Courtesy Black Jewelz
“A.I.,” from the New Haven-raised Black Jewelz’s science-fiction hip hop odyssey Illethal, begins with a sparse yet shimmering beat, one that leaves plenty of room for the torrent of words that’s coming. Then the voice comes in, first heavily distorted, the sound of a machine talking.
“Attention,” it says. “I am immortal / Anthropomorphic, invincible, abnormal / Infamous. Also incognito, anonymous, / Intently announcing impending Armageddon, imminent annihilation, instant apocalypse.”
“The main attraction of the song,” Black Jewelz — that is, Julius Ferguson — explained, “is the lyrical pattern. I labored over it for two days straight. I went through every word in the dictionary that begins with a and i.”
“A.I.” encapsulates the lyrical and musical ambition, playfulness, and wild creativity in all of Ferguson’s releases, from 2012’s Destiny Callz to 2015’s Illethal to his latest releases, 2016’s Unrivaled and 2017’s Rap King Rap. They reveal an artist bursting with ideas, from the content of the lyrics to the flow of their delivery, to the music Ferguson sets his rhymes to.
New Haven gets a chance to hear Black Jewelz live at the S.O.S. Festival on Sunday, a day-long event on the New Haven Green that combines social service outreach and music as it seeks to draw attention to the problem of criminal recidivism. After that, Ferguson heads back to Baltimore, where he currently lives and works, and then hopefully to Los Angeles.
“If I can just get to a place where there are people with connections, people with influence,” Ferguson said, then maybe he can get his career to take off. Sure, it sounds risky. But after a youth spent getting into trouble, a conversion that got him out of it, and years spent honing his craft, he knows he has to give it a shot.
Novocaine The Arsonist
Ferguson was obsessed with making hip hop early. He started writing songs when he was 11 or 12 in Hamden. In 2000, when he was 14, “I remember I had a cheap Casio keyboard, and it was so amazing to me to able to press a key and hear a kick drum, and then press a button and hear a violin, and then a horn,” he said, with self-deprecating humor. He multitracked an album by using a portable tape recorder and a boom box that he set up near each other, and he laid his tracks down one by one, switching tapes and building his songs.
“And that was the demo tape I was going to send to Dr. Dre!” he said with a laugh. “I was so serious and sincere about it.”
But, in his own words, “I was also a miscreant and a runaway … I had a rough upbringing” — rough enough that he found himself homeless at 15, sleeping outside. “That was the first time I learned how long the night really is,” he said, “from sunset to sunrise.” He bounced from place to place, and was on the street in Newhallville a lot.
“I became involved in street business,” Ferguson said, and learned that he didn’t like it. “The dudes I was hanging out with were literal killers.” People who have never lived that way, he said, “have no idea how dark and scary, how terrifying it is. It’s anxiety-inducing. You’re looking over your shoulder all the time…. Every day I wish I’d never turned to the streets. Some rappers wear that as a badge of honor. I wear it as a badge of shame. It’s not something I’m proud of.”
But he was still working on his music and had come up with a name for himself: Novocaine the Arsonist. That changed. “When I was out on the street,” he said, “I used to dress in all black — hoodie, ski mask, bandana, and gloves.” Riffing on Ferguson’s first name, a friend joked that his rap name should be Black Jewelz. It stuck in his mind. And looking back on it now, it struck him as fitting.
“When a diamond is discovered, it is first covered in coal,” Ferguson said. “It’s a metaphor for a diamond in the rough.”
Finding God
“There were many times when I was at rock bottom,” Ferguson said. Then he quoted J.K. Rowling, who said once that “rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.”
Ferguson could remember the day it happened: Nov. 23, 2003. He was 17 and had been expelled from school. He was attending Sunday services at Holy Word Foundation Ministries, which at the time was on Derby Avenue. (“It’s now a Dunkin Donuts,” he noted.) Speaker Stephanie Stroud was leading the congregation. “The theme of her message was, ‘Who’s appreciating you?’” Ferguson said. “She said, ‘Whether you know it or not, someone is appreciating you’” — either God or the Devil. Ferguson knew which of them was more interested in him, “and it wasn’t God,” he said.
“I felt a voice in my conscience, so clear, say ‘why are you making excuses?’ And no lie,” Ferguson said, the second he had the thought, Stroud said, “‘see, a lot of you would like to make excuses for why you won’t change.’ It was like God stepped in my face. She was pointing at me, and it was like God speaking through her.”
He changed that day, he said, casting aside the life he knew, and “I’ve never looked back. A lot of the friends I had, I can’t tell you the last time I saw them. I was determined to stay on that path, even if I was the only one.”
Go West
He finished high school and enrolled at Gateway, then transferred to Southern Connecticut State University, and finished a degree at Albertus Magnus. He’s been working toward a masters degree in social work. Meanwhile, he worked for LEAP and for Save Our Sons, doing youth outreach programs, and became a substitute teacher in the New Haven school system.
“I’m still trying to do stuff with the youth,” Ferguson said, “to be a role model and have an impact.”
That same message appears in his music, which Ferguson began to develop in earnest. From 2005 to 2008 he hit every spoken-word and hip hop open mic and talent show he could find, including at the Apollo Theater. And in 2009 he began to record. He self-produced his first album, but effectively shelved it.
“I do not like that album at all,” he said. He was still learning the key differences between performing for an audience and recording a performance for an album, and still learning how to compose music he liked and record and mix them to his satisfaction.
He was happier with Destiny Callz, but “still saw the holes,” he said. It was on 2014’s Black Market and 2015’s Illethal — the title a three-way play on “ill” (as in “cool”), “lethal,” and “illegal” — that he at last felt he hit his stride. The science-fiction themes on Illethal emerged after a jag of reading science fiction novels and comic books. Making a concept album also appealed to his desires to grow as an artist.
“I want to be able to delve deeper in being a writer,” Ferguson said, not only in writing verse after intricate verse, but in telling a story across an entire album’s worth of material. At some point, he said, “I want to make a thriller — at least one album of suspense and mystery, or maybe a series of albums.”
The past couple years have seen Ferguson hit the road on tours in the Northeast and Midwest. He currently lives and works in Baltimore, and is hoping to head out to Los Angeles in the fall. He believes in himself, believes in his ability to deliver his message. He just hopes he can find more ears to listen, and maybe even catch a break.
Or, as he says at the end of “A.I.”: “Impassioned, all I’ve acquired is ambition / Invoking alleluias, it’s all intuition / Ay, “I,” Ay, I assume it appears inconceivable / A’ight, interpretation: altogether, I am illethal.”
Black Jewelz appears on the New Haven Green this Sunday as part of the S.O.S. Festival. Click here to listen to and buy his albums.