Sintax.the.Terrific – Lawyer By Day, Rapper By Night Creates ‘Audible Essays’ Of The News

It’s 10:30 p.m., and Joe Brewer still has work to do. After putting in a full day at the office, hosting a Christmas devotional for his church’s college-aged home group, and tucking his three kids into bed, the rapper known as sintax.the.terrific finally has time to sit at his laptop and compose a blog post about the death of Kim Jong Il.

He drafts roughly five paragraphs of text that attempt to tell why our mental biography of North Korea’s former head of state shouldn’t be reduced to a Team America-type caricature. Afterward, he enters his homemade sound booth to self-record an accompanying hip-hop ode that ponders what sort of ingredients factor into a recipe that turns a “Dear Leader” into a dictator.

Two and half hours later the song, Sugar and Spice, is posted to the Press Junket website. Brewer moves on to craft a legal document for his “day job” as an attorney and finally slides into bed for a hopeful handful of hours of sleep before starting it all over again.

“It really doesn’t make a lot of good sense in the context of the way our life looks and economically; but I’ve just been so fulfilled by it that that’s kind of all the energy I need to do it,” Brewer said.

The artist, who also blogs as “iPoetLaureate” and is on Facebook as “Huckleberry Spins,” started the “real-time rap news song blog” over a year ago as a natural extension of his music career and as a challenge. He said that fellow deepspace5 group member Greg Owens’ “Manchild Insider” effort (where subscribers received up to five original digital song downloads a month) sparked his own idea to try and offer a serious analysis of world news in hip-hop form about twice a week.

He said he has always incorporated current events and social justice issues into his music, but the traditional processes of recording and distributing it would often lead to listeners hearing dated references by the time his lyrics reached their ears. Given today’s technology and the nature of the hip hop genre – recording over pre-produced soundtracks in a basic 4/4 time signature – offer him a quicker turnaround for the audible essays.

Read the rest of the article by Jason Bellini aka Sketch The Journalist at Chron.com

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