My girlfriend and I were sitting in the Southampton Common yesterday. Blue skies were overhead, green grass was below and my frequented aspirations were engulfing me. It has been a longtime goal of mine to develop a true platform for writing and my outlet of the past year, Esteemed Game, had gradually grown stale in my perception. The name did not resonate with me anymore, nobody really read it, I was not maximising my potential and – worst of all – I had stopped writing. I had composed 125 posts in the span of about nine months on the two matters of life I adore most in hip hop and basketball yet the fire was gradually dulled and my output was reduced to mere paucity. The problem in retrospect was that I approached posts with much deliberation and thought; I was held back by the limitations imposed upon myself. So, on the green pastures of the Common under blue skies, I revealed that I wanted to try again but better.

My girlfriend encouraged me to do so because of my variety of interests. I summarise my main areas of interest as hip hop and basketball which can be relatively broad. My niche personal topics – of which I plan to delve more deeply – involve heartbreak, lost aspiration, the fleeting nature of success, personal desire, perseverance through struggle, unheralded notoriety, exceeding expectations and premature endings. I truly love soulful expression, knowing where one comes from, deep research, uncovering the reason for motivation and what I define as “the moment” (pivotal events in one’s life that alters their entire destiny). To say my past attempts at capturing such elements of my personal character failed would be an understatement. It was not individual enough.

Such a change of direction required a change in name as Esteemed Game no longer fit the field for which I planned to encompass. I had chose it because I really wanted to title the blog after “Heavy in the Game” by 2Pac but that was already taken across multiple platforms so I settled for an available reference. I have genuinely spent the better part of a month attempting to conceive a new name and everything was either too generic or already taken.

Shock G probably underwent a similar experience at some point in his career. As the frontman of Digital Underground, he was known for his producing music that was sexually explicit or upbeat party music throughout most of the 1990s. He only ever ventured beyond such matters for a handful of occasions; the drug-aware “The Danger Zone” and socially conscious “Wussup wit the Luv” perhaps being the only exceptions. One of the greatest works of his career was his first production as a solo artist but it was tucked away on a compilation album by his D.U. bandmate Money-B. “People Over the Stairs” deals with Shock G facing mortality, lost success, inequality, social expectations, oppression, violence and stereotypes before finally succumbing to “let hell come and get [him]”. The outro has an impersonation of the devil laughing as he has accomplished his nefarious intent by having all of his evils be so widely perpetrated. The song is in such stark contrast to everything else that the music of Shock G ever represented so I can imagine his reasoning for putting it on an independently released compilation far away from the spotlight that once engulfed him.

Over the Stairs represents the journey, the accomplishment and the overcoming. It is about the ascension. For hip hop and basketball. It is new beginnings and the eventual goal. Only one way up.