Music

Rap as sport

For local emcee TDK, an aborted athletics career launched a thousand rhymes

Damon Hodge

Maybe it’s best that Kwasi Jones’ visions of sports glory didn’t pan out. Looking at him, it’s hard to see how the lanky former Cimarron-Memorial High football and hoops standout could handle the rigors of college athletics—the two-a-day practices and the relentless pounding against men twice his size. He’s got a quarter-miler’s physique.

Following a stint at the College of Marin near San Francisco, Jones (rap name TDK) returned home and began channeling the intensity—hustle, outwork your opponent—that led to all-state honors in both sports into a passion birthed in the third grade.

Music’s been the singular focus for nearly 15 years. “On the teams I played on, I always had raps for them. And in the same way you don’t play every team the same way, you don’t do every song the same way. I’ve written thousands of rhymes, more than a thousand songs and put out a couple of mixtapes.”

The productivity is paying dividends. This month’s issue of The Source magazine features a glowing write-up in the “Off the Radar” section highlighting unsigned talent from off the beaten path. Writer Jorge Gonzalez’s trite cliché aside—“Hip-hop in Sin City is about to take the house for all it’s worth”—the article pays homage to TDK’s grind.

That isn’t the Source mention he’s most amped about—The Chapter and Qadeer, to name two, beat him to that recognition. He gets animated when noting that his sex-themed song “Split Ya Wigg” also earned mention in the “Fat Tape” section, joining cuts from hip-hop luminaries like Jay-Z, Scarface and Lil Wayne as The Source’s picks for the month’s dopest rhymes. The song is bassy, piano-driven ear candy.

“That means my song is one of the hottest on the streets,” he says. “It fits because I don’t look at local rappers as my competition. I look at the Jay-Zs as my comp.”

Born in Ohio, but reared here, Jones figured on a career in either sports or music. “[Former UNLV and NFL quarterback] Randall Cunningham is my cousin, so I got the genes.” Music resonated with him in a way sports didn’t. His older brother, Shay, inspired him to rap, while Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” convinced him emceeing was a noble career pursuit. He recorded his first song at age 14; “something about a fantasyland. I can’t remember.”

Relationships parlayed while playing prep sports fueled his peripheral rap career. At 18, Jones founded the Culture Cultivated promotions firm, bringing Das EFX, among others, to Vegas. “They’d perform at the Thunderbird, which was owned by my friend Nevada Stupak’s father, Bob Stupak.”

Manager Jahe Allah, then-owner of Dunjun Studios, gave him a musical outlet. (Allah shut the studio down after one man was killed and another injured in a June 2005 shooting.) Allah has grown to appreciate TDK’s professionalism and indefatigable spirit—he works like a scrub trying to make the team. “He’s very workman-like.”

The plan now is to continue recording and “trying to kill YouTube and MySpace with videos,” following in the footsteps of Brooklyn’s Uncle Murda, whose YouTube proclivity helped land him a deal with Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records.

“I say, support me because I’m hot, not because I’m from Vegas,” Jones says. “The Source says I’m hot. It’s sad that the world has to recognize your talent before the people in your city do.” (myspace.com/teamtdkglobal)

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