Artist Profile: Sacredd919
Sacredd919, the rapper from Durham, North Carolina, utilizes his unique voice and penchant for intense rhyme schemes to ebb and flow over the tops of his instrumentals, and, his newest project, “Dirty Room Tape”, showcases both the intensity of his work ethic and the pure artistry of his presence on the mic.
Growing up around the R&B and Neo-Soul tastes of his mother, Sacredd had deep foundations in music, but he never quite imagined himself as a musician as a child.
However, when renowned poet and teacher Phillip Shabazz visited his middle school, he was given a packet of poetry homework to complete. In his mother’s household, it was the rule that her children finished all of their homework in one night, in order to have free time the rest of the week, and Sacredd vividly recalls struggling through Shabazz’s packet in that condensed time frame.
Yet, the challenge sparked something in him, and he began writing poetry voraciously, scribbling rhymes across scattered notebooks and sheets of loose-leaf.
As he grew older, his interest in writing coincided with his blossoming interest in hip-hop, and, before his eyes, all of his poems turned to raps. Even when he tried to break into free verse, he still felt most comfortable bouncing through the rhyme schemes that shaped his favorite music.
“With poems, to me, you can go in so many directions as opposed to when you're writing a rap and it has like an instrumental backing. Of course, you can be loose with it, and that's where you get abstract or avant-garde sounding stuff, which is my pocket… But when I was writing [poems], I couldn't stay away from rhyming. Nothing would sound right if I just let it be a close rhyme or skipped a line where I didn't rhyme at all. I just was naturally attracted to making my words flow into each other really well, and that's something that I pride myself on today.”
Even with his writing developing at an exponential pace, however, he still had to earn his chops in the studio, and this began a long and grueling process that can be traced from his first single, “Can’t Feel My Face!”.
A listen through his discography, from the cascading vocal chops of “Lone Isle Cabana” to the rolling piano loops and melodic flow of “snow”, reveals the rapid steps Sacredd took over the past couple years in finding his voice and confidence in the booth.
Yet, it is his newest project, a collaboration with North Carolina-based producer Professor Payne, that has pushed Sacredd to new heights. A bridge between the boom-bap style of Professor Payne and Sacredd’s typical drumless beats, it culminates as Sacredd’s flow breaks through the simultaneously grimy and laced production of his artistic counterpart.
Moreover, it has allowed him to transfer his sound and subject matter, which he describes simply as “desolate”, in a more potent and effective manner than ever before. In fact, it is this mission of transcribing his experience through rhyme that has driven and will continue to propel him forward in his music.