Griz 'My Evolution (Ragin' Grace)' album

"I'm just like a lot of people, a fucked-up kid from a broken home trying to make my way in the world," says Griz, a strong, imposing, 250-pound, street smart young man with a bald head, a body etched with tattoos and a don't-fuck-with-me look in his eyes.

A child of the streets of New York after running away from home at 15, an Italian kid who became a ghetto hero, Griz is as hardcore as hardcore gets--in music and in life.

But as real and heart-wrenching as his story is, you've heard similar ones before. What you haven't previously heard from a real deal hardcore rock singer-songwriter is this: "What I'm doing now is more than music, it's a movement to give every kid who cries at home because he feels the world doesn't give a fuck about him hope that there is another way to escape the pain. It's about love--love cures all pain, heals all wounds."

On his debut solo album, My Evolution (Ragin' Grace), released Spring 2004, Griz turns anger into redemption, hate into understanding, and desperation into salvation. While in the Orlando, FL studio of producer Joe Smith, whose name has been on albums that have sold 100,000,000 copies, Griz completely scrapped the unrepentant album he first was going to record. "I've walked earth, seen heaven and touched hell," he says. "Life is a constant battle between good and evil. I've done a lot of fuckin' wrong things in my life. I can honestly now say I wish I had done a few things differently in my past but I was in the mind frame that I had to do what I had to do to survive. I have built up a lot of fucked-up feelings throughout my life and once I was able to release all those feelings--I mean, I cry on this album--once I forgave people for what's happened in the past, something I'd never done before, I realized that there's more to life than what I was doing. There is more to life than yesterday.there is tomorrow."

For Griz, whose knuckles bear teeth marks from street fights, what he was doing involved drug-dealing and gunplay and much more to which he won't admit. My Evolution, which signals a musical evolution in hardcore rock some have called Eminem-meets-System Of A Down, marks the culmination of his own extraordinary journey. "Everything that has happened to me yesterday made me who I am today," he says. "I have finally come to realize that my deepest struggles are actually now my greatest riches."

Griz was four years old and living in Harrison, NY when his parents divorced. He then went with his mother and younger sister to live in nearby Portchester. His mother was a secretary during the day and a waitress in the evening. "She was young and alone, bipolar and manic depressive. Now I can understand my mom, and I love her very much, but at the time I was a child living in a fucked-up place and the only one I had to blame was her. Growing up we didn't have shit. We lived in the basement of my grandmother's house with no car, no phone, no cable television, no nothing. In elementary school, Horton School, I was the only white kid in all my classes. Horton was located down the street from the projects that we lived across from. The fuckin' school was so bad it was condemned. I used to get jumped all the time just because I was white. That's where I learned to fight."

There was a point in his life that he remembers eating canned fruit for meals: "I remember one time we were walking out of the buildings in Mount Vernon where we were living and my mother found some change on the floor and she bought bread for us to eat. She cried and prayed to God to thank Him that night; I'll never forget that." Meanwhile his father remarried and relocated to well-to-do Greenwich, CT. When the 14-year-old tried to join him, his new wife didn't want any part of Griz. His father tried but his wife insisted that if he allowed Griz to move in then she would move back to Italy and take his newborn daughter with her. His father was forced to make a decision and once again Griz got the shit end of the stick.

"I was the hard, tough kid who was always in trouble. I wanted to be part of my father's life so bad I did everything I could to be with him. I was captain of the football and baseball teams just to prove myself to my dad. I figured if I was the best then he would be proud of me--but he never came to see me play. I was embarrassed to be so poor. I was being raised by my mother, and although she tried, we just couldn't get ahead. I'd get up at 5:30 in the morning, in fuckin' middle school, and walk five miles to my father's house and hide in the backyard and when the school bus would pull up I'd get on--so the kids would think I lived there. I never had any white friends until middle school and even then either they didn't like me or their parents didn't approve of me because I was from a bad area and I hung out with the black kids. I've walked on the grass on both sides of the fence--the country club and the projects; the rich never knew about the poor and the poor never knew about the rich. Let me tell you from experience, the grass sucks on both sides."

When he was 15, he finally ran away from home. But going to an uncle's house, the door was slammed in his face. So he lived on the streets, going from place to place, ending up in the hood. Always able to put words together, he started rapping, finding an outlet to his frustration by putting his feelings into his music. That same year Griz wrote his first song, the aptly-titled "Problem Child" which was produced by a childhood friend of his who went by the name of Shadow S, and put it out on the streets. They formed a group called Black Thornz that went on to become a local success. Suddenly the white kid, who never really fit in, became known all through the hood as an unbelievable rapper. He'd go to shows at the Apollo in Harlem with his black friends and no one would bother him. "People have a misconception of the hood. I have been hanging around the streets my whole life and nobody ever bothered me. The problem with people is that they fear what they don't understand so they stereotype shit. Me, I didn't give a fuck about the world or no one in it. I was going to do whatever the fuck I wanted and nobody was going to stop me. If I wanted to go to Harlem, or any other hood for that matter, I was going and if that meant getting into a fight or whatever, then so be it. With me, everything is do-or-die. There's no middle--it's all or nothing."

Playing four or five shows a week, from the Bronx and Brooklyn to Westchester and Connecticut, Griz, nicknamed for his Grizzly Bear demeanor, became a big name on the streets. He also started making money in less than legal ways. "I was all alone. I learned how to survive on my own. I had my own place, my own cars. I was gonna make something out of myself. The world might have fucked me but I was going to fuck it back; one way or another I was determined to win."

One day he went to where his mother was living and asked if he could stay there for a while. She said yes and he seemed to be happy for a few weeks but that would soon end. One day he walked in and found her boyfriend at that time shooting heroin. Griz never became involved in drugs after seeing an uncle die in front of him from a suicidal overdose. So he confronted the boyfriend and they argued but when his mom came home the boyfriend denied the incident and his mother believed the boyfriend. A few nights later while sleeping, Griz woke up to find the boyfriend standing over him with a baseball bat about to smash in his skull. "We fought, and it was a bloodbath. The fight started in the house but soon found its way out on the street and there was blood all over. I beat this motherfucker like I never beat no man before him. My mom comes home and sees us fighting and jumps on me to leave him alone! My mother's neighbors called my father to tell him what was happening but he just told them not to ever call his house again, especially while his family was sleeping. Needless to say he never showed up. When the cops came they asked if we wanted to press charges and we both said no but they insisted that we couldn't both stay in the house so one of us had to leave. My mother thought it would be best if I left, so I did. I never went home again."

After four years in the Black Thornz, Griz went solo for a year or so and then went on to form a new group called Confidential, a crew of Italian and Puerto Rican rappers. The buzz was so strong that the group landed a spot on TV's "The Queen Latifah Show" in 1999. The next year, one of their tracks, co-written by Griz, was heard on the Virgin-released soundtrack Romeo Must Die. He then joined The Unit, whose 2002 album 100% Hater Proof, released on EMI, was executive produced by Latifah. Griz co-penned a track from that album which also appeared on the soundtrack to the 2003 Latifah-Steve Martin box office smash Bringing Down The House.

Griz is still idolized wherever he goes in and out of the hood. "I'm not looked at as black or white. I'm accepted because I'm real. I don't wear a baseball cap backwards; I don't try to be someone I'm not. A lot of white kids go to the hood and try to adapt, get gold teeth and wear oversized clothes. I`m just me all the time, what you see is what you get. And I have to say that when I had nothing and no one, the projects was the only place I was accepted. I have nothing but love for the people there. Don't get shit twisted--I love being Italian, I love who I am. I don't forget where I'm from. I respect those who respect me, period! I demand my respect but in the same light I show respect. I am loved wherever I go...I can go into the hood and roll dice and I can go to the social club and play cards."

But musically something was missing for Griz. He wasn't able to express himself in rap the way he wanted. "Music is an emotion, it speaks from the heart. I grew up where beat machines were all you had. I'd lay down verses to the sounds of a keyboard underneath me. That's all I knew." That's all he knew until he met Grace and Marc, of his record label, Ragin' Grace. They saw a lot more in him than just rap--they saw a movement. They posed the question to him: Why don't you do a rock album? They saw in him what he wanted all along; he just didn't know it yet. "I rebelled against doing rock `n' roll," says Griz. "I had been on the radio, on TV, on albums and mixtapes. I was known. Why would I drop all that and start over?" But in the same breath when asked how he felt about rock music, he replied, "Rock was always part of me. I love the feeling of live instruments, that reality, that adrenalin." He agreed to go out to Orlando, Florida and meet Joe Smith. They axed the original concept and began from scratch on a hard rock album of pure emotion. Griz laid down the melodies for the songs and Smith, with a band at his command, molded the music to capture that emotion.

In the process, Griz discovered that it was time to forgive. He was ready to let go of the hate and pain he had been carrying for so long so he poured his heart out on the record. "The music really became my stairway to heaven. My outlook on life, my mind, body and spirit, all changed. I called my mother and told her I forgave her for any mistakes she had made and that I appreciate her. I realized all she needed was love. My dad and I have become closer too. I was a street kid--I didn't give a fuck about no one and as far as I was concerned nobody gave a fuck about me. But I have come to realize that the only way to have a happy tomorrow is to live for today and forgive yesterday's mistakes. That's exactly what I was able to do through this album."

On My Evolution, his voice is deep and strong, his delivery powerful and full of energy. On "Hardcore," he roars, "What are we?" and the screams reply, "We are.hardcore!" You feel his words pounding into your head and before you know it they sink deep into your heart.

On "Nobody Gives A Fuck," he forces you to see how we hear the ones we love but don't listen to what they are saying. You feel his pain, respect his strength, witness his growth, and acknowledge his power. You are drawn to him by his confidence. You can measure the depth of his soul as he tells his mother, father, and God that he understands the reasons for his struggles and forgives them for his pain on "I Need Some Time." By the last note of My Evolution, you no longer fear him, you begin to understand him.

Today, when Griz takes the stage he owns every ear, every heart and every mind, and vows to touch every soul. "I should've been dead a few times," Griz says. "I'm still here for a reason--I want to make a difference in people's lives. Maybe through my music they will be able to find themselves the way I was able to finally find myself."

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Tags

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

Griz - My Evolution (Ragin' Grace)