FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC MUSIC Almost Famous SCHAMA NOEL IS PAVING HIS WAY WITH GENRE-BENDING HIP-HOP. BY CLEO MIRZA To say that rapper Schama Noel’s music career has been a roller coaster is putting it mildly. Between narrowly missed opportuni- ties with celebrities, going viral with no tangi- ble results, and bouts of depression coinciding with his best chances at success, Noel’s story is riddled with could-have-beens, would-have- beens and almosts. But the 28-year-old has had plenty of practice in perseverance, and it’s fi nally starting to pay off. This month, performances include a return to Denver’s Underground Music Showcase on Saturday, July 30, and in August, he’ll release his sixth full-length album, titled Two Can Play That Game. The rapper has lofty aspirations for himself as an artist, and he’s almost where he wants to be. Almost. Now based in Aurora, Noel was born to Christian Baptist parents in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and immigrated with his family to Florida as a toddler. “I was raised in this sub- urb of Orlando called Pine Hills. The crime rate was high there. It was defi nitely more minorities, and still, to this day, there’s not much infrastructure,” he recalls. “I would defi nitely get teased for being Haitian, as far as like, ‘You worship Satan and you eat cats’ — things like that. I would just say I was Jamaican to make it stop. I mean, my name is Schama — there’s no way to hide that ethnicity — but I could get away with saying I was Jamaican, and being Jamaican at the time was just way cooler.” Noel began freestyle rapping in the third grade, and by the sixth, he was writing his own lyrics. His fi rst time performing live was at a high school talent show, and by then he had already decided that he wanted to spend his life pursuing music. But the real precursor to Noel’s rap ca- reer was his viral Twitter account, RapLike, where he would write verses in the style of popular hip-hop artists such as Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls. “That started due to me commenting on a YouTube video of a Big Boi song, ‘If Andre 3000 was on this song, he would have said this,’” he remembers. “That gave me the idea: What if I just made an entire account like that?” Created in 2013, his RapLike account also led him to his fi rst manager, who ran another popular Twitter account called Only Hip- Hop Facts. “That page started getting really big, then my page started getting really big. Rappers would start following him, like Big Sean, Wiz Khalifa and Logic,” Noel says. “He started gaining traffi c, and by default, so did I.” After revealing his identity as the brain behind RapLike, that same year he released his fi rst mixtape, God’s Playlist, then followed it up with Eter- nal Feels Vol. 1 six months later. He had hoped that his large Twitter following would give him a leg up in the industry, but he discovered that going viral online rarely translated to real-life opportunities. Larger media platforms such as the Shade Room, Complex maga- zine and even MTV would share his verses that expertly emulated other rappers, but they almost never gave him credit. “I went viral fi rst from this Meek Mill emulation that I did. It was during the Drake and Meek Mill beef, and [Mill] took a while to respond [to Drake], so I was like, ‘If you don’t respond, I’ll just do it myself.’ So I did, and it went viral,” Noel remembers. “I went viral again with this RapLike Asahd I did — DJ Khaled’s son. The Shade Room posted it again, and it was my second time getting posted [without being tagged]. Hundreds of thousands of people saw it...but without my name being attached to it.” On the brink of turning 21, with a strong online following but not much else to show for his years of hustling, Noel fell into a deep depression. “There was a storm of toxicity and negativity that was too overwhelming, despite the success I was having. My mom is a schizophrenic, so I was told that by 21 I would suffer from mental illness, and there you have it,” Noel says. He dropped his third project, Ear Candy, in 2015, and quickly realized he wasn’t pre- pared for the kind of attention he had been seeking. “As that was happening, that was the moment where I felt the entire world was really small. Everything felt extremely magnifi ed, like everyone in the world was watching me,” he recalls. “I was getting sleep paralysis, and I just felt a very dark energy.” And the people he wanted approval from most, his conservative Christian family, re- fused to recognize his artistic endeavors. “It wasn’t the healthiest relationship,” he admits. “I just felt like I had another life that they didn’t really acknowledge. I felt like, ‘This is everything I wanted, I did it, but at the same time, I don’t have the support of the people closest to me.’” Around the same time, his then-manager booked his fi rst live performance at an un- derground hip-hop festival in Dubai. He After years of ups and downs, rapper Schama Noel is fi nally on a steady path to stardom. almost met Drake there, but was instead left waiting with the princes of Dubai as Drake made a hasty exit. The pattern of missed con- nections and near-breakthroughs continued. Noel says his mental health struggles were amplifi ed by the increase in racially motivated acts of violence during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “I remember there were a lot of mass shoot- ings, and I was just reading more, watching documentaries, and I started really under- standing the depths of white supremacy. I went through this phase for three or four months where I just felt like all white people were racist. And my following at the time was 75 percent white, so that alienated a lot of people,” he says. “It just started going downhill. Basically, it imploded. It was too much to handle by myself, not really having a mentor or guidance.” He retreated into himself, moved out of his parents’ house and took a step back from music until he dropped a remix in 2016 to Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar’s hit “Goosebumps.” The remix racked up hun- dreds of thousands of listens, but once again failed to translate to career opportunities. In 2018 he was set to play an under- ground show in Miami, opening up for controversial rap sensation XXXTentacion, but the event got shut down before his set because of an alleged shooting in the crowd. “What are the chances I’m there, I’m on the lineup, he’s there, he’s probably going to hear my songs, and I know exactly what to play...and then it doesn’t happen,” laments Noel. “It just felt like every win I get is an L. One step forward, two steps back.” He channeled his disappointments into that year’s Millennials, which he has con- sidered his best project until now. “It’s an analysis on everything from gun violence to mental depression, but over trap beats. The songs on that were inspired by not being with my parents for the fi rst time as an adult, not knowing what will happen next, eating Burger King every day because that’s all I could afford, making a meal last a whole day and sleeping through the hunger,” he says. He had to take the album down because of copyright confl icts, but plans to re-release it when he can afford the proper permissions. It wasn’t until Noel relocated to Denver in 2019 that he found the real-life support that he could never seem to solidify in the past. He ended up guest-performing at Cervantes’ with his longtime friend Harvey Tukutau (aka Rev. da IV), a Greeley-based rapper whom he had met online years earlier and collaborated with on the track “Scrunchie Gang.” “I happened to be here the same time that Harvey was opening up for Phony Ppl, and he invited me to perform ‘Scrunchie Gang’ with him,” Noel says. “I did, and after the response I got, it clicked, like, ‘Oh maybe I should stay here for a little bit.’ I started doing open mics, and the reception I was getting was just so great. It felt like people wanted me here and people appreciated the type of music that I made — alternative hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, however you want to classify it. I felt like I was in the right place.” He began showing dispensaries his songs as well, and ended up on playlists that would showcase his tracks in stores like High Level Health on East Col- continued on page 24 23 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD JULY 28-AUGUST 3, 2022 CLEO MIRZA
