From sheltered life to hip-hop star, Mr. Lif's life
By Chris Nixon
For The Union-Tribune
November 30, 2006
Back in the early 1990s in a dark dorm room on the campus of Colgate University in upstate New York, a man named Jeffrey Haynes freestyled with friends and got his hip-hop chops the old fashioned way. He earned them.
Now, Haynes' conscious rhymes can be found pumping from speakers in dark dorm rooms across the country under the moniker Mr. Lif. Politically aware and rife with intelligent vocabulary, Mr. Lif is the product of his environment. The golden age of conscious hip-hop in the early to mid-1990s gave Haynes inspiration to step up his game and devote his life to music.
“I did something back then that a lot of lyricists don't do these days: I took it all very seriously,” said Haynes from his home in Philadelphia. “Nowadays, kids buy some equipment and claim to be rappers. I started rhyming back in '93. You couldn't (mess) around back then. You're up against A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Wu-Tang Clan. There is no margin for error.”
For Lif, the era exemplified the best that hip-hop had to offer: “I knew that voice was important. I knew that content was important. And I knew that cadence was very important as well and always having dope production.”
Reaching back before his collegiate days, Haynes learned to be a man from his parents growing up in the Boston suburb of Brighton.
“My parents are Barbadian-Americans,” recalled Haynes. “They came to America with a whole different view on black people in this country and on planet Earth. There was a 99 percent literacy rate when they moved over here. They were used to seeing black doctors and lawyers in abundance. They came over here, and every night on the news there are groups of black people getting arrested or killing each other. That resonated strongly with them and made them tighten up the reins on me to make sure I was not exposed to that type of negativity.”
After fleeing the sheltered life at Colgate, Lif retreated back to Boston to make his name in the hip-hop game. He first gained a foothold through his self-produced tracks that found their way on to Boston's vibrant college radio scene.
The turning point for Mr. Lif came when he met El-P from the NYC-based crew Company Flow. El-P offered a contract to record for his influential alternative hip-hop label, Definitive Jux, aka Def Jux. His relationship with El-P gave Mr. Lif instant nationwide cred.
“El-P is one of the godfathers of the independent scene,” said Haynes, who used El-P as a producer on 2002's “I Phantom” and 2005's “Mo' Mega.” “He was prominent at a time when a lot of kids were realizing that we didn't have to sleep on the steps of Motown or Loud Records to put out a song. Everyone was realizing that if you had a couple thousand dollars, you could press up a single and service it to some DJs.”
Always politically driven in his lyrics, Mr. Lif joins another conscious hip-hop crew, The Coup, on the current set of 20 dates across the country. The tour stops at House of Blues downtown tomorrow.
Chris Nixon is a San Diego music writer.
