By Odeisel

History is not always self evident.  It is generally controlled by those who tell the tale and is subject to their spin on events.  When you don’t feel that you are represented properly, you can complain in the hopes that someone will rewrite the history books, or you can do your own research, get on your grind, and tell the story the way you feel it should be told.

Jerome Enders chose the latter.  As one of the first Yonkers emcees, long before you heard of a Mary J or a DMX, Enders participated in laying the foundation for Yonkers Hip-Hop as the original RR, Raw Rome.  When he felt the story wasn’t being conveyed properly, he put down the mic and picked up a pen.  This is his story.

Planet Ill: You call Yonkers the lost city of Hip-Hop.  Why is this?

Raw Rome: Yonkers been in the Hip-Hop game since the foundation. I had to take it to the essence. What do I mean by foundation?  I mean since Kool Herc, you had people coming from Yonkers, going to the Bronx, which was only 15 minutes away and bringing the culture back to Yonkers and germinating it up here.

Not just that, Afrika Bambaataa lived up in Yonkers at that time, and Imperical JC who was with the Herculoids at that time moved up to Yonkers. So you not only had people going to Yonkers during its infant stages, you had those pioneers coming up and moving to Yonkers. So eventually it started germinating the music into Yonkers culture and the world didn’t hear about it until DMX, Jadakiss, D-Block and Mary J. Blige. But prior to that, Yonkers had 20 years of underground things going on.

Planet Ill: You say your book is part history lesson and part education. What can we find in your book that would enlighten us on Yonkers history?

Raw Rome: I’m not stuck on the old school; I’m not caught up in a time warp.  What I’m doing is, I’m connecting the past to the present.  The now. A lot of people don’t know about the past.  And they say it’s just about the now, but the past plays a part in now.  A lot of these old school cats complain about the new school and the quality of the music, but the new school people, the younger generation has not been exposed to the powerful elements of the Hip-Hop culture.  That’s the key.

The old school generation had a lot of powerful elements that corporate America and uneducated Hip-Hop practitioners missed out on. So that’s what I’m doing, I’m meshing the past, present and the future.

Planet Ill: Who are some of the people that you talk about in this book? What does this book shed light on, that other sources do not?

Raw Rome: When I talk about D-Block, I talk about a side of D-Block that if you’re not from Yonkers, you probably wouldn’t have any idea about. A lot of this stuff don’t hit the news. I talk about Styles P’s contributions to Yonkers and the world. I talk about the Lox’ whole contributions and their give backs to the Yonkers community; how they help the children and the families up in Y.O.

Planet Ill: How important is it that those contributions are organic and connected to the community?

Raw Rome: It’s very important.  The reason I chose to write that way about D-Block, is because in a typical Hip-Hop book, they’re going to talk about how nice Jadakiss’ rhymes are or how many records they sold, their lyrical content, et cetera. Everybody knows that already, you can get that in any magazine. So I decided to touch on their character; their contributions.

It’s very important because they‘ve been giving back since the beginning; early in their career. Soon as they came in the game they were giving back to the community. That’s why I say D-Block means more to Yonkers than just music. So in my book I share stories of different children talking about their contributions; different memories that people have. Just the love that they have in Y.O. outside the music.  Hip-Hop is more than just music and that’s what I’m explaining in the book.

Planet Ill: Yonkers’ first rise or first salvo into notoriety begins you could say, with Mary J. Blige.  Is she in this book at all?

Raw Rome: My Mary story…the way I elaborate on Mary is that I gave the world a Mary story that they wouldn’t see in the Vibe or The Source magazine. No disrespect to those credible magazines. I touch a side of Mary, that knowing her, I’ve seen her come up. I’ve seen her personally. I’ve seen how she developed her craft. I was there at one of the first shows she did, down at the club called Arthur’s.  The Mary story is called “Visualization.”  Visualization and Materialization is what I call it.

Planet Ill: What drove you to write this book? Obviously it’s not easy to do.  What powered you to keep going and finish?

Raw Rome: First was history. Many years ago I saw this T-shirt that a young brother was wearing and it had all the Yonkers rappers. It had about 20 or 30 of them, and I didn’t find my name on there one time. Not sounding egotistic but for those in the know, you can ask anybody in the industry about Raw Rome. For those in the know, for my contributions to the foundation of Yonkers Hip-Hop, that’s a no-no.

That’s when I said I gotta write a book.  Because I didn’t want to get left out of history. My contributions.  Because Styles P threw me on the Gangster & A Gentleman album I didn’t want to get left out of history.  And I went to school. I see the way, I read social studies. I see how they lie about history and people’s contributions. It depends on who’s recording it. I ran into that example when that guy put that on the T-shirt.

So what I said is, since I have more knowledge about this stuff than most of these people around here, I’m going to put a book together, and deal with the history.  Take my time, scrutinize the information, fact-find and put something together without the ego and the individualism.  That’s the best way to get a history. The best way to get our story is without the ego and the individualism.

Plus I was so connected to the culture, it was no problem for me to call whomever or get next to whomever because they knew I was one of them. I’m one of them. They know about my work. So it was easier for me to go certain places and get certain information that others would have a hard time doing.

Support Hip-Hop Literature.  Yonkers: The Lost City of Hip-Hop can be purchased on Amazon.

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