Willie Esco
interview excerpt
“When my mother and father sort of split up, or we sort of left that neighborhood, the most important thing that ever happened to me was that we went to a Black neighborhood in Central Newark. It was on 1st street by the Cathedral in New York, in New Jersey by Branch Brook Park. To me, it was miles and miles away from where I used to live, but actually it wasn’t that far. But being immersed into Black culture, my next door neighbors were wild. There was no sense of who are these folks? It was just in Black culture, Latinos were always sort of easy, it was easy to assimilate. Anything else was very hard. Like, my brother assimilating, whose 10 years older, assimilating in white culture was a little bit harder. I’m the younger version of him, I’m 10 years removed. So, moving into a Black neighborhood at the age of 9, 8/9 was key. It was just, Disco was ending and Hip-Hop was starting. GQ and remixes and all that sort of stuff. This whole movement that we didn’t know was Hip-Hop was starting to emerge. They called it rap, as I started learning about it and listening late nights on the radio. When you start to really assimilate, and the reason you assimilate is to really get girls, right? For me it was, and most of the, most of the kids and teenagers, you want to assimilate to be cool. You don’t understand how getting money works, so you really want to attract another person, a girlfriend or whatever it was at the time. I just felt like when I entered that neighborhood it was different, noticeably, right. I’m a block away from Spires Projects, which was a nice set of buildings, but it was still projects nonetheless. And maybe two or three blocks, or a park away from 7th avenue projects, which was very dangerous. But, still, nonetheless I was off of 7th avenue, and that was the beginning of me immersing myself in the culture. With roots of soul and disco, and all that. I’m really appreciative of having that foundation of watching Disco turn into Rap, it sort of allows me to have an understanding of where Rap came from.”
