August 17, 2016
Both shot as young men, Namel Norris and Ricardo Velasquez now rap from their wheelchairs – they’ve played at the White House and yearn for mainstream fame.
Staged at the United Nations headquarters in New York and performed by disabled musicians, the Beautiful Concert – in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities – aimed for an air of sedate harmony.
Following one violinist’s meditation from the French opera Thaïs and a pianist’s performance of Beethoven’s Mondschien, up rolled Namel “Tapwaterz” Norris and Ricardo “Rickfire” Velasquez. They grabbed mics, waited for the bass to echo through the sonorous arena and from their wheelchairs started rapping Welcome to Reality.
“You think you’re rough, you think you tough, you think you’re bad as me … keep it up and you’ll be sitting down like me,” exhorted the duo, known as 4 Wheel City. “Mr can’t think, read or write, Mr one to carry guns ’cause you can’t fight … You living life the wrong way … I ain’t trying to play, trying to open up your eyes before you end up in jail or paralyzed.”
Even at the UN, 4 Wheel City pulled no punches. “We have two sides to what we do, and we try to do them both with the same mission, the same purpose,” says Norris, when I catch up with him at the 4 Wheel City booth during a recent New York street fair to mark the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “We do music to inspire people and we do music to plant seeds. Youth need checkpoints and references when they’re in trouble. If a kid says: ‘I’m not going to touch my gun today, because those guys told our class their story and their story’s crazy,’ then we’ve done our job.”
For The Full Article Go To:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/17/new-york-rap-duo-4-wheel-city-guns-shootings
