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!”
“STEEZ AND I USED TO HAVE A LOT OF CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WHAT WE WANTED TO DO WITH OURSELVES ARTISTICALLY, MUSICALLY AND VISUALLY. AND WE DECIDED THAT WE WANTED TO CHANGE THE WORLD THROUGH OUR MUSIC.”— JOEY BADA$$
Even as Pro Era began to include many different personalities and egos, like rappers Dessy Hinds and producer Kirk Knight, they decided to stick together. A few months after they formed, Joey was contacted by Jonny Shipes, the CEO of Cinematic Music Group, a boutique management company and label, who had stumbled across a video of the teenager freestyling online and was interested in signing him. Joey was just 16 at the time, but his mother, Kimmy Virginie, worked out an informal arrangement with Shipes for the two parties to work together without signing any contracts until she and her son were ready to do so. Shipes urged the young rapper to work with him as a solo artist. “I said to Joey, ‘Man, you should focus on yourself,’” Shipes told me. But the teenager was adamant that Pro Era be a part of whatever situation they worked out. Suddenly, the crew had the backing of a manager and a promotional team while most of its members were still in high school.
For Steez, the connection with Cinematic and the timing, coinciding with his high school graduation, were the first signs that his passion could be more than just a hobby. He dropped out of the community college in Brooklyn he had enrolled in, telling his family that it was distracting him from his music, and started to hone his image, growing out his dreadlocks and working hard to lose weight, buying a fixed-gear bike that he began to ride everywhere. Months later, friends would marvel at how the chubby kid they’d known in high school had turned into a slim rapper with tattoos seemingly overnight. As Steez joked on his Facebook, “I went from ‘obese’ to ‘Ohhh, beast?’” “It was crazy,” says Jack, his early rhyming partner. “I was like, Yo, you look like a rapper.”
Steez also began putting everything into his first solo project, which he planned to release in early 2012. Though he already had the rhyming skills, he was also coming into his own as a thinker, developing an anti-establishment view of the world that many teenagers could relate to. But as a black male coming of age deep in the outer boroughs of Michael Bloomberg’s New York—an increasingly unequal city economically, where police conducted more than half a million stop-and-frisks through 2012, mostly targeting African-Americans and Latinos—Steez’ ideas were informed by more than just youthful angst. Rey Sanchez says he and Steez were stopped and frisked by NYPD officers at least seven times together, and that Steez had grown increasingly critical of the government and police through those experiences. The two visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment and spent a night at Zuccotti Park, excited by both the ideas that the movement espoused and the more adrenaline-worthy aspects of the demonstration. They ran around the park—Steez in the panda mask that he would later wear in the video for “Survival Tactics,” and Sanchez in a ski mask—screaming “Stop stop-and-frisk!” and “Fuck police” at the cops, according to Sanchez.
As his views became more militant, in person and on Facebook, Steez seemed to relish in his role as an iconoclast. Friends from high school say Steez had always been committed to the idea of the truth, and that as he grew into himself, he decided that being an artist meant an absolute commitment to one’s principals, regardless of the social or financial consequences. In an interview with NYU’s student radio station, Steez spoke candidly of the importance of pineal glands, the fact that he was still a virgin (“I promote that”), and the development of his political beliefs (“Basically it was a time in my life where I thought I was going crazy. I realized that I wasn’t the one that was…it’s the system that’s built against me, you know?”). His words reveal a young man who was starting to feel let down by the world as he began to deal with adult life and its pressures: “Nothing in the outside world seems to make me happy,” he admitted on the air. “It’s just the simple things, just seeing a bee take pollen from a flower. It’s like, that’s life, you know? And to a three-year-old child, that’s still life. But the thing is, as you grow, this world makes you take your eye off of things like that.”
As he readied his debut solo mixtape, AmeriKKKan Korruption, he began thinking about a design that he would make into stickers to promote it. Steez had become fixated on the number 47, which he felt was a perfect expression of balance in the world, representing the tension between the fourth chakra—the heart—and the seventh—the brain. According to friends, Steez believed it to be the universe’s quintessential random number, and started noticing it everywhere—on street signs, clocks and Facebook timestamps.
He decided to incorporate the number into a logo in such a way that the two digits resembled a swastika—in Steez’ mind a commentary on the appropriation of what was originally a peaceful symbol with roots in Eastern religions. Ever the provocateur, he also put the design in a white circle surrounded by red—the same color scheme used by the Third Reich. He and his friends began papering the city with the stickers, particularly in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood around Murrow. He was ready to engage with people who criticized the logo. “yo i had 2 take a second look cuz i thot it was a swastika lol,” wrote someone beneath the image when he posted it on Facebook. “That’s what I’m aiming for. #MAADGENIUS,” Steez wrote back.
Steez seemed to enjoy the controversy the sticker caused beyond his Facebook page as well. “It’s actually under investigation,” he boasted during the WNYU interview, noting that NYPD officers from the local precinct were looking into it. (The NYPD confirmed it did look into the symbol as a possible bias crime after receiving one complaint, but said it dismissed the investigation after discovering that it was being used by “a band.”)
Steez decided to release AmeriKKKan Korruption on April 7th, 2012—the seventh day of the fourth month of the year. It was an impressive debut, a 14-track collection of acrobatic lyrics and rich beats, but beneath the wordplay and rhymes was a paranoid visionary commenting on bleak prospects for inner-city youth, US-sponsored violence overseas and what Steez deemed was a coming apocalypse. On “Free the Robots,” Steez raps over a beat that samples late ’60s British rock band the Moody Blues’ doleful “Dear Diary,” offering a scathing takedown of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s much-ballyhooed “soda ban” in fewer characters than a tweet: Cause, apocalypse is getting closer/ But they’re more focused on the lil youth sippin’ soda/ Fuck the sugar act, niggas out pushin’ crack.
While countless resources from Cinematic had gone toward promoting Joey as a star, Steez wasn’t getting the same attention, and AmeriKKKan Korruption wasn’t taking off. Cinematic had two professionally made videos produced for Joey’s tracks around the time that his mixtape, 1999, dropped, but, other than a rough, amateur video for AmeriKKKan Korruption cut “Vibe Ratings,” the crew didn’t release a Steez video (for “Free the Robots”) until September 2012, five months after its initial release. In a similar vein, “Survival Tactics” had initially been credited to Joey Bada$$ and Capital Steez—Steez had found the beat, and the song was his idea—but it had been rebranded as “Joey Bada$$ featuring Capital Steez” by the time the video made by Cinematic’s multimedia partner, Creative Control, was released. It was Joey who Cinematic had been after the whole time, and though Steez had impressed Shipes, he hadn’t convinced him that he would be a good investment. “I don’t think everybody is meant to do business together and that just wasn’t something that fit,” says Shipes. Joey was an easier artist to promote, an energetic MC with plenty of skill and an ineffable cool, in contrast to Steez, whose scruffy image and strong viewpoints didn’t lend themselves easily to the superficial whims of the blogosphere. “He could have been commercial if he sacrificed a few things, which he wasn’t willing to do,” says Jesse Rubin, who worked at Cinematic before leaving later in 2012.
Steez was painfully sensitive to the lack of recognition for the project. During the WNYU segment in April 2012, he talked about feeling like he was getting “slept-on,” and that Joey was soaking up all the attention. “I don’t get hit up for interviews as much as I would like to,” he said. “Forgive me—like Joey, he gets free clothes. I wish I got free clothes!” A video interview released by The Source in June of that year captures the stark differences in personality between the two. Relatable and charming, Joey holds court in front of the group with a microphone that he rarely relinquishes, a kid who clearly enjoys entertaining a crowd. Steez, by contrast, is less polished and a little out there, talking bluntly about his “ascension,” his massive weight loss and how “truthfully in my mind, I’m living in 2047.”
In July, Joey and his mother officially inked a deal with Shipes, and soon after registered Pro Era as an LLC owned by her and Joey. On Cinematic’s Smokers Club tour that summer, a two-month jaunt through 30 cities with headliners Juicy J and Smoke DZA, the group was billed as “Joey Bada$$ and Pro Era.” Steez was becoming the second-in-command of Pro Era, a lieutenant in his own squad. He went on tour anyway, where he had a number of firsts: he did shrooms and lost his virginity, according to his friends, and he went to Canada, where he said to an interviewer that he smoked weed four to seven times a day. But he told his friends back home that he didn’t enjoy eating junk food, getting little sleep and other aspects of life on the road.
Friends say they felt Steez was in a different frame of mind when he returned, and increasingly disillusioned with the rap industry. “He started getting darker almost,” says Jakhari Jack, who would check in with him over the phone while he was on tour. “It went to a different place after that.”
As Steez grew increasingly dissatisfied with his foray into industry life, his sense of spirituality also took a turn for the bizarre. He started talking more about dimensional shifts and alchemy, and began identifying with the Baphomet, a half-goat, hermaphroditic idol favored throughout history by practitioners of the occult. The winged figure, which some say is neither benevolent nor wicked, is often depicted with both breasts and a phallus, the body of a human but the head of a beast, pointing up with one hand to a bright moon and down towards a dark moon with the other. Many of Steez’ closest friends didn’t exactly understand what the Baphomet meant to him. His Facebook page lit up with hundreds of comments after he changed his profile picture to images of the Baphomet twice in July of 2012. “What type of shit are you on?” one of his friends wrote. Steez responded over the next few days, emphasizing the symbol’s meaning of balance. “When you find balance you turn both bodies of energy Neutral,” he posted. But he didn’t necessarily dispel any fears when, in response to another comment, he wrote, “what if I AM the Baphomet.”
He had also started speaking about a vague and ominous-sounding greater purpose: July 11: “I was born blessed with the spirit of Jah, but unfortunately I was put into this Body for Divine Purpose… And that purpose being The GREAT Work.” July 11: “I serve Jah in his Great Work,but this lead to the Discovery of an important truth for human beings.” July 12: “In 2012 they predicted that an Alchemist would rise, with the key to World Peace… Eye think it’s me.”
But as his attitude was growing increasingly grandiose, Steez’ big hopes for his career seemed to be crashing before his eyes, and the weight of that disappointment must have been extraordinary. (Steez had re-releasedAmeriKKKan Korruption with seven additional tracks in October, adding the word “Reloaded” to the title, and hoping to generate some more buzz.) But how exactly it was working on his mind remains a mystery. Steez had always cultivated an air of privacy that prevented even his best friends from knowing exactly what was going on inside his head. “You would talk to Steez and not know half the shit he was talking about. He would say something, and you’d be like, What are you talking about?” says Jack. “That’s my best friend, my brother and I love him. At the same time, he’s a little off and he had some demons he was dealing with—we all do.” Steez’ family says they still aren’t sure if Steez was struggling with any larger mental issues. “The other day I went to visit my mom and we broke down because every day she tries to calculate in her head, What the fuck happened to my son?” says his sister Tamara. “What emotional thing was he going through that we didn’t see as a family?”
The idea that the world would end according to the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 was a joke to many, but some practitioners of New Age theology took the prediction seriously. Steez felt that something was coming too, making references on Facebook to things like hatching, doomsday and a coming global paradigm shift. In early November, a few days after Hurricane Sandy struck New York, he met up with Jared Harari, one of his friends from elementary school. As they walked to a bus stop where they would say what would be their final goodbyes, Steez said something that gave his friend pause. “He said, ‘If the world doesn’t end, something really big is gonna happen and it’s gonna change our lives,’” says Harari. “I can still remember the way he said it. So it was running through my mind, What the fuck is gonna happen? I was just like, What the hell’s gonna happen?”
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