Sheep, to lion, to child. These are the three stages of transcendence which local artist and hip-hop group member Jordan “J.green” Green said guide his path through life. And although he is several years out of high school, he said he tries to become more of a child as time goes on.
“One day, you’ll see things could’ve been different, but you chose to let life go the way it was going. Like, ‘Muncie sucks, nothing to do here,’” Green said. “When you were a little kid, you would go out and make things to do, but now as we’re older, you can’t just go play in the park, because that’s weird, you gotta be doing adult things. But I feel like I’m getting back in touch with that imagination.”
Green is a member of the four-piece local hip-hop group L.A.M.E Crew.
Before he joined the band, Green was a lion.
“In high school, I was telling myself, ‘I’m gonna be this and that, I’m not worried about anything.’ But after so long, you realize that courage and proudness is not real,” Green said. “You’re just putting on that proudness.”
Green has always been into music and memorizing lyrics, but he didn’t try to write songs until his senior year of high school. He had friends at school and work that he could bounce ideas off of, he said. They told him he should keep with it which gave him the confidence to push forward.
In college, everything came together when Green and friends created L.A.M.E. Crew.
“So much had to happen perfectly for us all to meet. It’s so nuts,” Green said.
The first piece of the puzzle was randomly picking an orientation date, where he met his future roommate.
Green had only been writing rhymes for less than a year when he arrived at Ball State in 2012. Being a rapper wasn’t something he would “talk up” to people right away; he found a calling fairly quickly in meeting future L.A.M.E. Crew producer, rapper and DJ, Joe Fife, through Ricky Webb.
“[My roommate and I] met Ricky skating [and] found out we lived two doors down from each other,” Green said. “[Then] we met [Fife] and listened to his beats, and it was exactly like I like, beats [that were] soulful.”
Green said Fife was reluctant to start making beats for him, because he was worried Green wasn’t committed, a common problem Fife found in artists. But after Green rapped one of his verses Fife realized he was the real deal, Green said.
“Within the first month we had made, like, six songs officially as L.A.M.E. Crew, which was just a joke at the time,” Green said.
Now, L.A.M.E. Crew consists of four main members, all of which are credited by Green as rappers: Jordan “J.green” Green, Tre “Fate” Smith, Ricky “Nesh Backwood” Webb, and Joe Fife. The group performed April 4 at the Acoustic Room in Muncie.
The group’s lyrics cover many topics, but Green said their main stipulation is to give meaning to the message behind the music and avoid being “generic,” like rapping about money.
“Don’t get me wrong, we talk about money, but not really that much because we’re broke. We [might] talk about wanting it, but not blowing it or spending it,” he said.
Even their name relates back to this philosophy. L.A.M.E. stands for Laughing At My Enemies, or “being who you are and not caring about what others think of you,” Fife said.
L.A.M.E. Crew does not have much competition, Green said, because there aren’t many people doing the same thing.
“A lot of people wanna rap. But I’m not worried about that, because it’s not me versus them. If I stay true to myself and just do what I’m doing, my life will be fine with me; the world around me will be for me,” Green said.
Green likened the group’s progress to artists like Drake who worked for years before they found success.
“They started where we are,” Green said. “[They] met each other … and built it and built it.”
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