Artist description rapper, producer, dj from south austin texas

Music Style Hip Hop

Musical Influences All Hip Hop

Similar Artists Black Moon, Choo Choo Train, and Jay Z fa sho

Artist History Mr. Cree Bio 2002 The south side of Austin, Texas in the late 1970's wasn't exactly THE place to be for discovering hip hop. Like many towns in middle America, it's about a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of New York City, but the area's progressive, multi-cultural environment was open to developing arts. Austin has always been viewed as the ultimate town for rock and roll, and progressive country music. Think Austin and images of Willie Nelson, Alejandro Escovedo, and now, ugh, The Dixie Chicks, might come to mind. But ever since hip hop started peaking out from under New York's seedy skyline, Austin has produced more funky music than you'll ever believe, if you weren't there to hear it for yourself. It's an open minded, laid back, and inviting town. While the folks who grew up north of Riverside Drive, a dividing line of sorts between the north and the south, may have looked more like the cast of Slacker, or That 70's Show, people on the south side looked more like the cast of Beat Street. Rhyming, Djing, and especially Break Dancing took the world by storm, and this progressive pocket in the middle of Texas is no exception. "Man I remember the first time I ever heard hip hop." Cree reminisces. "I was like 7 or 8 years old and this dude Terry had just moved to my neighborhood from the Bronx. He would walk around with this big old jam box and play nothing but hip hop; Grandmaster Flash, Sequence, Sugar Hill Gang… and what really got me started with him was we would be sitting outside my cousins house playing hip hop at night. We'd all be out there in front of the jam box and it was cool. The shit hooked me right from there." It was in 6th grade at Fulmore Junior High that Mr. Cree started getting serious about rhyming. "I started writing and really paying attention to hip hop and wanted to do more with music." Cree continues, "In 7th grade everybody started beat boxing and break dancing. We would break dance on the tennis courts in the morning before class started and everybody had the latest gear. That was the time around when Beat Street came out. We really didn't have that outlet that people in bigger cities would have, being in hip hop in Austin. So whatever we saw on TV, any records that said Def Jam or Profile on it, we went out and bought it. It was really the only outlets we had to understand what hip hop was all about." Soon after, Cree and his crew started getting turn tables and beat machines and they set things off making songs for their neighborhood. "The first beat machine I had was a Roland 303, a little silver thing. Primitive, but that's the first thing I learned how to make beats on. We started forming little crews. My cousin would dj and my boy Leon, we called him L-Love, he wrote a silly song called "Take a Pill." We made that song by beating on the wall and playing with my little keyboard that I had and it was hilarious. People around our neighborhood thought that shit was innovative and that that shit was dope, so that fueled the fire for us to keep going and going." Learning the ropes throughout his formative years with his cousin and neighborhood partners, Cree developed a rhyme style all his own and mastered the art of beat making with a small bit of equipment and a heaping mound of determination. He was a part of several crews throughout high school, but upon graduation, he along with 7 others from the streets of South Austin formed a group that would change his life. The Guarden was a multi-cultural group that truly mirrored the environment that Cree had come up in. Black, white, and Hispanic rappers, DJ's, and dancers all came together in this collective and gave their city it's first taste of what live, real hip hop music was in that day and time. "I grew up in a housing project that had everybody. Black, white, Mexican, Puerto Rican. I guess that kind of defines who I am as a person. I don't look at peoples race first. I look at who they are and how they are before I make that decision. That influences how I speak when I'm rhymin'." The Guarden was Cree's first chance to record in a real studio, with semi real equipment. "I was still making beats off this cheap ass Roland machine that only had 2 seconds of sampling on it, but we made it work. Our DJ, Spinner T, who is still my DJ to this day, would take records and lay the break back and forth for like 15 minutes on a tape, then everybody would add their part and we'd add this little 2 second drum break. It was ill how it came together, but we came up with some dope shit back then." The group signed a management deal with music industry vet Kier Worthy, who at the time was working for Def Jam. He took a strong interest in the group, but being from such unchartered territory in the hip hop world, the groups efforts never really made it out of Central Texas. "Man we did tons of shows here in Austin with locals like DJ Casanova, Tee Double, Dove Springs Posse, MC Overlord… We did benefits, car shows. We opened up for Rodney O and Joe Cooley, KMD, Kool G. Rap, The Genius, Masta Ace, pretty much everybody who came down here at the time." But as people started going away to college, Cree included, the group began to fizzle out. Upon his return to Austin, he got back together with Spinner T and another MC from the Guarden, Jack Fiend (now known in underground hip hop circles as Sabado Gigante) to form Sociopath Left. Sociopath Left quickly gained a reputation as the livest rap group in Texas. Their off the wall stage show, crazy rhyme schemes, and bangin' beats took the city by storm and woke more than a few slackers in the Texas music industry up to some real hip hop. Andre Walker, the man who brought rap music to the forefront of the nations premier music industry conference, South By Southwest, took over as the groups manager and had them performing almost every other week. Realizing that at the time, Austin was just not going to be the place where this group could truly blow up, Cree and Jack Fiend moved to Brooklyn, NY, while Spinner T stayed back in Austin to finish school. This break up of sorts did not prove to be the best thing to happen to any of the artists, but Cree knows that his time spent in the big city was no detriment to his career. "Living there really elevated my rhymes. The essence of being in New York period made me want to elevate my skills even more. I really got into producing even more up there. I lived with a bunch of cats who were all trying to be in the music industry. There were tons of rap artists in the house all the time. Mos Def, Group Home, Medina Green, Bush Babies, all them used to come over to the house. So we were always around a bunch of artists and that just made me want to be even more into it. "We had some financial problems, had to leave Brooklyn, and shortly after returning to Texas, Sociopath Left broke up." Alone for the first time as an artist, Cree kind of stepped back from the mic to get his personal life in order, and to accept the fact that he was back in Austin and had to make things happen for better or for worse. "After coming back," Cree remembers, "I was partying and bullshitting all the time. That's all I did for like a year and a half was go to clubs, and me and Jack Fiend were even spinning at a hip hop night at the time at Proteus. That shit was starting to blow up, and I was getting caught up in the club scene, and all of a sudden Proteus shut down, I had my first child, and I stepped back a bit from the music for a minute." But then one day he walked into Music Makers, a massive music store not far from his crib and saw an EPS on sale. Two days later, he cashed his paycheck, dropped it all on the EPS, and started making beats again. "Now I've got like 200 some beats here at the house." Which leads to Mr. Cree 2001. His new company, Tolerance Entertainment is all about him. His years of experience and growth have all culminated into the songs you now hear booming from your speakers. His music runs the gamut from hardcore street tales, to straight skill droppin' hip hop. Representative of his colorful history and diverse surroundings, Mr. Cree has something for everyone with a passion for only the realest of hip hop. Download the songs, spark something up, and vibe to the freshest MC/DJ/Producer to emerge from Central Texas, ever.

Group Members Mr. Cree

Instruments secret

Albums man hold up

Press Reviews Many

Additional Info manchack

Location Austin, TX - USA

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