![]() I saw my neighborhood changing and gentrification starting to take place. “I eventually felt like I had this story to tell and these people that I wanted to honor. Then, in 2009, his younger brother was accidentally killed amid a neighborhood dispute. When Porter Ray was 16, his father died after a four-year battle with multiple sclerosis. His perspective changed after a series of losses made him think differently about the skills he had been quietly developing. “It was someone I could listen to, someone that would talk to me and sort of understand me, and help guide me.” “Rap was like my friend when I was younger,” he explains. Now 34, Porter Ray was an eager student of the creative arts, but he never had a particular goal in mind when it came to his relationship to music. “All the time, we would just be rhyming to each other.” “We would kick rhymes over the internet, or just over the phone,” Porter Ray says. His early interest in writing poetry and short stories came into play when he began writing his own lyrics, which he practiced delivering with friends. “I started being able to take pieces of those verses and writing my own stuff, or just learning how to develop my own rhyme patterns and wordplay.” “That was like my early training in being an MC,” he recalls. Therese Catholic Academy, Porter Ray was spending countless hours transcribing, memorizing and rehearsing the raps he listened to on the radio, showing up at school ready to perform. By the time he was in middle school at St. He remembers a pivotal moment from his childhood when his cousins played him “Funkified” by Da Brat. ![]() “They hear ‘Hypnotized’ by Biggie,” he recalls, “my mom would be like, ‘You know, that sound right there is from this David Bowie record - let me play this for you.’” His parents helped attune his ear to the original songs that hip-hop producers were sampling in the contemporary songs he heard on the radio. ![]() He would study the albums, poring over the liner notes to learn the names of the writers, producers and musicians behind the sounds that were always playing in the house. Porter Ray (his stage name) grew up in a musical family in the Central District, where his parents had a vast record collection. You would never guess, given all the work that he’s put into it, that Porter Ray Sullivan never set out to be a professional rapper. Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.
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