A Hip-Hop Artist In West Virginia Takes The DIY Approach To Get His Breakthrough
NPR, July 21, 2021.
When Issac Shelem Fadiga, simply known as Shelem, was a freshman in high school, he and his brother John downloaded a trial version of FL Studio. The beat-making app was gaining popularity at the time after Soulja Boy used it to make his number one hit "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."
"We were like, 'Dude, we can become superstars for free,' " Shelem says.
John picked up a cheap USB microphone for $15 at an auction and plugged it into the broken laptop their dad had given them. Shelem started rapping over the beats they made in the program. Soon, he was giving away mixtapes from his locker at Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley, W.Va. He uploaded the songs to SoundCloud, too, though none of them took off. Looking back, he understands why: The music was the work of a kid still learning his craft, with no guidance from older musicians or feedback from peers.
"There were people around who were rapping, but I never found them. I looked," Shelem says. "Everything was just me and my brother figuring it out."
Fame hadn't arrived by the time Shelem completed high school, so he applied to Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. He was never a very serious student but picked engineering as his major because that's what his brothers had done. He didn't think it would matter.
"I was certain I was going to drop out in the middle anyway," he says.
The move to Huntington, which has a much more robust music scene than Beckley, proved beneficial. He won first prize at a school talent show, his first public performance – that's how he connected with The Heavy Hitters, a funk band made up of Marshall music majors. They started taking Shelem along to gigs, letting him get up and perform a few songs during sets. That led to some modest solo gigs around town, though he never developed enough of a following to drop out of school...
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018036092/no-scene-just-a-dream-shelem-seeks-hip-hop-glory-on-his-own