Kulez - Artist Timeline

What if 2 Pac and Biggie recorded their beef in freestyle battles on the streets of New York and Los Angeles? Hip Hop Shop footage of Eminem and Proof was easily available on you tube. You can still find first hand accounts from fans that caught Jay-Z and Nas at open mics. And what if early bedroom and demo recordings of your favourite artists were online for you to follow and piece together the building blocks that made them.

Kulez came up battling and free styling like most underground emcees. He worked his way up from wining a few hundred pounds at local club nights to being crowned champion at nationwide and worldwide competitions with wins of up to ten thousand pounds. At the age of 16 most kid’s biggest worry is getting their GCSE results. Kulez was already paving his career path being one of United Kingdom’s finest freestyle rappers. By the age of 17 he had been flown out internationally to fly the union jack high making him a cult hero and was already a prominent name in British Hip Hop with no official releases.

“…United Kingdom’s finest freestyle rappers.”

A&Rs in London wanted Kulez. Record Labels wanted Kulez on their roster. He influenced and inspired a battle scene that has now become a global phenomenon. His battles were easy to find as they where distributed by jumpoff.tv but Kulez wasn’t as he wasn’t on the streets of London like his battles portrayed him to be, but focusing on his education in the country side of Norwich.

At 18 years old he released his debut single independently as well as a mixtape which was a mix of tracks he had been making from his teens. He tells the tales with quirky concepts of skipping class, making easy money, house parties and dumping girls – stories a lot of people his age could relate to. Street battles with over a million views and downloads worldwide made him the hottest rapper on the roads at the time which is what he was trying to achieve musically. He self distributed the mixtape and generated similar hype to K-Koke – Pure Koke Vol. 1 single handily with hand to hand street distribution. The host on the mixtape DJ Ames won awards for best host on a mixtape in America, shame it didn’t receive the same recognition on home turf.

Going through severe personal problems that led to heavy addictions Kulez found it hard to get motivated. A lot of his time was spent procrastinating suffering from writers block. Kuda Brown was born who was an alias, side character, who he blamed for this behaviour but still managed to release what he could for his most sincere fan base.

Now at 22, Kulez is back trying to get his buzz back and really build his brand to become hot property in 2012.

Written by Jasmine Walker