Capital STEEZ: King Capital - The FADER

From the magazine: ISSUE 89, December 2013/January 2014

Brooklyn’s latest rap renaissance was born on the back of a bus, at the end of a long night. It was March of 2011, and Courtney “Jamal” Dewar, then 17 and known as Jay Steez, had just performed for some of his friends at a $10 cover night at a small soul food restaurant in Clinton Hill, where he wasn’t even listed on the bill. He told five of his buddies to meet him outside, where they started freestyling, performing for nobody but themselves. Not that it mattered. “We had the most legendary cypher,” says Joey Bada$$, Steez’ high school friend and rhyming partner. “Whatever it was, the vibe just felt so great. It felt so right with all of us rapping.”

Riding the bus home afterwards, Steez began talking with Powers Pleasant, 17, a drummer and producer who had DJed for him that night, when they were both struck by the idea of forming a hip-hop group. Steez even had the name picked out—Pro Era, short for Progressive Era—a title with a purpose fixed within the two words: they were going to do nothing less than spark a new epoch in the storied history of New York rap.

Less than two years later, the group was well on its way toward achieving that goal. Dewar, rapping now as Capital Steez (stylized as Captial STEEZ), had emerged as one of the most dynamic lyricists from the city in recent memory, a 19-year-old MC with a critical mind and a sharp eye for irony, fresh off the release of a formidable first mixtape, AmeriKKKan Korruption. Joey, two years his junior, was getting known as one of rap’s brightest young stars, quickly winning over fans and the media alike with his sly demeanor and lyrical skills. And their crew, Pro Era, which had quickly grown to 12, was at the forefront of a hip-hop scene centered in Flatbush, with groups like The Underachievers and Flatbush Zombies all united under a movement Steez had named Beast Coast. Pro Era dropped their first full album together, PEEP: The aPROcalypse, on December 21, 2012, with Steez featured on five tracks. But just two days later, Steez, 19, was found dead on a prominent thoroughfare in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. The young rapper had leapt off a building early in the morning before Christmas Eve, propelling himself so far that he landed in the street. Dewar left no note other than a terse last message he blasted out to his friends and fans on Twitter, one minute before midnight: “The end.” He jumped into the cold December night just moments later.

For all its tragic weight, Steez’ death was shrouded in uncertainty. The incident was blogged by a few music sites the next day, but the write-ups had scant information about where, why or how it had happened. None of the city’s newspapers reported it, and of the outlets that did, not a single one was able to confirm it officially. One of the city’s most gifted young artists had killed himself in the center of Manhattan, and no one seemed to know for certain if it had even happened.

Steez and Joey first caught the internet’s attention in February 2012 with “Survival Tactics,” a catchy song with a slick music video that juxtaposed street scenes in Flatbush with Occupy Wall Street-inspired images of them and the rest of Pro Era marching though an abandoned building in the Financial District. The video racked up nearly 100,000 YouTube views within a few weeks. With their brash lyrics and confident swagger on camera, the two rappers introduced themselves as forces to be reckoned with, calling out West Coast rapper Lil B, boasting that Pro Era was about to take off and denouncing every arm of the Western establishment they could think of. But underneath their youthful bluster, the kids flexed serious poetic skills, particularly Steez: Riding on hoverboards, wiping out motherboards/ Started spitting fire cause my motherfuckin’ lung is scorched/ King Arthur when he swung his sword/ A king author, I ain’t even used a pen in like a month or four.

Though the entire group was still in their teens, their music sounded like a style of hip-hop that had long been abandoned. Pro Era’s songs featured sophisticated wordplay and jazz-inflected beats, sounds that harkened back to the so-called “golden age” of hip-hop, in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

The crew’s original core all met at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School. With its strong programs in music, drama and media, the public school has graduated an illustrious roster of arts-minded students since it was founded in 1974 as an alternative to conventional education; the Beastie Boy’s Adam Yauch, director Darren Aronofsky, actress Marisa Tomei and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat are all former students. As part of its founding philosophy, the school encourages the creativity and independence of students through free periods known as OPTAs (“optional time activities”), and during just about every period of the day at Murrow when the members of Pro Era were enrolled there, kids would freestyle in the hallway or across the street at a playground called L Park, home to a vibrant social scene that revolved around skateboarding, graffiti and weed-smoking.

Steez had already been rapping for a while by the time he got to Murrow as a sophomore transfer student in 2008. The son of Jamaican parents who had moved to the States before he was born, Steez grew up the lone male in his house. His father passed away when he was three, and his mother and his older sisters, Tanya and Tamara, raised him and his sister Jamelia, who was four years his senior. As a fourth grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 222 in Marine Park, Steez and his best friend, Jahkari Jack, founded a duo called Saturday Morning Breakfast and would perform in class. By middle school, the two spent afternoons downloading instrumentals from Limewire and rapping over them in the attic of Steez’ house in Flatbush. Spurred by his love of video games, Steez called himself Blowtorch; Jahkari was Excalibur.

Friends remember Steez in high school as a smiling kid with a short afro and skinny jeans. Though he was a heavy teenager—he once said in an interview that he weighed more than 200 pounds at one point—he was no slouch, always keeping up with his friends as they bombed around the city on skateboards. According to a friend, Jason Rose, they’d sneak into campus after-hours, skate through pornography shops and partake in other weed-fueled shenanigans. Steez made friends easily; he loved to joke around, though he was never one to force a smile or laugh to fit in. An avowed sneaker-head, he had an impeccable sense of style; his friends could never figure out how he was able to leave his shoes untied so they puffed out but never fell off. This flair was reflected in his first rapping name, Jay Steez: Jay for Jamal, Steez, old school hip-hop slang for style.

By his junior year, Steez became known around the school for his rhyming skills. One day he walked up to Joey, a skinny freshman who had been filming raps and posting them to YouTube under the name JayOhVee, and asked if that was him. Joey was ecstatic Steez had approached him. “I already knew who he was,” Joey now admits.

Pro Era began to coalesce the next year, in 2011. Originally four members—a lanky rapper named CJ Fly in addition to Powers Pleasant, Joey and Steez—the crew began linking up in the auditorium at lunch to trade bars with each other, with Pleasant on the piano or drums. “We used to have a lot of conversations about what we wanted to do with ourselves artistically, musically and visually,” says Joey. “And we decided that we wanted to change the world through our music.”

It was a grandiose goal for a couple of kids who weren’t even 18, but Steez had been thinking about his place in the world for a while, not merely in the realm of rap. He was raised in a relatively religious household, with church as a regular family function. By high school, though, he had concluded that conventional religion was full of lies. “We were both raised in Christian families, and there came a time in high school where we were like, This is bullshit,” says Steez’ friend Kevin Nguyen, 20. “He started telling me about how the white Jesus was fake and how Jesus was really black.” Steez had started to get into the idea of being a Rastafarian, and he was so persuasive that Nguyen, born to Vietnamese parents, started identifying as one, too. “We’d smoke and hang out—Jah bless, Jah everything,’” Nguyen remembers.

Issa Gold, 23, one half of the rap duo the Underachievers, says he met Steez around this time and that they started talking about Steez as being “indigo”—a term first popularized in the 1970s by new age practitioners to describe the aura of children believed to posses traits like hyper-intelligence and high intuition, as well as an aversion to authority and a proclivity for hyperactivity (some have alleged that the term is a kind way of describing people with A.D.H.D.).

As Steez’ spiritual outlook evolved, he began forging an idiosyncratic personal belief system from elements of new age spirituality, Egyptian mysticism and numerology. Influenced by a YouTube series called “Spirit Science,” Steez and Nguyen started talking about astral projecting, auric fields, shape-shifting, synchronicity and making sure their “third eyes” were open. They talked about how they were beings of a higher dimension. Steez’ excitement for the knowledge he was picking up was contagious. Soon, Pro Era started meditating together in Prospect Park and rapping about opening their chakras. “I’d ask him, How do you rap so good? And he’d be like, My chakras are open,” says one of Steez’ best friends in the group, Rey “Dirty” Sanchez. “He’d laugh at us like, That’s all you gotta do!”