Cleavon Crawford

                Cleavon Crawford, a native New Yorker, hopes to break into the Rap scene while it’s still in its heyday.  

Back Story

                Cleavon is nineteen years old.  After graduating from high school in 2015, he followed his mother to Kansas.  After living there a year, he yearned for the cultural buzz of New York City and decided to return home.  Cleavon is from Brooklyn, where he attended the Cultural Academy for the Arts and Sciences, a high school that was new when he attended.  Cleavon can remember being the first person to give a rap performance in the school talent show.  Cleavon was then, and still is now, comfortable performing on stage, he says that for him it’s “a great way to get a lot of energy out”.  Performing at school talent shows and in school plays was not Cleavon’s only exposure to the performing arts, for while in high school he became a student with Opening Act, a non-profit organization that offers free after school theatre classes to high school students in New York City’s most underserved public schools.  Cleavon now says “I wouldn’t be anywhere without Opening Act”.  Although becoming a professional rapper is Cleavon’s top priority, his exposure to acting in high school made him also want to become a professional actor-- let’s say it’s priority #1B.  Cleavon says that if an acting opportunity came about he would take it in a heartbeat but with one exception.  In the coming fall of 2017, Cleavon will be going to college, and he will not let an acting job interfere with that.  Where exactly he will go is undecided, but he wants to go to the Tisch school of performing arts at NYU, or Brooklyn College.  Dropping out of college, Cleavon says, “is not an option”.  He’ll just have to act and rap from New York City, if he needs to go to LA, it will be after college.  

                So where does the young rapper get his inspiration for all of his original songs (that aren’t freestyle)?  Cleavon says that one’s daily life is a good place to start.  When friends and family tell him stories, he jots them down, because who knows, maybe those stories could inspire a new song, or become lyrics.  If small snippets of lines come to him, he’ll jot’m down and return to them for use in a song later on.  It is very rare that a rhyme website is utilized during Cleavon’s writing process, however the dictionary and thesaurus are Cleavon’s right hand guys, after all, there are so many words, each with its own use and meaning, why not take advantage of that.  As for the beat, Cleavon’s brother has a never ending supply.  Cleavon says he will listen to a beat up to a 100 times, or even more, before deciding if he thinks there is anything there.

                While it’s been nearly two years since Cleavon released a song on Sound Cloud, which is so far his only medium for sharing his music, summer 2017 is about to change that.  Cleavon not only plans to release new music this summer but his first music video.  In addition, he will have a new Youtube channel and hopes to debut his music on Spotify.  

Personal Style

                We discussed the cliche of rapper (fashion) style, “bling”; expensive and flashy jewelry.  Cleavon described it as “bitter-sweet”.  The bitter side is that wearing flashy and expensive jewelry to flaunt one’s monetary success can be representative of a push back to what had been a negative reality for some rappers: poverty, and sometimes an utter lack of power and freedom.  So does the “bling” symbolize aloofness, or does it symbolize “look at me now”.  The sweet side is that if you came from nothing, achieving great monetary success can in some ways be very liberating, whether or not it brings pure happiness.  As for Cleavon, his style is quite different.  He thinks his style should be representative of who he is.  So what is Cleavon trying to show through his personal style?  He describes himself as “nerdy”, he grew up playing video games, and physically was relatively small.  He was not, and is not, the big tough guy.  He has dreads which he likes to style, and now wearsglasses, rounding out the “nerdy” effect.  Compared to some other rappers out there Cleavon looks unique, and of course, he is unique.  He’s just doing his own thing which is the best thing a young artist can do. 

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