Today we’d like to introduce you to R1can.
R1can, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Testing. Testing. Mic check. Yo! Aye! I’m a bit nervous, but look! First things first: my grandma raised me and my siblings on Skyland. Skyland is a neighborhood off Buford Highway, in what has become the city of Brookhaven. This area of Atlanta, known as the ‘international corridor’, is a place where people from all over the world live, own businesses, raise families, work, play and go to school. Right now the neighborhood is in the middle of being gentrified but look. Skyland has always been a crossroad in my eyes, a place where people meet. So at its core, Skyland Records looks to embody that dynamic and not only embrace the diversity but through the power of words seeks to protect it.
My grandma had said that when I was a toddler, she never spoke to me in baby talk – no goo goo gaga or nothing – and when I started talking, at age four, it was in complete sentences. After I learned to read I usually kept a book with me (I started with Harry Potter, Alex Rider, and Lemony Snicket and worked my way to Mary Shelley, Albert Camus, and J. D. Salinger). I was a bright, promising young man in elementary school: I won a spelling bee, a reading bowl, had principal’s honor roll and accelerated reader awards. All the way up to my senior year of high school, I was the kid that ‘enjoyed’ writing essays for school, but the older I got, the more of a class clown I became. Eventually, I came to a simple, but poignant realization: I could write to entertain people. Since then I have developed a passion for writing that has brought me joy beyond simply being a reader.
I’ve drafted short stories and stand-up comedy routines. I have outlined novels I want to write and developed storyboards for short films I want to direct. I co-wrote an email blast and successfully helped a startup reach its funding goal for its Patreon account. If it can be written, I want in on it. You could pay me next to nothing (*wink wink Netflix). However, I am currently focused on a particular passion above the rest.
In the fall of 2009, in the back of my Algebra 3 class, a friend of mine pushed me to freestyle a cappella like a person inciting a riot. This was not my introduction to rap music; I have been listening to rap my entire life and it is my favorite form of self-expression and entertainment. However, this was the first time I understood what it really meant to rap. I loved it, but I was also good at it. In less than a year and a half, I dropped three mixtapes, Uptown East, The Takeoff, and The Life, under the moniker, R1CAN.
Call it a ten-year challenge, but don’t call it a comeback I been here for years. I just turned 26 years old and I have dropped three solo projects, three collaborative projects and dozens of singles, since ’09, all in the name of pushing the art form I know and love. I have created hundreds of songs and thrown away several albums worth of material just because I didn’t like them anymore. I have racked up tens of thousands of individual streams and personally passed out hundreds of mixtapes.
I have accomplished a lot, but it doesn’t feel like much. I still have a lot more I want to get done with the music. For me the music is a medium that allows me to express how I feel and stand up for my principles, to represent for the people that feel similarly, and it grants me a platform for my ideas to reach a larger audience. I have been writing lyrics for fun since high school, now I’m writing lyrics that mean something, that go deep and hit you in the heart.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
F*** no! I have had a difficult life, in general, but I’ve also made life more difficult for myself at times.
Like if I go back to the beginning and tell you about my birth, it’s crazy. My father married my mom in ’89 after she got pregnant with my sister. They had my brother in April of ’91. They were divorced by November. I was born in New York City in January of ’93. I was the youngest of three kids. When I grew up, I found out that my father had been with another woman and had three other kids! Two of the kids were older than my sister and one was born between my sister and brother. In ’94, my mom brought me and my siblings to Atlanta to visit my grandma. Our father called us during the trip and told us to stay here. So we did and I haven’t heard from him since.
I love my mom. I say that to say, my mother is mentally disabled. She had multiple brain tumors as a teenager and had part of her frontal lobe removed. She has no short term memory and that’s not great if you’re raising kids. By ’97, my grandma was filing for custody, but she didn’t get full custody until the summer of 2000.
My brother was always in and out of jail from the age of 11 to 21. He was never home for a full year. I wrote about this a lot and mentioned it in songs hoping to help him realize the impact of his absence. He was the one hanging with LRZ, a Mexican gang in Atlanta. I would try to hang out with him and guys would try to fight us. There were incidents where knives were pulled out and bats were swung. There were incidents where guns went off and people were shot.
I stopped focusing on school during middle school. By senior year of high school, I had experienced enough trauma to where, after reading Albert Camus’, The Stranger, I decided that life was pointless. So I dropped out of high school. I wasn’t really publishing as much music as I could have been during this period of my life, although, I hadn’t stopped writing lyrics and recording songs. The collaborative project with ‘goodie’, Creative Juice Overdrive, was put out in 2013. It was during this time that I got myself into college, performed at the Apache Cafe, shot a music video for the single “We Got It’, and was working and trying to support myself.
In 2014, things reached a point where I was positive about the direction I was going with the music. My brother and I were living together and I was convincing him to rap again. There were some hiccups, but I could see it coming together.
My brother was shot and killed in our apartment complex in July of 2014. I was evicted from the complex a couple weeks after that because of the incident. It upended my life. I could not focus on anything. I began to spiral downward after I left my job due to stress.
Like when I tell you, I didn’t give a f*** about s**t after that like I really lost all interest in maintaining any semblance of composure or normalcy. My lyrics were dark and emotional.
I have gone through some rough stuff between my brother’s death and now, but I’m in the best position I have ever been in. Over the last few years, I have gotten my life together. I work full-time to support myself, but lately, I have been focusing a lot more on writing. I am so inspired that I’m starting to feel like my lifestyle now is not conducive to being a writer or musician. I want to work on my passion, but my energy is wasted at my job. It’s time to take a big step. I’m excited and it doesn’t really matter if I fail.
I have had to overcome a ton during my short time in this world. Whenever I feel down or defeated, I ask myself what will make me happy and I try to satisfy that. Thats all that matters to me now: the pursuit of happiness.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Skyland Records story. Tell us more about the business.
Skyland Records started out as a joke. It was originally named Skyland World Entertainment which honestly was a play on SWE or Smoke Weed Everyday. My brother, Skin E, and his friend Mouser were definitely a big influence on me growing up. To me though, the music was never a joke. I started with a mic that was used for like a video game or something. The quality was terrible so I went to Best Buy and was looking at the mics they had, but the prices were nuts. Basically, I stole my first real microphone. I broke it quick though. I finally bought a mic that lasted me for a while. The three of us were rapping together, but my brother got arrested again and I started rapping on my own. This is when I dropped my second and third mixtapes.
I produce, but I focus on the recording/mixing side of the music. Goodie can do it all he produces, writes lyrics, plays instruments. We have several artists that focus on rapping.
There is a story that needs to be told about Atlanta. The neighborhood we grew up in has a rich history, one that you never hear about. Some people say that Atlanta is like the new Los Angeles and nowhere is that more appropriate to say than Buford Highway. People from Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America, and Central America populate this area. It is the most diverse part of Georgia – period. The story is though, if they buy up all the affordable housing, demolish it, and build luxury condos, where will all these people move? Why should they have to? The narratives that derive from that life and that environment are what fuel artists like me.
Today Skyland Records is an imprint that is focused on the artists’ development. People need an outlet; otherwise, they end up getting into trouble. Skyland has fostered the passions of artists like goodie, 12 GA., Skin E, John Doe, and more.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I don’t believe in luck. I don’t believe in one god. I don’t want to be passive about my life. If I did it, I meant it. If it happened, it is what it is. That’s it. Let’s just do it!
Contact Info:
- Address: 2585 Skyland Dr. NE, Brookhaven, GA, 30319
- Website: https://soundcloud.com/r1can
- Phone: 4048620959
- Email: misteramirr1can@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/misterr1can/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelastlefty
- Other: https://vimeo.com/groups/24241/videos/87400128
Image Credit:
Zoe Gherman
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