Karega Bailey: The RAPstation Interview

Source of Light The Karega Bailey Interview By Kyle Eustice Karega Bailey may not be a household name yet, but just wait. The Washington D.C.-based educator and artist is on the verge of a breakthrough thanks to his deeply moving writing style. As a teacher by day and spoken word poet/emcee by night, Bailey has been running in circles trying to stay on top of it all. By the look of things, he's doing an incredible job. Bailey caught the attention of Chuck D after working on a panel together in Atlanta. His song, "Source of Light," was featured on the RAPstation show ANDYOUDON'TSTOP last summer. Since then, he's recently experienced a profound loss the day he lost his older brother to a senseless homicide. He's tapped into that pain to write and the result is the recent spoken word track "For Black Males Who've Considered Homicide When They've Lost Someone They Love" and the song "Don't Last Always." He will release a full-length album titled Peace King on January 26, 2015. This is just the beginning for the impassioned Bailey and a taste of what's to come. Head over to his Facebook page or www.karegabailey.com to check out his material. It's a decision you won't regret. Bailey took some time to talk to RAPstation about the SOL Spoken brand, his grassroots movement and spreading some good news. RAPstation (Kyle Eustice): Tell me about the song "Source of Light." Karega Bailey: That song is written for my students and the brand SOL stands for Source of Light. That was the title track. Something that people forget. Whether you're taking things for granted, that song is a great reminder. It really is. That's a tremendous honor. Now you're getting in the way of my feelings [laughs]. I literally just do this work because it helps me fight. It helps me go to work everyday. I started doing this music because I knew that social music have always had soundtracks. If I'm in a social movement of hope, what then do teachers and students listen to together to help create a song of empowerment? I realized that music really doesn't exist. I take bits and pieces from artists, but there's not an artist whose catalog is consistent like that. Take Sam Cooke, for example. To see how his work materialized and how he really wrote for the Civil Rights movement was inspiring. For the social movement not to die, I had to write a soundtrack. I'm writing about hope for myself, my students, their parents, the teachers, and the greater community. I kind of see myself in the near future, well my wife is finishing a degree in educational psychology, so I see us doing community talks on motivation and resiliency. I see us doing those by day and concerts at night. The work is alive. It's really grounded. This is what is missing in our generation. There aren't many positive role models anymore, especially in mainstream music. It's littered people's minds. Even a couple of generations behind me, they don't understand what real hip-hop is and what the culture is about. It came out of struggle... Yes! It's rooted deep. So check this out right, the album Peace King is my rawest dedication to hip-hop. Peace King is so damn hip-hop. That's the other part. What is this important for? I write a lot of poetry and prose because a lot of the work was written during a time where I prayed that the creator would heal my tongue. I was 17 and my older brother had put me on to the poet Black Ice. I said 'oh man, this shit is kind of real now.' I had an internal conflict. So "Roses" was the first song I record after seven years of not doing any music at all. That was really cool. My wife and best friend produced that record. I was coming home from work one day, it was my second year of teaching, work was really hard, and it was taking up a lot of my emotions. My best friend had a studio in our apartment at the time. He would have clients over and I would sit there quietly, and not rap. One day, my wife was in the studio and I saw her on the keys. I started thinking about what I would want to rap about. My mother and father are Jamaican and the record spoke to that portion of me. That was when I started making my transition back to music. I used the purest translation of my feelings. I am a child of roots reggae and hip-hop. I think people missed how powerful the track "Peace King" was because they couldn't put it in a box. Is it hip-hop? It is soul? Is it gospel? What is it? It's my truth. I wrote my ass off for hip-hop on this one. You kind of sound like Andre 3000. What happened with the album Surrender? 
[Laughs] That's crazy. This record is for the preservation of hip-hop, the culture, the sounds, and the emcees. It's my agenda. Maybe I'm just too much of a grassroots type of rude, but Surrender doesn't exist online anywhere because I didn't really have time to wait to get it done. I just made it a hand-to-hand experience, but not intentionally. Six months after I realized what I was doing, I thought 'what if I could create an experience just by touching people by hand-to-hand?' Surrender could essentially be re-released because it was never really released. It's just this project I did. You have to get it out there. One thing that keeps me going is I don't fall for the deception that good news doesn't spread. Good news spreads and I believe it does. Some people have been distraught because they think it doesn't work. But I see the reality I want to see. Obviously, you contacting me shows me that people are listening. People do want good things. People will support the truth. You coming along with this energy, this light, I'm so excited. I want to create the momentum.