We caught up with the brilliant and insightful BS a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, BS thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

It started with a lot of trial and error and having some big feelings and not knowing where to put them. At first, rhyming was solely working through those larger feelings. I’d write about them and it happened to rhyme. Later I discovered battle rap – freestyle battle rap in particular. I got my start at an event called Freestyle Mondays in NYC. I was able to take some of those big feelings and and do something constructive with them. From there, I was rapping in the park, on the corner, on the subway trains, and started street performing. That’s how I cut my teeth.

Knowing what I know now, remembering that done is better than perfect would have done a lot to speed up the learning process. People are allowed to like what you create more than you do! Setting my sights higher sooner and leaning into self-confidence would’ve hit the proverbial gas pedal too. It took a little while to feel internally affirmed in who I was and what I was doing as an artist.

A healthy sense of shamelessness, putting oneself in uncomfortable situations, and having a a community with which to to play and practice are some of the most essential skills for this craft. There’s no cheat code for doing the work, but the closest thing is to find a community down to art with you so that you’re never “practicing” or “training” – you’re just having fun with your friends.

Rap is a language learning process so anything that that will help you with language in general will help you here – learning a new language, reading, active-listening, studying music, and Hip-Hop in particular of all kinds will help a lot too. All of these things are super, super helpful.

As far as obstacles along my journey go — I got in my own way! With this art-form the biggest limitation is one’s mind and oneself. I got in my own way through initial insecurity. There are also financial obstacles often involved in pursuing a career as a creative. It can be hard to to do the artist/artist-educator thing and get it off the ground. Cultivating side streams of income and learning to manage your time can be challenging.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is BS. A lot of people ask what that stands for. Well, BS means turning Best Self into Better Self, even if it just looks like “BS” to anybody else. I’m the only BS you can trust! I’m an artist/artist-educator specializing in freestyle rap and songwriting. I’m also a beatboxer and do loop station production. My business is called Freestyle Fitness NYC. FF is a place where adults can be their authentic selves, celebrate progress, play, and learn life and language tools through the vehicle of freestyle rap.

Freestyle Fitness offers virtual and in-person workshop opportunities. We run groups on Zoom. All FF sessions are small group, cohort-based learning drawing from Cypher and Freiriean pedagogies to emphasize social and emotional learning and development. I’m also a songwriter, I make make and release music. The goal is to empower creatives and to make people smile across the world. , To remind folks that they’re enough as they are and to be themselves. That’s the most powerful thing they could be and do. We’re here to empower continued creation.

So with my clients, I prefer to think of my clients as friendticipants — with my friendticipants, what we do is an inherently vulnerable and intimate thing. With freestyle rap, you don’t know what’s about to happen next and we end up often sharing in therapeutic ways. It’s common to share a lot about ourselves and our lives and putting our authenticity front and center. So I provide a space for healing and openness. I provide a space of affirmation, a place where it’s safe to make mistakes and where the most important thing anyone asks of somebody is to try. At freestyle fitness, we say “practice makes progress” and progress is a process. Make practice, trust the process.

For me, I’m a former classroom teacher. I’ve been working in nonprofit sectors with numerous different populations from incarcerated youth to folks with special needs, to political refugees in other countries. I’ve been featured on 106&Park, The Kelly Clarkson Show, released music through Tommy Boy Records, performed with Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award winning crew Freestyle Love Supreme, and presented at Harvard University. The experience that I bring to the table is unique. As a facilitator, I’ve worked with everyone from educators, customer service reps, professional rollerbladers, Broadway stars, professional rappers, doctors, authors, economists, and folks working administrative 9-5’s. Freestyle fitness is the only place where you can work out your brain in a judgment free space with people who are similar to you in the fact that everyone in our village is very different. We give folks enough tools to be able to create art and social openings where we can all share the tools that we came in with with one another. We’re learning from, and with each other, and empowering one another to go after the things that we want to pursue.

I’ve helped clients prepare for public speaking gigs, launch businesses, transition careers, diss their bosses after a rough day at work, blossom into career artists, and given folks a judgement-free space to be themselves and belong. The space and the craft allow the freedom of expression to creating the room for someone to spontaneously express and tap into a deep part of themselves that amplifies the clarity of their vision for their future.

I’m most proud of affecting positive change in the lives of others and in in my own. You may think that freestyle rap is not for you — I disagree. There’s a lot of people I’ve met, myself included, who at one point couldn’t string three words together. It’s an incredible outlet. It’s an incredible community. It’s an incredible way to release energy that no longer serves us and it’s an incredible self awareness tool. You’re also learning math, increasing your vocabulary, and musicality. You’re putting ideas in rhyme and rhythm, and sometimes even taking opposing ideas and putting them in harmony with one another, literally and figuratively. You grow more comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty and non-closure. You also train your brain to think quickly and do multiple things at once.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

So I was a skatepark kid, and inline skater and aggressive rollerblader. I still rollerblade actually. But once upon a time, a very, very young me was at the skatepark. I went for a trick and fell really, really hard. I ate it trying to jump from one big ramp to another. I slammed and got up battered and bleeding. I was really shook, really scared. I thought I might be done skating forever. Just then, the biggest, meanest, fastest moving skateboarder who went to this park came up to me:
“You okay?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure.”
“Well, can you walk?”
“Yeah…”
“All right, well, good. If you’re not falling, you’re not learning”

And then he just jump back down into the ramp like it was nothing. That’s always stuck with me. If we’re not falling, we’re not learning. And that’s translated to my facilitation style and how I I move through life in general. We fail forward. We fail, fail, fail again, fail, fail better until we feel better about failing. It helped me realize that success and failure are both really code words for forward movement, so as long as we’re moving forward and we’re progressing, then we’re doing what we need to do.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Mental health and expanding the conversation around it is a really important thing to me. It’s a part of my journey and manifests throughout my music and workshops. I’m an ADHD brain with multiple TBI’s who also experiences anxiety and depression. I have very big feelings and for a long time didn’t know how to heal my inner-child.

When I initially started rhyming, it was because I was really upset and needed an outlet. I thought I had to be angry to express myself and it took a long time to realize that there can be a style of expression for any and every emotion that we have and that art is a broad, all-encompassing spectrum of feelings and expression. It wasn’t until participating in an event called Hip-Hop Subway Series a number of years into rapping before I realized that I didn’t have to be mad or battle to be able to access my ability to freestyle.

At Subway series, battling was not allowed. There would be a meet-up of rappers, musicians, beatboxers, singers, dancers, and regular muggles that would hop on a subway car and jam from one destination to another. We’d take over the car and turn it into a spontaneous party. I noticed how it left me, the other artists, and the folks on the train smiling.

I could be silly, I could be playful, I could be clever. And then later I realized that I could share this with other people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://trustBS.com
• Instagram: @trustBS
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/itrustBS
• Twitter: @trustBS
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/trustBS
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trustBS
• Other: Freestyle Fitness NYC:
  trustBS.com/ffofferingsIG: @freestylefitnessNYC
  FB: facebook.com/freestylefitnessnyc

  Listen to my latest song, “For Things You Feel”
  https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/bs19/for-things-you-feel-feat-mike-larry-draw

Image Credits

Matt O.
Arin Sang-urai
Bert Blading