By Margaret Ernst
News Editor

It starts with a crowd roaring. Then the beat.

"Wake up!" someone screams.

An emcee comes onto the mic, subduing the shouts and announcing the players. Sumayyah Abdul-Rahim, Ibrahim Abdul-Rahim’s young daughter, and his stepson Ahkeel Lowman. Jessica Nelson ‘12, who met Abdul-Rahim behind the conveyor belt in the Erdman dish room last year. Allison Keefe ‘11, who acts on Tracks 2, 6, 11, and 15, and other friends.

Then of course, there’s Ibrahim, "the self-proclaimed leader of the RoofTop Regime".

Abdul-Rahim started working at Bryn Mawr’s Erdman Dining Hall in 2005, and now coaches the track team part-time. He’s been rapping since middle school, and in November self-released a meticulous hip-hop album 18 years in the making—"Take Over the Block", available on iTunes for $9.99. After the screams of the crowd on the first track, he says his verse.

Abdul-Rahim, who goes by RoofTop Regime in the hip-hop world, explains that the title of the album is metaphorical.

"Let’s step out of the hood,” he says, his voice passionate and didactic, “Let’s realize it’s a larger world out there that we can have a piece of too.”

Stick "Take over the Block" into a CD player and you’ll hear 18 variegated, sharply-layered tracks. Abdul-Rahim’s lyrics are assertive, unafraid. They’re woven together with clips from historical speeches and for comic relief, fake commercials a la Saturday Night Live.

Abdul-Rahim talks about God—he’s been Muslim since 1998—police harassment, the meaninglessness of today’s rap industry, and the apartment complex in San Diego where he grew up. He draws from funk, classic hip-hop, reggae, and old school R&B. On Track 3, he raps over the vigorous bass of Metallica.

He sits in the Campus Center on a Tuesday, about to go to track practice. On Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays, you can hear Abdul-Rahim chatting above the crashing of dishes on the belt. He speaks with rhythm like the way he raps, sometimes about politics or his family and often about hip-hop. But on Tuesday, Abdul-Rahim wears jeans, a brown jacket, and a red and orange patterned scarf that he tosses around his shoulders when he goes outside.

"When I was coming up, it was all about rappers being smart,” says Abdul-Rahim. "You might have a class that can teach you how to rap now…but 20 years ago?"

He smiles, his eyebrows raised doubtfully.

"It was like, you just gotta go out there and hope you don’t look stupid."

In a time in which hip-hop is a corporate commodity, humming perpetually from the flat screen TV in Erdman, Abdul-Rahim sounds like a sage when he talks about what rap culture used to be like. He first started recording in 1988 with seven friends, his crew who called themselves a number of names related to "rooftop" over a number of years.

There were brown stucco walls and blue roofs where they were living in San Diego, and first the seven called themselves the "Flue Roof Posse". It would have been "Blue Roof", but because their neighborhood was Blood-affiliated, it was habit never to refer to the blue affiliated with the Crips.

Abdul-Rahim recalls when he first realized he could try rapping to express himself, years before. He wasn’t a popular kid, he says. He read scores of books. His mother would only let him watch the news on TV. Then one day at lunch, a crowd of kids gathered around two eighth-graders battling with rhymes. It looked like people watching a fight, and he drew closer.

"But nobody was breaking— just two kids rapping."

That’s when Abdul-Rahim thought: I can do that.

That’s not to say rapping comes automatically for him. Abdul-Rahim says it was a skill he had to study and learn. And like the runners he helps coach at Bryn Mawr, he has to stay in shape—"it’s like mental conditioning.”

“For me, it’s all about the lyrics,” he says.

That’s because when he started, with someone beat boxing at lunch or in the locker room, the lyrics were all he had.

In the first recording studio Abdul-Rahim entered, he wrote verses covering college-ruled paper, and from veterans, learned how to separate his bars. Now in his late thirties and 3000 miles away from the friends with whom he first made music, he is starting from scratch.

“Take Over the Block” comprises a completely solo vision, produced in Abdul-Rahim’s studio in North Philly without the ideas or resources of others. The album spans Abdul-Rahim’s experience and imagination from San Diego to Cleveland, where crowds listened to Maylcom X’s “Ballot or the Bullet" speech in 1964. The sparse "Just Ain’t Right", written by Abdul-Rahim 18 years ago, is a recollection of two defining memories that are each devoted two long verses.

One was when he was harassed by the police in 1990, because he just "fit the description."

The other was four months later, when he was shot by Crips with a group of friends who were in the "wrong place at the wrong time". Both incidents happened in San Diego, just a block away from his grandmother’s house. Abdul-Rahim turns around, leaning to look out the window of the Campus Center.

“Like the distance from here to Canaday.”

Over a menacingly simple synth line, Abdul-Rahim tells the story, followed by an overlay of sirens and terrifying screams.

“You know me, we was talking about God, that’s it/Almost done, I was comin’ to my conclusion/when we was interrupted by the gang-bangers’ intrusion.”

Abdul-Rahim says that though he used to get into trouble occasionally, he wasn’t a "criminal criminal". He wanted to describe the incidents on “Take Over the Block” because he believes their message is vital.

“I want people to know that you don’t have to be a criminal to be harassed by the police,” he says. "You don’t have to be a gang-banger to be shot by gang-bangers."

The inspiration for Track 7 came when Abdul-Rahim was washing pots in Erdman.

It was Martin Luther King Day, and there was a special on the radio devoted to King. Abdul-Rahim wondered if there was a song about Malcolm X too. Abdul-Rahim learned about Islam from the Nation of Islam but, like Malcolm X, became disillusioned with its anti-white rhetoric. Rather than wait to find out, he wrote a song.

"I wanted to present him in the light I’d like to assume he’d want to have himself presented," says Abdul-Rahim.

That "Take Over the Block" is firm with its political message is perhaps a message itself, particularly about the contemporary hip-hop scene.

Abdul-Rahim says that sure, he could easily write raps about drugs or girls or killing and shooting. But the mark of a "true MC" he says, is one who says something real, who keeps the party going, and who the grandmas and the little kids will like too.

“Some people think ‘Take Over the Block’ is about taking over somebody’s drug spot or something,” he says.

But Abdul-Rahim quietly explains that really, it’s about taking over the world.

"I’m like, fuck the block,” he says. “Stop thinking so small."

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