“I was still washing dishes at a restaurant when I got these beats,” rapper Tef Poe said as he talked about the release of his latest project. “When I was listening to these tracks, I had no idea what type of personal transformation I was about to go through and the things I was about to see.”
He hid his laptop and would squirrel away during his shift to write rhymes for the tracks during his breaks.
“That was a real dark time for me,” Poe said. “I was like, ‘Man … am I going to be doing this forever?’ Then I just got to the point where I was like, ‘If I don’t make some choices and some bold moves and really put my feet down, I don’t have a chance.’”
He had been spinning his wheels on the hip-hop scene since the early 2000s – doing shows and making mixtapes that made him popular in St. Louis and abroad, but he couldn’t pay the bills.
“There’s no Def Jam in St. Louis; there’s no Interscope in St. Louis,” Poe said. “You can’t go to Dellwood and stop by Arista, and L.A. Reid is not coming to St. Louis to find Tef Poe. I had to create that energy for myself.”
Less than two years later, he would be retired as a “Freestyle Friday” champion on BET’s “106 and Park,” featured in hip-hop publications like “The Source” and “XXL,” ink a distribution deal with Universal Records and release his debut album “Cheer for the Villain.”
Tomorrow night he’ll give St. Louis a three-dimensional listen with a special performance of selections from his CD at Vintage Vinyl.
In the midst of his transformative journey into a full-time hip-hop artist, he faced a family tragedy that rerouted the direction of the album. A younger cousin died last year in a high-speed police chase on South Grand.
“I wrote a record that I was gonna play for him. I said a line where I referenced his name, and I said, ‘If you’re listening to this music, please say a prayer for him,’” Poe said.
“I was going to let him listen to the song, because I thought it would be a leeway for me to have a conversation with him about some of the things going on in his life and the choices he was making. That was the first record I made for the album, and by the time I got to the third record he was dead.”
Poe made the audacious decision to create a conceptual album that focused on that night and the actions that led up to his cousin’s death.
“I said, ‘This is a good way to catch people completely off-guard,’” Poe said. “It sounds opportunistic, but when you try to make timeless music, you kind of have to hit them with some shock value.”
Despite what the title “Cheer for the Villain” suggests (a dual dose of bait-and-switch and irony), the album is a cautionary tale. Some of the elements are factual. Others are embellishment for the sake of entertainment. All of it is for a greater purpose.
“In rap, we do a lot of praising for the bad guy,” Poe said. “A lot of people come out and want to be the biggest gangster they can be, the biggest killer they can be and the biggest drug dealer they can be in their music, so I tried to take that mirror, hold it up to ourselves and see how foolish we look sometimes.”
Tef Poe will perform selections from “Cheer for the Villain” at a special show at Vintage Vinyl (6160 Delmar Blvd.) on Friday, March 7 at 8 p.m.
For more information, visit www.tefpoe.com
