Zearle Biography
Zearle was born in the boot heel of Missouri, a few miles from where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet, in a tin shack, during a fierce winter blizzard. No doctor attended; his mother pushed him out and his father cut the cord. He was born with his eyes wide open.
The new family had to move on to Arkansas a week later, since the FBI was closing in on them. Zearle's father was a Vietnam War draft resistor. Zearle's first years were spent underground, going from one small town to another, as his parents followed the crops as migrant workers in the cotton fields and the apple orchards of the deep South and Midwest.
By the time Zearle was 12 years old, he had traveled thousands of miles, zigzagging across the map, from small Southern towns to the big Northern cities, from New York to Little Rock, Albuquerque to Chicago. Experiencing the country as a fugitive and a wanderer made a huge impact on Zearle. His perceptions cut through the typical American boosterism and he saw the real pain and anguish behind the facade of bourgeois prosperity, the underbelly of the beast.
To the bourgeois jerks, Zearle appeared to be just a lower class kid with a bad attitude; what was brewing below was their bitter class enemy. In a thousand ways, Zearle was backhanded by the system, bad food, bad schools, bad jobs, the capitalist rack. He had the choice: self-destruction with drugs and crime and being a sucker for the capitalist's system, or rise up as a revolutionary artist, who offers love and support to his peeps, instead of hustling them. Zearle did choose: he went back to school, got a job teaching the youth, and started writing songs.
Zearle cut through the fog of rock and pop to get to hiphop music, the music of Black and youth rebellion. This was the music that inspired him, moved him, and for which he began to write lyrics. By the time he attended high school, Zearle was making rap tapes at a friend's studio, laying tracks to the new West Coast beats. Zearle's lyrics, however, differed from the pack because of the content, a far cry from the fantasizes of gangsta, glitter or girlie rap.
Zearle's lyrics reveal a sharply intellectual view of the world, delivered acerbically with the ready wit and slang of the urban streets. The music tracks he uses are mostly created by unsigned hiphop beatmakers with R&B;/soul, reggae, folk, and acid jazz backgrounds.
As a modern Marxist, Zearle strikes hard against oppression, imperialism and racism. In a torrent of words, he praises fallen heroes, educates the players and flays the greedy rich, in a stream of eloquent phrasing, pulled from the rich center of his revolutionary spirit, which is love.
Today Zearle, with the help of a few, maintains his own studio, website and network, and is building a vanguard online audience for his new style of new conscious hiphop. His music is now available all over the world.
|