As a high school football player and track runner, Milwaukee's Karl Iglesias had dreamed of securing a college scholarship. When he ultimately received that scholarship, though, it wasn't for his atheism, but rather his writing. He's now a sophomore majoring in theater at the University ofWisconsin, where he attends through a program built around rap and hip-hop culture.
"I'm a mostly a regular kid," says Iglesias, who raps under the name ¡OYE! "I'm from the inner city, the South Side. Latino. Puerto Rican. I went to a pretty good high school, Rufus King, where I was able to develop and hone my academic skills. Now I'm in college with my tuition paid for, and my life is in a better place. There's a part of me that's always dreamed of representing my city in some way—maybe not by breaking out as a national artist, but just by being an artist and telling my story and to inspire others, and also to refute those who assume that because I'm Latino, I can't rap."
That last onus weights particularly heavy on Iglesias.
"I feel Latino's contribution to hip-hop is overlooked," he says. "When hip-hop was born in the Bronx, there was a huge Puerto Rican population in the Bronx at the time, and if you look at photos from that era and the history of the culture, Puerto Ricans and Latinos are all over. But now when people think of Latinos in rap, they just think of the stereotypical reggaeton rapper. We haven't seen somebody be really respected in hip-hop since Big Pun."
This month Iglesias released his first EP as ¡OYE!, a collaboration with the burgeoning Milwaukee producer Klassik called In My Mind.
"I wanted to give a brief introduction to people without talking somebody's ear off," Iglesias explains. "You know how when you first meet somebody, they can just go on and on and on and on, talking at you? I want these five songs to just give a taste of who I am. If the listener likes me and wants to continue the conversation, that's where my next releases will come into play."
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Iglesias is already planning those follow up projects, one of which will pair him with members of a Madison salsa band.
"It's funny, because I grew up listening to a lot of salsa music, but I didn't like it at the time," Iglesias says. "My family listened to it all the time, and I never cared for it. My mother and father and sister were all born in Puerto Rico, so I was the first member of my family born in Milwaukee. Growing up in Milwaukee, hip-hop is all you see, so that's the music I gravitated toward. But now that I'm older, I find myself bumping salsa in the car as much as I do hip-hop. I guess I've sort of grown into my culture."
¡OYE! and Klassik's In My Mind EP is streaming online at oye414.bandcamp.com. The pair will give an EP release show at MOCT on Thursday, March 25.
