By day, Cassondra Tibbits cleans other people’s houses.
“It’s a living,” she said in a recent telephone interview from her Lebanon apartment.
After hours, though, it’s all about the music. And to hear her tell it, it really has been all along.
A year ago last month, Tibbits founded her own promotion and management company, Legit Lioness Entertainment, to support local underground hip-hop and R&B talent. She lets her artists record in her Lebanon apartment, which she’s transformed into a makeshift studio space.
She knows that most people’s idea of a hip-hop manager probably isn’t a woman who grew up in Canaan on a steady diet of classic rock — Janis Joplin and Creedence Clearwater Revival played on the soundtrack of her childhood.
“My parents were bikers, just in case you couldn’t tell by my personality,” she said.
But as she grew older, she increasingly found herself drawn to the ethos and energy of hip-hop music.
“I don’t know how to describe it in words. Something just moved in me when I heard artists Run-DMC,” she said. “Mary J. Blige. Talk about a strong, powerful woman.
“Oh, and Beyonce. Duh.”
Since founding Legit Lioness — named for her Zodiac sign, Leo, and for the lion’s capacity for both toughness and tenderness — she has booked between 30 and 40 shows for her eight artists.
Among these artists is Yung Breeze, aka 22-year-old Christopher Brown, of Springfield, Vt. Breeze has recently taken home a couple of titles from the New England Hip Hop Awards, run by the award-winning hip-hop-themed music promotion website GetMoneyMusic.com. Breeze won first place in the slot competition, which was based solely on performance, and the independent record label he founded, Street Religion, was named one of four best hip-hop crews. The song Cold War is also up for the People’s Choice Award, for which voting closes on July 21.
On June 17, she presented a showcase of her artists at The Engine Room in White River Junction. It would be journalistically fair to say that Street Religion brought down the house: Though the event was scheduled to end at 1 a.m., security could not quell the audience’s demand for an encore performance.
“It helps to have artists that are talented,” Tibbits said. “Obviously.”
But, her artists said, it also helps to have Tibbits.
“Cass has been like a big sister,” said Jun Fargo, of Springfield, Vt., one of the artists signed to Street Religion. When he’s not channeling his inner John Legend, Fargo works at a gas station; like several of the artists interviewed for this article, he was homeless at one point in his life and sees hip-hop as a way to elevate himself from his pain.
Fargo said that, as a former cog in the foster care system, to have his talent validated by Tibbits “means everything.
“She’s not money-hungry, and she doesn’t play favorites,” Fargo said. “She looks out for each and every one of us. She’s real people.”
‘Hard Times and Hustling’
Gho$t, aka Christopher Elcock, of Claremont, works Sunday through Thursday for a remodeling company in Manchester. Some weeks he works Fridays, too.
“I’m one of the guys who tears down the old Tedeschi (convenience) stores to put in the 7-Elevens,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “Pretty different from my other life.”
That other life is devoted to the two things he loves most: his son, who recently celebrated his first birthday, and music. He spends hours poring through different beats, looking for the one that lays down the right feeling around which to spin a song.
The process, he said, can be almost as daunting as choosing between Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, the late rap luminaries of the West and East coasts, respectively: There’s no right or wrong choice, only one that reveals some kind of truth about the listener.
Personally, Gho$t prefers Tupac. “I know I’m East Coast, but what can I say?” he said. “He’s got me.”
For the record, Tibbits leans toward Tupac, too. She was only 13 when he died, but she remembers being struck by his seamless blend of both personal and political narratives: “I know, I know. I’m just a girl who grew up in the country, a million miles from the ’hood,” she said. “But I did grow up in that kind of poverty, and I could relate to the stories he told in his songs.”
Breeze, on the other hand, prefers Biggie.
“Talk about being versatile,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “He really shed a lot of light on the music as a movement to get people out of the ’hood. I think, with his kind of energy, there’s no limit to what he could have done if he were alive today.”
Breeze’s own energy is anything but limited. At the June 17 showcase, he was a major life force on the stage, literally jumping up and down for joy throughout his performance.
But Breeze has seen his share of hard times, too. Like Fargo, he’d been homeless before — in Breeze’s case, at 13. After his family moved to Brattleboro, Vt., from Greenfield, Mass., he clashed with his mother’s new live-in boyfriend. The tension escalated to the point that Breeze opted to leave home of his own volition, couch-surfing for a while before his godmother took him in. “To be honest, it wasn’t very easy,” he said of life in Brattleboro. “I’m not proud of it, but I did my fair share of hustling to survive.”
He noted that Brattleboro is predominantly white city; Breeze is white, black and Puerto Rican. Despite a liberal reputation, he said, “Vermont is a borderline racist state.”
In his high school, there was a student hate group called the NHRA: the (N-word) Hanging Redneck Association.
“I got my legs slashed by one of them,” he recalled. He was shot with a BB gun later that week, he assumes by one of the same guys. And, the morning of the June 17 showcase, Breeze and Fargo were walking down a sidewalk in Springfield when a woman rolled down the window, threw a can of paint at the two men and yelled a racial slur before the car sped out of sight.
Earning Respect
Breeze said the challenges he’s faced in life, including the negative stereotypes projected onto him, have inspired him to pursue music as a way to cope with — and make something meaningful out of — his frustration with the world. Transcending his pain through music is almost spiritual to him. That’s part of why he named his label Street Religion.
“Everybody in their life gets the chance to pray, in one form or another,” he said. “We might not pray to the same god or law or higher power. We might pray in very different ways and for different things.”
But Breeze’s preferred mode of worship is with a microphone between his hands. As he croons in the song Cold War, the one that’s up for the People’s Choice Award: “The melody being played is hard times and hustling / Saying prayers, God please forgive my sins.”
His rationale is that, even if God isn’t taking his calls, “somebody will eventually hear me,” he said.
“Cass did.”
Like most of the entertainment industry, music continues to be a male-dominated field. A recent survey from the Music Business Journal reported that 61 percent of people in United Kingdom’s music business are male; in the promotional/management sector that Tibbits works in, 70 percent are male. The survey estimated that U.S. statistics would be comparable.
Patience Jay, a Hartland-based music promoter who has worked with big-name artists such as P. Diddy and the late Prodigy, agreed. As the senior vice president of the digital branding company RAI Radio, she said, she deals with misogyny on a daily basis.
“I really, really love hip-hop,” she said in an interview during the Legit Lioness showcase. “I love its sense of freedom, and I love how it can be used explore real issues that are true to life. … But I swear to God, I have to work 10 times as hard to get the recognition that a man gets. The condescension can be unreal.”
Tibbits said she has encountered this, too, but she considers it more of an occupational hazard than a deterrent to her dreams. She tries to take the assumptions people make about her — “basically, that I’m only doing this to sleep with my artists” — in stride, in the hopes that her work will speak for itself.
“Once people see me in my element, I think they have a lot more respect for me,” she said. “I don’t know what other way I can prove myself in. But I want to be that woman. I want to make my stamp on the world.”
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-hop music, in particular, is a genre that comes with a host of stereotypes, not all of them positive, Jay said.
Gho$t echoed this sentiment. He said many people are surprised to learn that a hip-hop subculture exists in the region at all.
“Part of it is that there’s not many people of color out here. It’s too cold for most of us,” he joked. But he added that hip-hop is becoming an increasingly important platform for social discourse, and he believes it deserves greater recognition in the area.
“It’s only getting more relevant,” he said. “It even lives in Vermont now. I personally don’t understand why more people don’t want Vermont and New Hampshire to become more relevant to the rest of the world that is already accepting (hip-hop).”
He guessed that “gang stereotypes” are part of many people’s reluctance to accept hip-hop into the Upper Valley mainstream. But to hear artists tell it, hip-hop means empowerment. It means turning horribly gritty experiences — homelessness, racist hate crimes, getting lost in the foster care system — into beautifully gritty art.
It’s the sound of human resilience, set to a syncopated beat.
“All of us here, we’ve all been through some really difficult, painful things,” said Breeze during a recording session in Tibbits’ apartment with Fargo and Kush, aka Mike Marrone, of Lebanon. “The music we create, it comes from that place of pain. But it’s also about finding your vision in that struggle.”
Citing one of his idols, Gil Scott-Heron, Breeze said he is moved by music’s capacity to express “the epitome of pain.” But amid that pain, Breeze is searching for “that melody you can’t capture,” he said. “Until you hear it and you’re like, ‘Man, that’s tight!’ ”
He bent over to pick up one of Tibbits’ cats and absent-mindedly scratched behind its ears as he played one of his artist’s tracks on YouTube, FLEX by ABstylez, aka Adrian Belnavis, of Augusta, Maine. In the song, Belnavis references his own experiences in the foster care system, and the hard financial times that followed him into young adulthood. Toward the end of the video, there’s a moonwalk across the screen.
“My man! He’s killing it!” That was Breeze, so moved by the performance that he ran a lap around Tibbits’ apartment.
From foster kid to a maker of raw melody: It’s what Tupac might call, as he wrote in the poetry collection that came out after he died, “the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete.”
Editor’s note: To listen to the artists Tibbits manages under the Street Religion label, visit Legit Lioness’ pages on Facebook or YouTube. Voting for the New England Hip Hop Awards’ People’s Choice Awards closes July 21. To vote, visit www.newenglandhiphopawards.com/vote.php and follow the instructions on the website. EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.