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Like the man himself, [Dave East’s](https://www.instagram.com/daveeast/) music defies labels and transcends time. It sounds old school and new, classic and innovative – it’s impossible to put in a box. His lyrics are poetry. Each line is a sliver of his life, cut out and served to you. He tells a story that feels both new and familiar, because on the deepest emotional level, it’s your story, too. This is the rare quality that separates art from entertainment – the ability to connect with you across space and time and make you feel something deeply. Dave East is an artist.
We live in a world of curated Instagram accounts, hit songs that no one remembers in a week, a surplus of content and a deficit of culture. Many entertainers chase the next big thing, anticipating what people want right now and chameleon-ing themselves into it over and over again. Dave does the opposite. He pours himself, his family and his friends into his work. All of their pain, struggle, hope and joy are put down on the tracks – to give people something they didn’t know they needed. “I wanted to create the soundtrack to the average person’s life, not the famous rich jet-flying, yacht life – not to them – to the people that gotta get up and go to work every day. I want to make that music for them. To motivate and to encourage them and I speak it from a standpoint of – that was just me, I was just in that space.”
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This is the sacrifice of an artist: to know what works and what’s popular, and choose not to do it, because you have a different vision and a different goal. Dave jokes about this reality: “There’s not a rapper alive who doesn’t want to hear his music in the club – with the exception of maybe Drake because he probably gets tired of hearing his shit, ha. But every other rapper, emcee, hip hop type of person wants to hear their music in the club, but that don’t be my focus in the studio, so it’s a weird space. I try to balance it… I’m an artist in 2020, so I gotta be relevant but still do the things I wanna do musically and the things that make my heart smile as far as the music goes.” If there’s one thing that’s true, Dave East will never do what everyone else is doing. He’s an original. You can hear the authenticity in his music. In an era when that doesn’t seem to count for much, he doesn’t care. It’s having a resounding positive effect that I can only explain with this quotation by Theodore Parker from 1856 taken horribly out of context: “Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the Soul of Man, the seed, however broadcast, will catch somewhere, and produce its hundred-fold.” The truth in his work will always find a home in the heart. Dave East is timeless.
If the stars had aligned differently, this article would be written about NBA star David Brewster. Dave’s story might have gone something like his friend and former teammate Kevin Durant’s. Dave was on scholarship at Towson. His NBA dream was within arm’s reach, and then it was gone. Dave watched former teammates tell their mothers they didn’t have to work anymore, while his own mother continued driving a school bus and Dave sat in a jail cell. The Shakespearean twists Dave’s life took could have broken him, but they didn’t. They _made_ him. He struggled. He grew. He persisted. Dave found a way and he found his voice.
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Jail separates David Brewster from Dave East – it marked the end of one dream and the beginning of another. It was the first step on a long, arduous journey of resilience and reinvention. Dave’s time in jail made a tremendous impact on him. Our society as a whole is just starting to acknowledge that the criminal justice system is broken and needs to be fixed. But the insidious truth is that our criminal justice system is not broken – it was designed to work this way. “This is how it was written. It wasn’t a mistake, nothing went wrong – this is how it was set up. As a minority, we’ve come a very long way. We have more rights, we can do all the things we want to do in today’s society, but that stigma will never leave. It’s set up that way because the prison system is actually eating, they’re getting rich off of somebody going to jail and coming back.” Dave experienced firsthand how the system is failing individuals: “There’s nothing about going to jail that makes you better. They’re supposed to rehabilitate you. It’s not making anyone come out and say I’m gonna go be a lawyer now. And even if you do have that ambition when you come out, once they put that felony by your name, it’s over.” Dave is still feeling the restrictions of the system, ten years later. To this day, Dave can’t go to Canada and every time he travels internationally he’s flagged by customs, separated from his family and taken into the interrogation room.
Despite all of the changes and gains he’s made in his life, the system still sees him as a past criminal, not a person. Our system degrades people to the lowest level and then never lets them forget it – it pulls them back down every time they try to take a step up. “I feel like it’s a cycle that needs to be broken, but there aren’t enough people of color in positions of power to care. That’s why I salute people like Meek, Jay Z that’s doin the reform. You know what’s crazy, though – look at the position Jay had to get up to just to have a voice in that world. He had to become _Jay Z__._ If he was just Shawn Carter from Marcy then nobody’s hearing that. I salute that man 100% for doing that because he don’t have to. He went out of his way to do that, to have a voice. He’s our voice. I feel like Jays really is a real one for that. I feel like a lot of people later will appreciate what he started.”
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David Brewster’s NBA dreams died in jail. His life burnt down around him, but he never lost hope. It was from those ashes that Dave East rose, phoenix-like. Dave had always been drawn to the arts, and despite his father warning him that having a Plan B was simply revealing you’re not that confident in Plan A, rap was always in the back of his mind. After jail, he went to live with his cousin, Chester, and decided to pursue rap. “We’d be in my bedroom in the back, in the projects, the radiator right here on the wall that shit burnin hot so you don’t wanna sit too close to that. I got six or seven homies in the room that wanna hear what I’m doin’ but everybody gotta shut up like you can’t even breathe. I’m like yo I’m about to record and they all hold their breath. Those were the times that let me know jail didn’t break me, not being able to play ball no more didn’t break me, I had found something else that I was excited to do, I was passionate about. I wasn’t even making a dollar.”
For six years Dave worked on his craft without making money. “I can remember bein dead broke and I’d go to the store and my dudes that ran the store they were from Yemen. My man would give me food on credit for a week. That came from love. I feel like I was blessed during those times, even as bad as things were to me in my mind.” After six years of putting out mix tapes and performing for free, Dave’s (new) dream came true when he signed a contract with Nas in 2014. His newest album, _Survival_, dropped in November and took him around the world. His album hadn’t even been out a full month and fans in Dubai, Paris, London and Berlin were singing the lyrics word for word. Dave’s career has also branched out into acting and modeling. Dave stars as Method Man in _Wu-Tang: An American Saga_ and has a role in the forthcoming film, _Boogie_. The future is bright and boundless for Dave.
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Life works in mysterious ways – had David Brewster the NBA player succeeded, the world would have been deprived of Dave East the artist. “I really believe when people say that everything happens for a reason, because I think I’m a lot more valuable to the world as an artist than playing ball. Ball was my love, I probably woulda had this money a lot earlier, but I had to go through that.” Lucky for us. The deep emotional register of Dave’s work is a direct translation of his years of disappointment, struggle, reinvention and dedication. You can hear it, you can feel it and you can recognize it as your own. “I felt like it was gonna touch a lot of people that might not even be from my world. You don’t have to be from no hood, you could be from the suburbs, country, anywhere. Any walk of life – and any time period.” Dave’s work is deeply human. It offers recognition of a shared emotional struggle and it reminds you that you’re not alone. Most importantly – it gives us hope.
So what does Dave hope for in the future? “Get Trump out of office. Immediately. I don’t want Kairi growin’ up in the Trump era.” Dave’s daughter, Kairi, is a source of inspiration and strength for him, and a reminder that we should all work to make this world a better place. “I hate the world she was born into, to be real with you. As long as I can provide to where it’s at least comfortable for her and let her know about this life before she gets into it… make sure she has the tools she needs to move, to maneuver. Her passport is hit up already. I didn’t even have a passport ‘til I was like 26. I just want her to be introduced to things a lot earlier than I was. I want her constantly busy, constantly testing her brain and traveling this world, I want her to be fluent in multiple languages, you know – shit that I can’t do. That’s the world I want for her.”
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Photographed by: [Akram Shah](https://www.instagram.com/akram.nyc/?hl=en).
Styled and Produced by: [Ani Hovhannisyan](https://www.instagram.com/hovha/?hl=en).
Asst producers: Tim Mackay & Ashlei Banks.
ASST wardrobe: Tevin Evans, Jahson Fuller, Kiauntay Rogers, Joshua Tucker and Joshua Walker
Location: [Royalton Park Avenue](https://www.royaltonparkavenue.com)
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