The club is dark, the music is jazzy. Acoustic bass harmonizes with saxophone. Swirls of cigarette smoke are silhouetted by the spotlight cast over Darius, a smooth-talking poet from Chicago played by the enigmatic Larenz Tate. “Who am I?” he asks the crowd, “it’s not important, but they call me Brother to the Night.” Young Jackson was mesmerized by it all.
Growing up in the projects of Indianapolis, Kevin Jackson II didn’t know that poetry could look like that; saucy, provocative, and Black. Love Jones, an R-rated movie Jackson snuck into at the age of seven, sparked a fascination with words. It is a distinct memory. He found kinship with Darius, a midwesterner with the same complexion as himself who became a successful artist. He also got the girl, which helped sell Jackson on the coolness of poetry.
Jackson kindled this love in secret, afraid to embrace the vulnerability required to share his writing publicly. He was always in close proximity to poetry by way of music. From the gospel his grandparents played to the Usher and Aalyiah albums his older sister belted out in her bedroom, strings of lyrics and fragments of melodies were constantly swirling in Jackson’s head. An innate rhythm translated into skill as a dancer. It wasn’t until he peeked behind the music industry curtain as a backup dancer on a world tour that he saw the feasibility of a career in music. He’s been striving to make that vision his reality ever since.
…
In sixth grade English class, Jackson felt his first rush of inspiration. The assignment was to write a haiku. After years of listening to rap music with his dad, pouring over episodes of Mos Def Poetry Jam and obsessively watching Love Jones, Jackson was already familiar with poetry. He spent all of his time in school, whether in math or science or history, scribbling down phrases that sounded “dope” – poems about Ninja Turtles or girls or his mom. When he was tasked with writing this haiku, it poured out of him with ease.
He wrote about his mom, Regina. The poem’s elegant simplicity took his teacher by surprise, as she had no idea of Jackson’s capability as a writer. She immediately shared it with his parents and suddenly Jackson’s secret skill was no longer entirely his own. “With Black parents, once they found out you can do something, you have to show everyone,” he says with a laugh. “The grocery store, dentist’s office, doctor’s office… wherever we went, they made me show this poem.”
From that point on, his parents helped nurture his love for words. His dad, Kevin Jackson Sr., is his namesake and hero. “My dad’s biggest goal in life was for me to succeed him. If I was going to be good at words, he was going to make sure I was the best.” And so, they read the dictionary together. They’d discuss the new words they discovered and how they could use them. Jackson focused on phonetics, studying the individual syllables of each word, noticing the way he had to shape his mouth or move his tongue to form the sound. He learned how words could be syncopated to match beats and make music. He started to hear those same patterns in the music his dad played.
Sitting in a beat-up white truck with the windows cranked all the way down and the music cranked all the way up, Jackson Senior played his son Me Against The World by Tupac for the first time. The guttural aggression of 2pac’s voice juxtaposed with the poetry of his lyrics ignited something in Jackson. The smile it brought to his dad’s face is cemented in his memory. He was seven years old, but even then, he related.
He’d listen to JayZ and Nas in the shower, mesmerized by how their music described complex emotions in such relatable words. He listened to his CDs on repeat, working to memorize each syllable of every lyric. He felt the words of the greats roll off his tongue, mimicking their cadence and vocal intonation. In the blur of hot water and soap suds, those lyrics became his own and he transformed into the artist behind the mic. It made him feel invincible, even if only for a moment.
Growing up in Indianapolis, Jackson says his childhood was “pretty unsupervised.” He’d go to friends’ or cousins’ houses and witness plenty of drug consumption. Early on, he says, he could tell when someone drank too much by the slightest slur of their speech. He saw fights break out at corner stores and learned to recognize the outline of a gun in a man’s pants pocket. He also saw the strength of community, describing his childhood friends as “boys for life.” When Tupac sings of a “gangsta party,” Jackson can still picture it. It’s the duality of life in the projects; poverty and crime juxtaposed with vibrant celebrations of life, faith, and resilience. This is exactly how rap music felt to him; a sonic representation of his simultaneously celebratory and bleak reality.
Inherently, even at 7 years old, he felt the power words could hold. That power, that talent, gave him an outlet to masquerade as superior to the kids around him. He constructed worlds outside his own where he wasn’t limited by his upbringing.
Despite his love for rap, he never considered it a viable career. He was aware of the negative connotation that came with rap – it was the music of “gangbangers” that didn’t live long enough to raise their children. He heard it under the breath of his mother or in the side-comments of his teachers. It rattled windows and disrupted classrooms with bass heavy low-end that boomed out of retrofitted Toyota Camry stereo systems. Rap was a phase, a genre that would burn out as quickly as it rose to popularity. Forging a career as a rapper was a silly, childish goal, not rooted in reality.
The same year, 1996, Jackson Sr played his son Tupac for the first time, the rapper was murdered at 25. The case of his murder was recently reopened in Las Vegas, but it remains unsolved. Many people have believed since early on that the person who ordered his death was rap rival Notorious B.I.G, who was gunned down less than a year later at 24. Longevity as a rapper didn’t seem common.
Jackson continued to hide his talent as a writer out of self preservation. He describes his hometown as a place “where people don’t express themselves artistically.” Jackson’s lyrics were deep expressions of self; poems about mental health and family and struggle. By sharing his writing he knew he’d open himself up to ridicule. By maintaining a hard, emotionless exterior, he avoided painting a target on his own back– perhaps both figuratively and literally.
….
In his teens, Jackson had a preoccupation with two things: financial stability and girls. One thing he knew girls liked was a guy that could dance.
He started playing around with the dance trends of the time — the heel-toe, the chicken head, the pancake, all fairly simple moves you’d see on VH1 or MTV — and quickly realized he had rhythm beyond the norm. He skipped basketball practice to attend his first dance class and never went back. Not only could he dance freely, he also got to listen to music at the same time; two things he loved. What started as an inroad with a crush became a porthole to a whole new world.
The dance scene in the midwest was vibrant. As Jackson continued to take classes as a dancer, he attended local dance competitions that brought in diverse people from across the region; judges from Chicago and choreographers from Detroit, all of whom had distinct perspectives on the world. Jackson recalls starting “to see a lot more diversity, not just in race. I would meet other Black dudes that were so different from me that didn’t come from the projects and had been dancing their whole lives. They were making good money from dancing.”
After grabbing the attention of a talent scout, he signed a contract with LA-based talent agency The Movement and started auditioning. The path towards financial stability was clearly paved for dancers and a career started to form. Jackson relegated his poetry to a hobby and packed his bags for a world tour as a backup dancer for Will.I.Am. The Black Eyed Pea was embarking on a two-year-long world tour as a solo rapper.
Touring with Will.I.Am was transformative for Jackson. It was like boot camp for life skills– the tour was in a different city every day. He learned to travel, fight jet lag, keep up his stamina and perform nightly, all while being away from home for the first time. He saw the pressure of fandom and the expectations of an artist. He learned to not be star-struck by celebrities. He saw them as human, like himself.
Jackson describes Will.I.Am as being very “future thinking” and constantly “striving to break out of the box the industry puts Black artists in.” He quickly became a mentor to Jackson, even if from afar. Jackson studied how he moved and how he thought, from the way he treated staff to how he approached creating new music. Will “cared about what his dancers had to say” and spent time while on tour “hearing their views about the world.” He made Jackson feel like his thoughts, and thus his writing, mattered. He saw Will.I.Am’s success as a rapper as a product of hard work, talent and passion intersecting – not some divine, unreplicable, accident.
K.LOV3, the moniker Jackson went by at the time, was inspired by his smooth, and sensual signature dance style. This distinct style helped him gain recognition of his own and he became known amongst fans of dance. Leading up to the 2010s, a person could achieve real celebrity as a dancer and parlay it into his or her own career as an artist. Big names like Mariah Carey and J.Lo got their start as backup dancers. Even Tupac had a brief stint dancing behind Digital Underground. TV shows like America’s Best Dance Crew and So You Think You Can Dance, both of which K.LOV3 appeared on, provided dancers with opportunities to make names for themselves.
When Jackson began the #willpower tour with Will.I.Am his recognition grew amongst fans of the musician.
A windy night in Amsterdam, performing at the Ziggo Dome, would shift Jackson’s perspective on his career forever. December 10, 2013 – three fans, hours before the show, stood at the stage door waiting for Will and his dancers to arrive at the venue. When the group deboarded the tour bus, Jackson saw their signs. Emblazoned in thick black marker was his name: K.LOV3. They were waiting for him, in the cold, with no tickets to actually attend the show.
Jackson got them front row seats. The concert went on and he could see their signs from the stage. While Will.I.Am connected with 17,000 people as a rapper, Jackson had connected with those three people as a dancer. That felt like a whole world to him.
For the first time, he knew he was the artist and that music had to be his outlet. His first tour as a dancer would be his last.
. . .
Nascent Youtube videos of rap battles became Jacksons’ testing ground for new bars. He’d recite his “favorite lines” from a newly released rap battle video, telling his friends this rapper or that rapper had penned them. In reality, they came from his journals, written in secret. By pretending he didn’t write the lyrics, he felt like he got an objective opinion and could avoid both the negative and positive bias of his friends. If his friends reacted well, he knew he had something.
Rap is a game of proving yourself. Jackson began to earn his stripes in the LA music scene through live performances at cyphers — a collaborative evolution of battle rap where artists consecutively rap one after another, progressively changing the melody as they go. As opposed to Mos Def Poetry Jam, where poets performed written solo pieces that read more like spoken word than music, the poetry he heard at cyphers in basements of North Hollywood homes, seemed to emerge from nothing– “off the dome,” as Jackson described it. Each rapper picks something up from the person before them, evolving the story to speak individually while smoothly transitioning out of the flow that came before. The crazier your bars, the more cache you gained as a rapper.
Jackson steadily improved and began to gain some respect. He developed his own style; quick, syncopated and rhythmic. He credits his ability to rap with speed and clarity to the years he spent reading the dictionary with his dad. As if by instinct, with each tick of a syllable, his body moves ever-so-slightly to mirror the imagery of his words.
The unique intersection of dance and lyricism became his signature. With a little bit of buzz among his dancer-turned-musician community, he decided to independently produce his debut album, Speak.
He found a producer, another dancer-turned-musician Wyatt Starkman. Jackson quickly moved into Starkman’s home and became part of his family. They spent months holed up in a small childhood bedroom piecing together what they thought would be a life-changing record. They were so focused, Starkman’s mom would have to remind them to eat. They were locked in on their common goal; produce an album that would take them both out of momma’s house.
Speak never saw the light of day.
In retrospect, the album was all over the place. It jumped around subject matter, instrumentation, and personality. Jackson likens it to cooking a frozen pizza; “we were so excited to be making an album that we took it out before it was done. In some places, it was delicious. In other places, it was still underbaked” he said.
Jackson went into this album intending to put it out under K.LOV3. The name, which was better suited for the crooning voice of Brian KcKnight or Barry White, didn’t necessarily fit the music he wanted to create.
He also felt like the name was still too personal, too self-serving. It never felt right.
Giving up on Speak untethered Jackson. Creating and releasing that album was a guiding force in his life for several years. Without it, he had no reason to be living with Starkman, no goal to achieve, no driving purpose. The post-dance life he had established was dissolving and he found himself starting over yet again.
As a means of supporting himself, Jackson began working with other artists as a ghost writer. Def Jam would call him into writing sessions with R+B artists and rappers on their label. He spent time with 5th Harmony, wrote frequently with Dani-Leigh, collaborated with Kaash Paige and worked on arrangements for the BET Awards. He had accomplished his goal of financial stability through music but had to quiet his own voice to do so.
It wasn’t the career he envisioned back in Amsterdam.
Growing up, Jackson was self-conscious of “doing too much” or trying too hard. As a kid, this was borne out of his fear of vulnerability. As an artist, this manifested itself as trying to fit into a box. The same conversation he had with Will.I.Am over ten years prior was the same concept he was struggling with in his own artistry.
Once the pandemic hit, Jackson refocused. He went back to the beginning; poetry. He formed a collective of artists, titled “their p.o.e.t.s.” – an acronym for “purpose overcame each torn story” – and stories started to pour out of him. He also started going by Jackson II, a return to his family name and a commitment to expressing his unique, authentic experience. The addition of II is an homage to his father, Kevin Senior.
Gone was smooth talking K.LOV3 and the dated inspiration he pulled from Love Jones. He stopped trying to force a type of music or an image or a name. Instead, he decided to let inspiration come to him, in the same way it did in his sixth grade English class.
Sitting at a spoken word poetry event, inspiration struck like a tidal wave. A few hours later, he had the beginnings of a new song, “God Eyes;”
“A pack of them packing pistols probably plotting to pack you in // I valued the vicious cycle that the people would trap me in // But trapping me only freed my mind to see the big trap I’m in // I’m thanking him, it’s God eyes on me.”
Two years later, Jackson is in the final stages of polishing what will actually be his debut album “My Demon’s Demon.” It’s a return to his roots, a discussion of his childhood, a love letter to his family, and an examination of racial disparity; An ode to the artist who came before him and a cautionary tale for the artists who will come after him. “My Demon’s Demon” is a culmination of all the lessons Jackson learned in order to still be here, making music. He’s okay with taking his time and is pushing for that longevity that has eluded so many rappers
As for his hesitancy to share his music, those days are long gone. Just like Brother to the Night, he knows he has sauce. “I’m the greatest rapper alive,” he states proudly, “you just haven’t had the pleasure of finding me yet.” And now you have.