The “Come Up”

You might be wondering why I have the come up in parantheses. If you are a longtime listener or have looked at my catalog, you may have wondered why the first 9 songs I uploaded all got over 1,000 views as of 11/6/2023 and why literally every other song and video has failed to reach that mark.

I have discussed this in a song that not many people have heard called “Addict of Rappin”, but allow me to fully disclose it here.

During the beginning of my career, I would market myself directly on instagram accounts that had recently followed music YouTubers such as BlackySpeakz (and I actually am forgetting the other guy I would mostly use) with the following message:

“Hey if you’ve got the time, check out my rap songs, the link is in my bio and any feedback is appreciated! Thank you”

I probably sent about 10,000 of these comments. I think the most followers I gained on Instagram in a single night was 17. It was quite effective objectively. I was getting over 2,000 views a month at one point on my YouTube channel, and had over 80 monthly Spotify listeners about 6 months after Finally Here.

I decided along the road that this was not how I wanted to continue going on. It was taking something so real and close to me and turning it fake. My idea was that if I got big enough the realness would come, but also during this time, I was dealing with a massive bout of nihilism. That is in part why there was really only 3 songs during the course of a few months during this period. That is also why Empty Page and Dumb it Down have so many views.

It’s almost painful to look back on this time, but I 16 years old in a small town and I thought it was the only way I could make it on the stage of Coachella when I was 18. That was one of the goals I had in my head. The amount of time I spent copy and pasting that comment could have spent making so much music and I’ll always wonder what that alternate universe looks like.

While this was somewhat of a strange period of Hidden Bars, it taught me so much about myself and that I have to be genuine and REAL, or I will not be happy with myself.

Thank you for listening to my ted talk.

Empty Page

Empty Page was me comprehending the power of an Empty Page. At this point I had some traction, as looking back at the description I had just reached 150 subscribers on YouTube. Thinking about the next song, what I could possibly write, it fascinated me. I clearly had fame on my mind in this song as well. Something I really don’t and haven’t had since the next era.

Dumb it Down

Dumb it Down. This one has so much memory tied with me before it came out. The first person that I showed this song to was my therapist. She thought it was pretty good. I remember I posted a snippet on Instagram and that got 2 or 3 thousand views. This song was the first that my voice really sounded almost professional. The mix came out great.

The purpose of this song stemmed from my strong disdain for high school. I think that using the full capacity of my intelligence was not the best way to do specific things. I was having a tough time relating to a lot of people at the time. I also was quite “rebellious” at school, and would be ridiculed and punished for telling the absolute truth because people would get offended.

Big Plans

Big Plans was me still thinking my fake it till you make it strategy would work, and I was also thinking about the EP I would drop. This was also the first song I used autotune on, which was quite popular at the time.