This story ends with Ishues dining with the richest man in Zimbabwe then jumping offstage at the Miss Zimbabwe Beauty Pageant. It begins with him taking the train from Jersey City to Philadelphia to rob people and then going back home to rap about it. This story ends with Ishues trading verses onstage with KRS-One and Black Thought of The Roots. It begins with being shot at on Halloween night, a wake-up call that turned his life around. 

With the barrel of a gun aimed at his temple, Ishues was thinking one thing: “Ain’t karma a bitch?” It was Halloween 2000. A few nights earlier, Ishues was on the other side of this type of transaction. This night, however, he handed over $300, paying close attention to the hold-up man’s shoes. The perpetrator stuffed the money in his pocket and ran after Ishues’ friend, who had darted off as soon as he sensed danger. 

Ishues collected himself, got with his crew, and “strapped up.” They drove around the block looking for a guy wearing similar clothes. They stopped to intimidate suspects, holding them up until they could get a good look at their sneakers. If it wasn’t a match, they let the guy go with a simple, “OK, you good.” After an hour of this, they gave up. 

Back on the front porch, Ishues was still simmering over the night’s turn of events. While retelling the story to a friend, a shadowy figure stepped out of a car and stood under a nearby tree. Ishues looked at the shadow; the shadow looked back. Ishues noticed that only one arm of the shadow was visible; the other was hiding something behind his back. Ishues immediately jumped for cover. As the shadow opened fire, Ishues could only think about his girlfriend, who was pregnant with their first child. “I could’ve been sitting on the porch with my daughter.”

Eight years later, Ishues shows friends these bullet holes when he visits his old house in Jersey City. He moved there at 18, when his cousin promised him music industry connections. Ishues started rapping while sitting at home with the boom box and a pad of paper, writing response verses to his favorite underground battle rapper, Canibus. Eventually he gained the confidence to take his rhymes to the streets, finding lyrical sparring partners by asking people who nodded their heads with a hip-hop swagger, “Yo, you rhyme?” If they responded affirmatively, he would challenge: “So rhyme.” 

Ishues and his cousin earned a name for themselves battling and defeating the best MCs in the Tri-State area. During this time, Ishues not only rhymed about robbing and glorifying violence, he lived it. But after that fateful Halloween night in 2000, he could no longer put his family at risk. Ishues moved to Atlanta and reinvented himself, both as an artist and as an individual. 

In Georgia, he was able to focus on his music while raising a family. He was still battle rapping, but his topical and now profanity-free lyrics focused on his struggles as a father raising a daughter. He also embraced Pan-Africanism, the movement promoting the unification of all people with African ancestry.

From 2001 to 2004 Ishues went from being an overly ambitious new kid on the block to the top battle MC in Atlanta. He won all the important battle titles, which cumulated in his induction to the World Famous Mic Club’s Hall of Champions. He parlayed this momentum into an album, 2004’s Reality Flow, which won multiple Flagpole awards as well as earned him the title of Underground Hip-Hop Artist of the Year by Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. 

With more confidence than ever, Ishues jumped onstage at a KRS-One show and took over the microphone for a few minutes. Rather than getting booted off by security, he was taken in. Ishues demonstrated an ability to captivate an audience, and KRS-One asked him to join the tour as his hype man. After every show, KRS-One would encourage Ishues to get on the mic and rhyme whenever he felt inspired. Ishues took this advice and ran with it. “I got to the point where I would just cut him [KRS-One] off,” Ishues remembers. During a show in Philadelphia, Ishues and KRS-One were joined by a surprise guest. “The DJ told us Black Thought was backstage and wanted to know if he could come out. Before we could answer, he came out with a mic in his hand and started going off. I went next.” 

After the tour ended, Ishues continued to perform in Athens and Atlanta, headlining smaller venues as well as opening up for big names like Kanye West, 50 Cent, Ludacris and Talib Kweli. In September 2007 he released his second album, Civil Unrest, on his own label, Spokenroar. 

In December of 2008 Ishues got a call from his manager, who told him of a possible New Year’s gig in Zimbabwe. Not only would this fulfill Ishues’ lifelong dream of going to Africa, he would be the first American hip-hop artist to perform in Zimbabwe. 

Two days after Christmas, Ishues arrived at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe and was picked up by a Mercedes C-Class. Chauffeured from place to place, he saw the reality of Zimbabwe, a flourishing consumer culture with a thriving market for hip-hop. On the road, all he saw were high-end luxury cars, and he hung out with people who owned 10 to 12 of them. These high rollers would lend Ishues one of their cars, as long as he came back the next day to trade it in for another one. “I had never been around so much money in my life,” Ishues observed, “and this is in Zimbabwe, where everybody is supposed to be starving.” 

But then he went to the hood, where “it was like a war zone. Buildings were blown out and... I don’t know how else to describe it except that it looked like something that survived a war.” Despite the landscape, he didn’t see anyone who was starving or unhappy. Everybody knew each other and kids were more likely to hold hands with one another than threaten each other. Cars pulled over so the neighbors could dance to the music thumping out of the speakers. It was the type of poverty where people didn’t have luxuries, but they still enjoyed the simple life. “There was clearly a separation in class, but everybody was content with what they had. There wasn’t the pressure of trying to get more. Don’t get me wrong; that does exist. You just don’t feel it as much. They own and live off the land.” Ishues felt at home here, sharing laughs, stories and food. 

If the Pan-African movement could be summarized in three words, it would be “Africa as home.” While Ishues understood this intellectually, he always felt like an outsider looking in. In Zimbabwe, “I was able to see the world through the eyes of Africa.” It was always important for Ishues to visit his homeland. He knew this. Now he could feel it.

Ishues had the schedule of an overnight celebrity in Africa. He went over with a TV appearance and a New Year's concert planned. The love he received after his first TV appearance led to more TV and radio gigs, collaborations with top local hip-hop acts, and a handful of additional stage shows. The first impromptu appearance was the highlight of his trip, one song in front of 5,000 people during the nationally televised Miss Zimbabwe Beauty Pageant. “I don’t know what came over me at that pageant,” he recalls. He jumped over a table, off the stage, and ran into the audience. The crowd was electrified; “I might as well have been Lil’ Wayne.” He exited the stage with the natural high of a rock star who has connected with his audience. Breathing heavily, he wanted more. 

When asked by African media what the purpose of his trip was, Ishues stated, “to get out here and rock.” Using hip-hop, his goal was to bring people together and forget about their differences. Besides the class divide, there is a strong racial divide between whites, dark-skinned blacks and lighter-skinned blacks in Africa. Ishues rocked the stage for all of them. 

From a life of violence to bringing people together in the name of music, Ishues has come a long way.  When asked, "What's next?" he doesn't hesitate to respond: "I'm going back to Africa." After that, his plans include Australia and Japan.  With Ishues, you never know what's next.  

Michael J. Gerber