We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Hasani Byas. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Hasani below.

Alright, Hasani 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.

Learning the craft want difficult at all. It feels like it came to me naturally. I didn’t realize what I was really doing at first. I thought I was just passing the time with my writing. On had no idea I was developing into a music artist as well.

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?

I got interested in the art of poetry since I was in the 2nd grade. It was my very first poetry assignment and I didn’t want to do it because I knew nothing about poetry. Once I understood a little bit about poetry and how to rhyme words I almost instantly fell in love with it. After turning in my poetry assignment to my teacher she told me how much she liked it. From that point on a would continue reading nothing but poetry books no matter who the author was. I became so fascinated with the structure of the writing. Eventually I began trying to write my own but they never turned out as good as I wanted them to be. I was also I big music lover as a child. My dad introduced me to rap music from the 80s and from there was when I could hear the similarities of rap music and poetry. I still continued to write my own poems but as I got a little older I wanted to be more creative with my writing. By the time I hit the 8th grade I wrote a poem about my step grandfather for a project. All my friends pressured me a little bit to turn that whole poem into a rap song. I was hesitant at first because I had never performed any of my poems as a song before, let alone have it recorded. But eventually, after enough peer pressure, I agreed to record the poem as a rap song. After the song was completed, it was played in front of the entire school and the parents of the students and almost every audience member applauded my work. So ever since then I’ve been making music and writing poems and I have no plans on ever stopping.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being able to have the passion to do it at all. I’m not into creating poetry and music because of money. I do this because I genuinely love doing this. The money can come later if it does. It’s rewarding to me once it’s officially out in the public because to me I look at it like a time stamp in my life. It’s something I can always go back to look at and remember where my mind was when I created that piece. Also I want others to enjoy what I’ve created. There’s enough negativity in the world so I feel like this is a way to escape from all that momentarily and just enjoy a work of creativity.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Stop being so picky, sensitive and judgemental. There are some real creative minds out there but are quickly rejecting because it doesn’t fit some stupid criteria. That also becomes unmotivating to those individuals because they feel like they have to censor what they do just to please society. Not everyone is supposed have the same mindset, like the same things or agree with the same ideas. That’s why we have the gift of creativity, so we can express how different we can be.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/mynameisikill?igshid=NGVhN2U2NjQ0Yg==
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@mynameisikill732?si=Z9lYgyicj-QESNTx

Image Credits
Bobby Wheeler