Rick Chyme: Grand Rapids hip hop’s poet, storyteller and master collaborator

The Local Spins Artist Spotlight shines on an award-winning rapper with a basketball teamwork mentality who plays Festival and the Local First Street Party this weekend. (Podcast, photo gallery)

 

As Rick Chyme raps on the appropriately titled “Starving Artist,” he “wouldn’t advocate this way of life for most, but this was meant for me.”

Indeed, the award-winning Grand Rapids musician has emerged as one of the most prolific, innovative, intensely collaborative and respected hip-hop artists in West Michigan, one who credits the sport of basketball not only for his entry into the world of music but as a model for teamwork in creating his art.

“Growing up, I played sports, so it’s kind of ingrained the mentality of how we can accomplish more together,” says Chyme, a 1998 graduate of Rockford High School who also played basketball for Western Michigan University.

“The way that basketball and hip hop run, these cultures run parallel and they kind of intersect. It put me in proximity to that music from the time I was 10 until now. Basketball brought me to hip hop. Those poets and storytellers kind of gave me an escape as a listener early on, and then the music has given me an outlet therapeutically.”

It’s done more than that: Chyme’s far-reaching 2013 album, “The 5iveit LP,” won album of the year honors at the Grand Rapids Jammie Awards hosted by community radio station WYCE-FM, bolstered by an impressive roster of guest artists and producers, including Nixon, Ryan K. Wilson, Edye Evans Hyde, Molly Bouwsma-Schultz, Red Pill, Michael Sullivan and many more.

A 17-HOUR RAP AND A COLLABORATION WITH THOUSANDS

Chyme – sporting that distinctive, flowing beard – also has turned heads for his bold ventures, including his bid to set a world record for freestyle rapping at last fall’s ArtPrize competition, when he spent more than 17 straight hours rapping throughout Grand Rapids, with instrumentalists joining him and videographers documenting his interactions with fans and passersby. (Read more about that here.)

“The ArtPrize freestyle,” he says, “was a huge collaboration not just with musicians, but those thousands of people who were down in the city that day.”

In his short but colorful career, the expressive wordsmith and motivator also has traveled extensively, including performances earlier this year at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

“He reaches out to people and he’s got a lot of drive,” suggests longtime associate and producer Nixon, who’s also currently working on projects with hip hop’s Lady Ace and Convotronics. “He’s meant for it and just keeps going for it.”

On Wednesday, that meant rapping on-air during Local Spins Live on News Talk 1340 AM (WJRW), likely the first time a hip hop artist has ever performed on the Grand Rapids AM station. Listen to a podcast of that rap and conversation here.

Although Chyme makes his socially conscious, improvisational rapping and rhyming seem effortless, he cautions that it takes long hours of work, planning and practice to hone that craft. Indeed, his much-repeated mantra is, “Push it past potential each day, manifest your dreams.”

“You stake a step over the line and then there’s this obligation if you want to reach your potential to put in thousands of hours. A lot of people don’t know that’s the case in hip hop,” he says. “I didn’t know I was even built for it until I was confronted with the decision to put this time in. It’s just making that commitment to what you believe is your destiny, your passion.”

But he also credits time spent in the classroom as a kid, sponging up information that would eventually surface in his songs.

REFLECTING THE SOCIAL COMMENTARY OF DYLAN IN THE 1960s

“It’s just your vocabulary, anything that I learned growing up, those classes that you thought didn’t matter,” he says. “We’ll go into schools (now) and talk about how you think you won’t need your science class and maybe you aren’t going to be a scientist or whatever, but there’s stuff and content that you are absorbing.”

Oh, Chyme concedes he has rhyming dictionary somewhere, “but it’s not something that gets used often. The music will tell you where to go and like anything, I’ve developed this skill set and there’s a bank of these words, and you continue to read and watch movies and bits and pieces of it just kind of hang on with you.”

As a unique emissary for hip hop, Chyme also suggests there’s an ocean of worthwhile, socially conscious hip hop simmering below the surface of mainstream rap and worth exploring.

“What you are seeing on the mainstream level isn’t necessarily representative of the whole,” he insists. “Your mom might think that hip hop is guns, drugs and misogyny. That is a part of it, but that is also part of our world. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with music that’s talking about that, it’s just why can’t we have a more broad example at the top?”

Chyme offers that many socially conscious artists are “the same as folk singers back when Dylan was ‘the voice of the generation.’ The Internet is going to help expose these artists but it’s just a tough battle at the level of radio and the mainstream media because you’ve got corporations who are putting a bunch of money behind some music which at this point comes from a limited perspective.”

Fans will have a chance to see and hear Chyme perform twice in Grand Rapids this weekend – first during the Festival of the Arts at 8 p.m. Friday on the Fountain Stage and at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Local First Street Party near Bistro Bella Vita on Weston Street SW.

He also plays New Holland Brewing in Holland at 10 p.m. Friday with Muskegon’s Chordis Bell.

Get more information about Chyme and his music, and watch some of his videos, at rickchyme.com.

PHOTOS BY ANNA SINK/LOCAL SPINS

Email John Sinkevics at jsinkevics@gmail.com.
Copyright 2014, Spins on Music