john wells • overly dedicated

So, you can classify a few different times in my life as when I was “first inspired to pursue music,” but I’m gonna go with this one. When I was 14 (in 2012), I told my mom two things I wanted for my 15th birthday. It was either this $80 mic from Best Buy or tickets to go see my favorite rapper, Kendrick Lamar, perform at Rams Head Live! This was like a month and some change before good kid, m.A.A.d city came out and he had either just dropped “Swimming Pools” or he was just about to. I knew [my birthday gift] was only gonna be one of the two. My birthday came, and it was the mic. This was the mic I recorded my first songs on that I was dropping on Soundcloud, so life would be VERY different had it not been for this mic; so I’m eternally grateful with that decision. Like I said, GKMC hadn’t come out yet so I can’t say that was the album. It wasn’t Section.80 either, even though that shit was amazing. The one that had me in a chokehold at that time was Kendrick’s Overly Dedicated mixtape. It was a tape, released in September of 2010, made up of so-called leftovers from the Kendrick Lamar EP which was released on December 31st, 2009. These leftovers consisted of songs like “Cut You Off,” “Ignorance Is Bliss,” (which got him noticed by Dr. Dre and signed to Aftermath/Interscope), and, most importantly, the song I’ve been trying to outdo since I was 15 - “The Heart Pt 2.” Whenever you hear me rap for any longer than 24 bars (which is a good number of my songs), that’s the bar I’ve set for myself. Overly Dedicated had an impact on a 14-year-old John Wells that I didn’t understand yet. It’s the reason I rap with the conviction that I do. It’s the reason I’m not scared to run out of breath and keep going and damn near pass out until I get a chance to breathe. It’s the reason that when I use a punchline in my raps it’s not an empty filler bar used to catch your attention, but it’s just a more clever way of explaining something. And it’s the reason that I’m extremely transparent, sometimes to a fault, about my life in my music. And I knew that was who I was trying to beat. I’m still working on that, but we getting there.