outlet. Writing these songs and telling people my story. It’s like, you’re really vulnerable because you’re putting yourself out there like that, to people you don’t know. Especially I feel like you’re going to get judged. They might use that against you, because coming up in the rap battle scene, like, if I knew a little insider thing, I’d be like, “I’m going to use that against you.” So it’s kind of like a double-edged sword because, like, I’m going to tell my whole story. And my story too is, like I always say in my music, “This is my passion mixed with my pain.” Growing up, when I was seven years old my dad killed himself. Suicide’s really heavy prevalent on the rez. Back then it wasn’t. That was, like, the first person — I was seven years old and I would ask, like, “Jeez, my dad killed himself,” and I didn’t know anybody else. Everybody would die, like, car accident or natural causes. That messed with me as a kid. I dealt with issues growing up, and even today I see my brothers and sisters and they have those issues of, “I don’t have a dad.” They have that mentality, and it’s hard to break that cycle of trauma, and I’m still trying to break that cycle and not be like that. For a little while there I was trying to go into the counseling field, and I learned statistically that if one of your parents committed suicide you have a 50% chance for the rest of your life. And I was like, “Wow these are some hard statistics to look at.” Just imagine: my whole life, it’s 50%. And so I was like, “Nah, I ain’t going to do that.” And I grew up and I started to see my friends — like, it was a tough, tough time. Especially growing up here, like, what else is there if all your friends are dying off, how can you save everyone? And so that’s why I always say that whenever I make albums I’m telling you real stuff that’s going on, like, from my dad dying, my friends dying, and stories about real rez stuff that’s going on, from people’s depression. And so in my music that’s what I speak to. I do rap about a lot of aspects in my life, but I always tell people, the reason I call myself Rage, it’s like, that pain of when I was a kid growing up, and then, like, turning that into something good. And then Rocc Boy comes from my Lakota name, Hota Inyan Najin, literal translation it means “a grey standing rock” but when it was told to me, it was that I was the rock in the middle that everybody would lean on, that everybody would confide in.
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Growing up, especially on the rez, especially in the middle of America, what are you connected to? Because, like, when I was a kid I listened to everything. I listened to West Coast music: G-funk music, gangsta rap. And I listened to New York music like Biggie, and Nas, and JAY-Z, and then it was like even the conscious rappers like Talib Kweli, and Common. I didn’t have, like, one set of sounds that when I was growing up I was like, “That’s how I envision myself.” And then I hit high school, I was really into Southern music. Like, for some reason in my town DJ Screw, was the coolest music. It felt like, Native hip hop, when I was growing up, like, Litefoot was the only guy that sounded alright, especially when he did that album with Kid Frost [Good Day to Die].
I went to college. Did that. I went to Si Tanka University for two years, found out it just wasn’t my vibe. So I came back, started working back home, and I started getting back into music when I got back here. One time [my brother] said, “Hey pick me up, I’m out to No Flesh,” and I said, “Alright, sure.” In the basement they have their little studio, and they’re rapping, and I was like, “I want to get down. Let’s go.” He made some beats, there was seven of us, and, we all, for three nights we made 21 tracks. All the songs were really good, and we put it out, it was called K-Town Warriors. My brother and I, we was Native Empire, and then we started rapping with No Flesh, and then it turned into a big Native Empire. Did three more albums: Rez Boyz, Talk Shit Get Hit, and The Baddest Click. We performed a lot of shows in Rapid, shows down here on the rez, like, Rosebud, Eagle Butte, we’d hit the rezes. And then we did shows in Denver, it was kind of, like, moving then, trying to do something with it. At the time we was pushing the movement, like really hard.
First Fellas is the group that I created. So me and Ill Dubb, we was trying to put an album together. That’s my best friend. He’s the one doing DJ back in the day. He was telling me, “I want to put a beat tape out. I want to pursue music for real.” So I was like, “Let’s make an album then.” Got together, and then it turned into, like, “we should just market ourselves like that’s our label, and we could get other people under it, and if they put out an album we could help them produce it, help them distribute it, get them shows.” Me and him started, and then one of my childhood friends, his name’s Dirty, Dirty Vitalis, DJ Vitalis but everyone calls him Dirty since he was little. He has a real raspy voice. I listened to his album [NGK (Native Grind Klick) — Welcome to Pine Ridge], sounded cool. Like, it was real raw, like really, really raw. So me, Will, Dirty. And then [Dirty] said, “I’ll bring one of my friends, I know you guys know each other, but I’m going to see if it’s cool.” And I’m like, “Well, who is it?” And he’s like, “His name’s K-Dawg, Kyle.” And the funny thing is, Native Empire built our popularity on rap battling, and Kyle’s crew was Rez Records from Pine Ridge, and they made a diss song to Native Empire, like, they were saying stuff about one of our member’s sisters. So we heard it and so we didn’t get along. We, like, made songs back and forth, and we tried to fight each other. Well, you know how you’re young, and you see each other out in public, and it was in Rapid, there was cops all around, and it was during a powwow, so it was, like, a big thing. I was like, “Bro, that was a long time ago. I’m sure he’s fine now, we’ll be fine.” Then we met and it was crazy because he became a good friend after actually meeting him. In their group, Rez Records, K-Dawg was the one that was popular in their group. K-Dawg had 3 Legged Dawg. Big Ray [aka Keylo] could freestyle and everyone liked him, I was featured on one of his albums [Ballad of a Badman], but K-Dawg was animated, he had that hip hop look, everything he did, and his style, he’s like real morbid, his style’s real graphic, I liked it. And so when we met we talked about, like, “Hey we’re going to start First Fellas, we’re trying to get a project going for all of us. You down?” And he’s like, “Yeah I want to rap.” Another guy that was in the group too was one of my bros growing up, he was doing stuff out of Eagle Butte, at the time he went by David Love, and then him and Emonisi they were called Young, Native, and Talented, Y.N.T., they would make mixtapes over popular beats at the time, and then they came out with an album [The Mixtape] that was, like, super dope, really cool. So we were rapping, doing songs, that’s how I met Colton. Colton handed me a CD at one of the fairs of him. He was a young guy, 16 at the time, and he was spitting, like, he sounded way older than I thought he was. I think he found his sound once we got a little bit older: that R&B hip hop sound, because he sings round dance songs, and he sings Lakota spiritual songs. His name’s Ekichetu now. He makes music now with Antoine Edwards, Nataanii Means, Tufawon out of Minnesota, and Gunner Jules. All of them kind of do that the R&B-style hip hop. It sounds cool. I wanted [First Fellas] to be where you knew it was Native, but you had to, like, “Are they really Native? Because they don’t sound like they’re Native.” Like, we wanted to be on a professional level where we just sounded good. We just wanted to be, like, that’s hip hop right there.
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What I’m trained in is health and wellness. Actually got published for finding data on my own community: prediabetes, and diabetic rates in children, and overweight in our community. And so that’s what I was doing. Then our college here [Oglala Lakota College] said they were going to have a graphic design degree and I was like, “No way! I’m making my album covers, I’m making flyers and posters already, I’m making logos for people. Shoot, I should do that and get a degree behind my name.” I just finished, like, Wednesday. And so, two semesters ago they’re like, “Hey there’s this opportunity [the We Are Still Here project]. We know these people at NACDI [Native American Community Development Institute]. You guys should apply for it.” And so I put in for it, I didn’t think I was going to get it. I’m going to do a big mural, but it’s going to be a digital one. It’s going to go in the George Floyd park, and so it’s going to be, like, the Lakota supporting the black community. Then we’re going to collaborate on a big project that’s going to be presented in the Hennepin [Theatre District in Minneapolis], it could be digital design stuff, or we could paint, whatever we chose to do. I always did graffiti and stuff because I always thought, like, I’m hip hop, I have to learn how to MC, I don’t breakdance, but I can do graffiti. I always did art, and I always liked to dabble in digital art, and so I think once I got into painting, and actually going to school for it, I was like, “Alright then, that’s what I want to do now.” So that’s what I’m pursuing right now, not so much the music side.
Being in my 30s now, I look at these new kids rapping and it’s like, “Jeez, I remember these kids at my shows.” There was a kid in the town that I live in, Dawson Dayne, they go by N.H.O.D., I remember him as a little, little kid, and he was singing my songs to me at the basketball courts, like he’d rap stuff to me, and I was like, “Bro, that’s hard.” And at the same time I was like, “Jesus, this little kid’s cussing.” And his mom would be like, “He listens to you guys!” And I’d be like, “Cool! That’s cool.” And I didn’t know what to do for him. And then now he does music, which is cool. There’s another kid out of Thunder Valley, Nevada Brave [aka Nevad Brave], and he reminds me of the stuff we was doing. It’s basically rapping, like talking shit. But with him it’s, like, a singing rap, that new style of hip hop music, a lot of autotune. Both of them are really popular. That’s one of my plans, to actually bridge that gap between my generation and their generation. There’s a ton. When I think back, the scene was really big. I think people don’t realize the hip hop scene in South Dakota is big. There’s a lot of people that do it. People don’t think, “Oh, South Dakota hip hop.” They think more JazzFest, and old time bands, but there’s a big, big scene of hip hop music. Some people think we’re just Natives rapping about stuff that don’t pertain to them, but no matter what they’re talking about, it pertains to them if they’re telling their stories.
RAYMOND JANIS’ ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
LakotaBourne — Through Sky Way Road (2021)
Witko334 — Public Enemy (2020)
Ekichetu — Ekichetu (2016)
Keylo — Ballad of a Badman (2014)
SOURCES
“We Are Still Here Raymond Janis.” Hennepin Theatre Trust, 13 Apr. 2021, hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here-raymond-janis/.
Janis, Raymond. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 6 May 2021.
