By All Means Music... and Marketing,

Beazly has survived in 55 cities since leaving his parents home at the age of 17. Having recorded more than 200 songs, the rapper-producer-engineer has also signed two record deals. He was incensed by the “pop direction” both deals were headed in, however, so although he stayed down and continued to push the creative envelope, the flames from those formerly hot artist deals burned out soon after they were lit. Now after 19 years in the game Beazly has two promotional albums on the horizon and, given that he has spent a nomadic life relocating his impermanent domains of survival, is seeking permanence. He landed safely in Atlanta five years ago. Finally, a place where can possibly live – for once. “I get up early and sit in traffic for an hour, then work all day at a job I hate,” Beazly begins, offering the details of his daily grind. “Then I leave the job, sit in more traffic for another hour, then go to the studio to make music,” he concludes. “The music is more therapy to myself.”

Homelessness. A human condition as American as, well, homeownership. We’re taught, really conditioned, to go home at night, to live, after a long often unfulfilled day of work; of survival. When there exists no home to call ones own, however, that cycle of day and night fuses, becomes perpetual, ubiquitous, dominant. The day never ends and the night never truly begins. There is only an overwhelmingly constant 24 hour presence, a time when the social stares are dark and cold, when your meals are as few and far between as your earnings and destinations, when your culture grows precarious and your cult following, your family, could care less -- when your sunlight is spent lying in taboo cracks and your moonlight spent tucked in train station crevices. I speak to you from this experience. Jack Beazly, unfortunately, does as well. “I’ve lived in around fifty five different places,” Beazly begins, the gravity of self-reflection tugging the base in his voice towards the concrete he stands on. “I’ve been homeless, did the red cross thing, the soup kitchens. I’ve had guns in my mouth but I’m still alive,” he explains, his offerings as scattered and brief as his belongings during many of his shelter stays. “I’m still alive because I never gave up on myself.”

Lyrically Beazly’s work is reminiscent of Pun and Em, startlingly clever wordplay mixed with revealingly emotional tales of hardship. Pick a track, any track, sometimes he is witty, other times he sounds Black. But the kid from Connecticut who sported the “X” hat as a youth has always been an admirer of rap culture, of Black people, of hip hop. If you ain’t know that, then you ain’t know Jack. “I’ve always been really into Black culture,” Beazly begins. “I always stuck up for Black culture. For some reason, even as a kid, I knew there was a bigger purpose than whatever was going on locally in Southbury or Danbury,” he says. “Hip music is the sound of rebellion, the voice of the people who are down with the struggle.”

His many styles and deliveries are intertwined, folded together seamlessly, bound. The stories are true and each presentation is picturesque like cover art, allowing the listener to actually view the topics being addressed. The greatest of emcees, from Pac to Nas, B.I.G. to Face, Cube to 3Grand, submerge themselves entirely in the music, drown their ‘fro in the flow of things, bang back when the track gangs up on them. Beazly, a wordsmith and craftsman who studies these and other greats, quite literally becomes one of the instruments when he rhymes. One helluva site to behold quickly manifests into one helluva sound that unfolds. “I listen to the music and whatever that music makes me feel I try to go with,” Beazly says. “I am just completely honest. I put myself out there.” On “Super M.C.”, a heavily web-rotated mixtape track, Beazly rhymes fervently about saving hip hop, an art form separated from its core because it no longer speaks to, or for, the poor. “I think hip hop is fragile right now, close to extinction,” Beazly begins, discussing his life’s work as explored through the street-born medium. “Money has watered down the music to a point where there are only a few rappers right now doing real hip hop.”

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