Page 35 of Omar

The warm-up finished and the DJ brought the energy down for a second before the lights dropped. The room went dark. Someone near the front screamed Rashid's name. Then the beat dropped, the lights came up blue, and Rashid walked onto the stage.

He was wearing all black, a chain Kadeem had given him for his twenty-first birthday sitting heavy on his chest. He moved to the microphone without rushing, took the stand in both hands, and waited for the room to quiet.

"Brooklyn," he said. "Y'all ready?"

The room erupted.

Rashid opened with the street tracks, the ones with heavy bass and quick bars that made the crowd bounce. He had a presence on stage that you couldn't teach, a confidence that came from knowing his music was good and being unafraid to prove it in real time. He moved across the stage with an energy that pulled the crowd forward, their phones raised, recording every second.

The first three songs were a wall of noise. Rashid fed off the energy, pushing his delivery harder with each track, his voice cutting through the bass, his body moving with the beat so naturally the whole stage felt like it belonged to him. A woman near the front threw her hands up during the chorus of the third track. Three more joined her. Within thirty seconds the entire front section was moving together, a mass of bodies responding to Rashid's voice like a single organism.

Between songs he talked to the audience like they were friends in his living room. He told a story about getting lost in Manhattan as a kid because he'd followed a pigeon into the subway. "I was eight years old, alone at Times Square, crying my eyes out. This random auntie found me, bought me a hot dog, then put me on the right train." The crowd laughed. He talked about his grandmother's cooking, how she measured ingredients with her hands instead of cups. He dedicated a song to Ma without saying her name, just called her "the woman who made me." The room went quiet before the beat came in.

The newer tracks were different. The ones he'd played for me at the studio, the personal ones about growing up Baptiste, about his father's absence, about the gap between who people expected him to be and who he actually was. The crowd heard the shift. The phones lowered. People listened instead of recording.

One track hit different from all the rest. Rashid had written it at the studio the week before, the one he'd played for me during my visit. The lyrics didn't mention Pops by name but they didn't need to. He rapped about a chair at a kitchen table that stayed empty, about a name that opened doors he never asked to walk through, about the silence in a house where someone used to sing in the mornings. His voice broke slightly on the second verse, just enough for the room to catch it, and the crowd responded with a silence so complete you could hear the ice shifting in glasses at the bar.

There was a moment during the second-to-last song where Rashid stopped rapping and just looked at the audience. The beat was still playing, the bass vibrating through the floor, but he was quiet. His eyes moved across the room, taking in the faces, the raised hands, the people who'd come out on a weeknight to hear him talk about his life over borrowed beats. Then he came back in on the next bar and the room exploded.

Devon leaned toward me. "Kid's got something special."

"Yeah. He does."

"You ever think about what happens if this actually takes off for him? Record deal, touring, the whole thing?"

"I think about it every day."

"And?"

"And I'm trying to make sure the Baptiste name doesn't follow him into that world the wrong way. He needs to keep his head down, stay out of trouble. After everything that went down last year, Kadeem's barely let him back in the room."

Devon nodded and went back to scanning the room.

The set ended with Rashid's biggest track, the one that had been circulating on social media for months. The crowd knew every word, rapping along with him, their voices drowning out the speakers. Rashid let them carry the final verse while he stood at the front of the stage with his arms open, his chain swinging, the blue light making him look like he was already somewhere bigger than this converted auto shop on Myrtle Avenue.

The lights came up. The crowd screamed. Rashid grabbed the microphone.

"Love y'all, Brooklyn. For real. Every single one of you. I'm nothing without this city."

He walked offstage. The house music came up. The crowd started moving toward the bar.

I made my way through the bodies toward the side door that led backstage. Rashid was in the green room, which was really just a storage area with a couch and a mirror. He was toweling off his face, his shirt dark with sweat, his eyes bright with the post-performance high.

"Yo!" He grabbed me when I came through the door. "You were here?"

"I was at the back."

"How was it?"

"You were good. Really good."

"Good? That's all I get?" He grinned. "Deem would've said magnificent or some shit."

"Deem's a better liar than me." I sat down on the arm of the couch. "The new tracks landed. The crowd felt that shit. That one about the empty chair at the kitchen table... people weren't even breathing."

"Yeah?" He was pacing now, too wired to sit still, his energy bouncing off the narrow walls. "I wrote that one at like three in the morning. Couldn't sleep, kept thinking about Pops, so I just sat up and put it down in one take. Tre said it was the best thing I'd ever written."

"Tre's right."