Northwestern has a budding rapper, but it's not Chet Haze: It's sophomore basketball player Omar “OJ Tropicana” Jimenez III.
The 6-foot-1 point guard from Atlanta, who walked-on to the basketball team last season, started his rap career during his junior year in high school when he took The Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat” beat and overlaid it with his own lyrics. His first moment of inspiration came from an unintentional challenge from his stepmom.
“I was visiting my dad and my stepmom and we were talking at the dinner table and we somehow got to the topic of the saying ‘You can be whatever you want to be in life,’” Jimenez said. “My stepmom said there was a limit to that. She said you’re not going to have a 450-pound, five-foot flat, senior in high school trying to go to the NBA. As much as he would like to, it’s probably not going to happen.”
She continued by saying that she could see many different career paths for him, he said, but rapping was not one of them. Jimenez said it was a bitter challenge at first, but then became friendlier in his mind as he got the ball rolling and started to write his first song.
“I was laughing it off at the moment,” he said. “It kind of stuck with me. I kind of took it as a challenge. I was looking for beats and I heard the 'I’m on a Boat' beat, and that’s how it began.”
Jimenez has performed at two shows to date: one at The Rock on Sept. 28 and one at Dittmar Gallery in the Norris University Center on Oct. 20. He will be rapping at the Afropollo talent show on Nov. 16 in Tech Auditorium. He has invited his dad and stepmom to his shows but because they live far away, they have been unable to attend.
“She knows I rap now,” Jimenez said of his stepmom, “but I’ve never told her about how that moment motivated me.”
Although he has not been able to attend one of his son’s shows, Jimenez’s father, Omar Jimenez, Jr., likes what he has heard of his son’s rapping. Jimenez Jr. has listened to the music and said he believes his son is a positive young man articulating what is going on in society today.
“I think he is really creative,” he said of his son. “He has a good voice and good tone. He can stay with the rhythm of the music. I really like that his music is upbeat and that he raps about positive things.”
While Jimenez has been writing his rhymes down, he has been getting more requests recently to add a new dimension to his game by freestyling.
“People would always ask me to freestyle and I wasn’t really that good at it," he said. "This past summer I really made an effort to get better at it. I practiced and practiced and practiced. My freestyling has definitely improved.”
Jimenez, who cites Ludacris, T.I., Usher and Eminem as his biggest rap influences, said the content matter he raps about comes from the heart and from a place of experience.
"For me, that experience is a black guy who acts 'white' who comes from the suburbs, not the hood,” he said. “I’m someone who has a different story. People like to hear pain in rap songs. My pain was not necessarily the fact that we couldn’t afford this and that. It was more like that I was a big-time nerd in middle school and the beginning of high school. I didn’t have too many friends. My parents were divorced. My family was just split apart. I think it’s interesting because everyone has a different story, and this is a different shakeup from what you’re used to hearing in the traditional rags to riches story.”
Some of the planned content matter that Jimenez has is about the girls in his life or his sports career. He said that he isn’t planning to write a dirty rap song about women, but rather talk about some of the drama in his life relating to girls.
While he doesn’t foresee himself becoming the next big rap star, he hopes to keep rapping as a hobby as long as he can.
“I am a journalism major, so that is what I’m studying to be, a reporter on television,” said Jimenez, who has contributed as a writer to North by Northwestern. “Right now this is just a hobby. But with the power of the Internet and social media and how these can spread, if I release a song and somehow it’s a number one hit on iTunes, then maybe it may stick around longer in my life.”