After being the standout rapper on the recent Chicago radio hit “On My Momma” Swing didn’t feel as if he was able to capitalize on the momentum. Things were moving too slow and he needed to make a change. “I just looked at it like, ‘Man, you’ve just got to do this yourself,’” he recalls. “You can’t sit up and wait on nobody and do nothing for yourself. You’ve got to be the one at all angles.”
Swing, who got his name because of his willingness to “swing” first, then got a fateful call from Earl Gainer, an up-and-coming New York producer. Earl heard Swing’s music and wanted to work with him, so Swing paid for his own flight to New York and was ready to record. “That’s how serious I was,” Swing says. “I wasn’t looking for anybody to cater to me. I was just looking at it as an opportunity.”
The dividends were immediate. Earl noticed that Swing, who was staying in the projects in Harlem, was able to fit it wherever he happened to be. “Earl was saying, ‘Yeah, you should make a song talking about going through the hoods since you’re here and everywhere you go, you stay in the hood,’” Swing says. “When he said that, I started listening to the track and I was like, ‘Yeah, I can rotate through any hood.’ You couldn’t escape the beat and it has a feel like it’s actually rotating you through all these hoods. It will lift you up and make you feel like you’re moving. That’s what guided me to really write the song.”
The resulting track, “Rotate,” was the first song Swing recorded while in New York. Swing’s aggressive delivery and street-centered lyrical focus makes “Rotate” an official soundtrack for the streets.
Swing hit the studio hard and soon delivered another future classic, “Push On Him,” which also features Styles P. “I told dude straight up and down that it’s an honor for real because I see his struggle, what he’s on, what he’s doing,” Swing explains. “He’s solidified in the streets and you can tell in the music that I’m real.”
Both “Rotate” and “Push On Him” contain the type of edge that connects with hip-hop’s original fans: street denizens. “I’m bringing the streets back to the streets,” Swing explains. “I’m not trying to bring the streets to the rap game. I’m trying to rotate with the dudes that’s really from the streets and talk about what’s really going on in the streets. You’ve got to be able to bring energy to people. People have to be able to feel you, and they’ve got to know that you’re serious.”
With nearly 50 songs in the vault, there’s no doubt that Swing is serious about his promising career. The buzz “Rotate” and “Push On Em” has already generated has shown that Swing can earn legions of fans by delivering verses that are both lyrically potent and thought provoking.
“All of us shoot the breeze, kick it and say some crazy stuff out of our mouths at times,” he says. “But I’m talking about some deep stuff, some real stuff. I’m talking about abortion, but in a real way to where I’m not trying to preach to nobody. I’m putting people in a situation to where they’ve got to think.”
Growing up on the North Side of Chicago less than a block away from the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects, Swing had plenty to think about. His father was not around and his mother, a music fan especially fond of Stevie Wonder, was struggling to make ends meet. But Swing found a brotherhood with his friends in the streets.
It was the streets that exposed him to hip-hop. LL Cool J, Kool G. Rap and Nas were among his early favorites. “They were just real vivid,” Swing recalls. “LL had a lot of energy that I loved, the pizzazz. Kool G. Rap was real grimy and he would make you see what he was talking about, just like Nas. It was real. A lot of people come out rapping and they’re saying it, but they can’t make you feel it. They had a voice that was speaking to me with words that are real.”
With competitive friends who were quick to participate in neighborhood ciphers, Swing quickly became enamored with rapping and graduated from observing people rhyming to rhyming himself. He also realized that the street life would only present him with two results: death or incarceration.
So Swing and his crew dedicated themselves to rap and started generating a buzz in the Chicago area with their witty wordplay and high-energy stage shows. But it was Swing’s appearance on “On My Mama” that made him a celebrity among the city’s hip-hop elite.
Based on popular Chicago street slang, “On My Mama” gave Swing his biggest musical platform. “My verse really stood out on the song because it was real,” he explains. “I know that coming up in the streets, when you say, ‘On my mama,’ that means that it’s real. You’re going to do it. People knew not to play with you when you said that. I just wrote about when I was growing up what you said on your mama. That’s the big song that put me on the map and that put my name out there.”
Now, as Swing records what is sure to be a landmark debut album, he is drawing from his life in order to create powerful music. “You’ve got to dig into your life and bring that situation to the table,” he says. “I’ve really listened to Stevie Wonder growing up. That’s how I really know how to write, through Stevie Wonder. My words really have to mean something and you’ve got to feel it. I am bringing the streets back to the streets, not bringing streets back to the rap game. A lot of brothers out here are doing some bogus stuff just because they think they’re a thug. The culture of the streets has to be brought back.”
And Swing is the one to do it.
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