Alright readers! Today's gift is an EP from one of my favorite artists, someone I have the priviledge to call a personal friend of mine! C Dot The Catalyst and her Forced to Freestyle Mixtape: Read the bio and download the mixtape
here!
Artist Bio: Texas resident via Chicago, IL and Minneapolis, MN, Charity Clay calls herself "The Catalyst" for two reasons. The first is due to her desire to be a force for change by upholding a high standard for lyrical skill and rhythmic delivery in her music. The second is to push forward her belief in the power of love, as she believes it to be the major force for change in everything. She is driven by this love for Hip Hop that began as an infatuation in 1989 with introduction to such groups as A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Salt-N-Pepa, and such solo artists as Rakim, Ice Cube, Yo-Yo and MC Lyte. At a young age, the emcee known to most as C Dot Clay or simply C Dot was intrigued by the narratives and delivery of these aforementioned emcees fusing the poetry of self expression and socio/ political commentary and the incorporation of musical samples from the soul, jazz, rock and R&B that she was raised on. For her, Hip Hop was the perfect combination of the two. She began as many emcees do, reciting the lyrics of her favorite artists and began building her own album collection in 1996 with the purchase of her first album, "Beats Rhymes & Life". Using that album's title as a mantra, she began to study popular artists of the era; most notably Nas, Common, Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, Black Thought, AZ, Missy Elliot, Busta Rhymes, Andre 300 and Bahamadia. Not until her first year at Chicago's DePaul University did she try her hand at rhyme writing and in 2003, after suffering injuries in a car accident that ultimately would end her college basketball career, she began to focus more on writing as a cathartic process to deal with the physical pain and emotional trauma surrounding the incident. It wasn't until her senior year that she began to share her written material with friends, who, impressed with her skills encouraged her to consider writing and performing more seriously. In 2007 as a graduate student at Texas A&M, she recorded her first songs at a home studio of a friend that she'd met while performing at local open mic sessions. Since then she has worked tirelessly honing her craft to insure a quality product is provided to her listeners and in May 2009 she released her debut project "Forced to Freestyle". The debut, laced by Philadelphia beatsmith Aeon, chronicled her recovery from a car accident in January that left her physically unable to write and is a collection of raw, unmixed and unedited freestyles. Her next release,tentatively titled, "The Smokey Winston Project", is slated to drop in early 2010 and is a collaborative project with Chicago based producer Smokey Winston. She is also collaborating with many up and coming artists and continuing to carve our her place as a "catalyst" in Hip Hop as we enter this millennium's second decade.


Labels: Cdot the Catalyst, downloads, hip-hop, Holla-Day, Xmas