It was an April day in 1995. Two boys, each 5, were playing tag with a group of kids near C-Town Supermarket in Fair Haven. One slipped through the locked gate of a power station that controlled all the streetlights. He climbed onto the transformer. The 13,800-volt shock that went through him was f atal.    Patrick Stenson was one of those boys — the one who survived. For the last 30 years, Stenson, now a rap artist known as Off Brand Budd, has lived uneasily with what happened that day, pouring his raw emotions into poems and rap songs. In the first week of January, the 36-year old, fresh off his rousing performance at the Re-Imagine interactive art exhibit at Nolo last month, is dropping his debut song and video “Hot Winter,” along with musical partner Johnnie “5iverr” Singleton. His project “Welcome to My World” is set for release in February. Click here to listen to an excerpt of Stenson’s new song, and click here to listen to Stenson rapping at the Nolo-hosted event. “My mom told me to watch him and I didn’t,” he said of his uncle, Jeremy Davis, born three days after him; Jeremy was pronounced dead at Yale New Haven Hospital later that day in 1995, as the New York Times reported. A therapist Stenson saw in the ensuing months gave him a notebook. Whenever you feel angry or upset and you feel like lashing out, write your thoughts in here instead, the therapist told him. He lashed out. “I couldn’t control it,” he said. He also filled notebooks and notebooks with what was going on inside him. Funeral pin of Jeremy Davis. Photo courtesy of Patrick Stenson. A lot of what he wrote was poetry. When he was 11 or 12, a friend snatched his notebook. “Just kind of how kids haze each other,” Stenson recalled. “He was like, ‘Man, what you writing,’ and then he tried to rap it. And I was like, ‘You can’t rap it. It’s poetry. It’s different.’” That got his mind working. Growing up in Farnam Courts, the former public housing complex just off Grand Avenue at Hamilton and Franklin Streets that has since been rebuilt as Mill River Crossing, he’d heard rap, but didn’t know anything about it, about its terminology, or how it was supposed to look. Gradually the poems in his notebook became raps. “They weren’t good enough,” he said. “I hid them from everybody.” All around him in those years was music. “If you went to my grandmother’s backyard, you’d hear Notorious B.I.G. coming playing from the second-floor window from one of my uncles, and if you walk to the front, you were hearing Al Green and all of the older stuff from my grandmother,” said Stenson. His father listened to Nas and Jay-Z. One of Stenson’s notebooks with the song “Talk Wit Mama” Photo courtesy of Patrick Stenson Then he was introduced to battle rap. The competitive verbal jousts captured his imagination. “I always knew I could put words together, and that’s what got me to really make the transition, because battle rap is like slam poetry,” he said. All the while, Stenson, a standout football player and track field athlete at Wilbur Cross, was schooling himself in the fundamentals of rap—the rhythm and flow, the rhyme schemes, the song structure with its intro, verse, hook, and bridge. He was also absorbing the techniques of iconic rappers. Among them were DMX and Jadakiss. “Jadakiss was just so cool and down-to-earth and smooth lyrically, like your normal next-door neighbor in the projects,” he said. It was DMX above all who showed him what was possible. “He talks about his trials and tribulations and his perseverance, and if he didn’t persevere, he’ll talk about that too,” he said. “He was the first rapper I listened to that wasn’t just about the guns and violence and drugs, but his feelings too.”   Inside the lyrics were lessons. “It gave me permission to talk about my demons, my epilepsy, my suicide attempt,” he said. “If someone can hear that, they might say ‘that’s me,’ and that might open them up.” His song “Talk Wit Mama” has him telling his mother the pain he felt for causing her pain and the hope he holds out that he might still make her proud. “It’s a lot of young Black men that are probably going through the same issue where they love their mother to death, but can’t have an honest conversation,” he said. “He’s taken everything he’s been through, he’s dug deep, and he’s made it into an art form,” said artist, playwright, and teacher Edmund “B*Wak” Comfort, who’s been following Stenson since he was a teenager. Stenson with his two daughters. Photo courtesy of Patrick Stenson. For Stenson, it’s not about the clicks or the fame or a mainstream big hit. When he’s not working at Franciscan Ever There Care as a personal care assistant for the elderly, he’s doing DoorDash deliveries. “Trying to find a way to feed my passion and my two daughters,” he said with a smile. In his song, “Hood Inside the Hood,” Stenson writes about the aftermath of a grand mal seizure at 15, which led to a diagnosis of epilepsy. At first I was skittish from the feelin I’m aliveThen I started talking ’bout it putting rhythm in my linesBeing traumatized was a different kind of vibeIt was hard for me to be around the livin’ once you died. “It always goes back to my uncle and always will,” he said. “But if I can reach one person, make it easier for them, that’s everything, and I think he would say that too.” The post 30 Years Later, Tragedy Fuels Rap Artist’s Debut Single appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less