| О себе: |
Danny "Avatar Young Blaze" Degtjar, child of the USSR, found a home in the US, a new family in the streets, and a voice through making gangsta music.
“It’s an uphill battle for me”, says Avatar. “I don’t sound how I look, I got this crazy story; I mean, that’s what I hear at least.” It’s true—the gravelly voice, tone, flow and content may paint a picture in your mind that doesn’t quite match up to the skinny young white kid who penned and spit them. Forever tied to both the Central blocks and the Eastern Bloc, he’s had a road tougher than most would ever guess.
“Back in Russia, grandma used to wait in line in a foot of snow/ barefoot for a loaf of bread and a toilet roll.”
Born in Tallinn, Estonia, to Ukrainian/Russian parents, Avatar and his family utilized family connections to leave for the United States when he was three months old, and eventually settled in the suburbs just east of Seattle, WA. The thought-to-be-affluent suburb of Bellevue wasn’t exactly flush with opportunity for Avatar’s family at first, as they called home a cardboard box outside of an Ivar’s Fish & Chips by the Crossroads Shopping Center. Things got better, but Young Av found static early; “I was always kinda like, not bad, but rebellious—because English wasn’t my first language, I was in ESL classes and I had an accent up until 3rd grade.” Now of course, he has another accent, one owing to he and his mother’s next move, to “the CD”: Seattle’s historically African-American Central District, former hub of jazz and soul, the birth place of Jimi Hendrix. His mother envisioned him getting away from the trouble with the law that had already found him in Bellevue, but probably didn’t realize that the CD was also the most active, gang-infested hood in the Emerald City.
“I’m from Seattle where it’s a lot more than coffee mayn/ matter fact, 20 people just got shot today.”
It was his freshman year at Garfield High that he started attending local
hiphop shows and competing in MC battles against people twice his age; making an impression with grownup bars, he fell under the wing of Seattle hiphop label Stuck Under the Needle and the 30-deep NW crew Oldominion. That was the same year he found his father’s body, several days dead, in the bed he used to sleep in. "I saw that and I feel like my life changed right there, I just kind of went off; a whole dark phase of my life started right there. Right around then, my mom had to travel a lot for her work. She was always gone, like always; one or two weeks at a time, she wasn’t home at all. So I’d just be by myself, or my grandma would come stay with me, or my uncle, but they couldn’t control me. I didn’t really have any parental guidance after that. Like sophomore year, that’s the year I really turned on; that’s when I started gangbanging and stuff…"
He'd taken to the streets at top speed, under the wing of his friend, a G by the name of Dave Blaze. "That's my brother. He was active, he was really that dude. So I’d be runnin’ around with him and cats would ask him about me, like 'where’s he from', and Dave would tell em ‘he’s from where I’m from’. It’s kinda tough being damn near the only white dude from the CD; I had to be either the wolf or the sheep. Y’know, my mom wasn’t dropping me off in an Audi, I was taking the 48 from Massachusetts to Cherry. I kinda dove off in it, kicking it with these dudes, standing on the pyramids every night, and then I really started learning the lit behind it, the principles and the knowledge behind it all. I felt like it represented me."
When Dave Blaze went away for a murder, Avatar took on his name, and went even deeper. "My brother went to jail, and I kinda picked up where he left off, I felt like I had to carry his name." Meanwhile, he'd begun releasing his own Russian Roulette mixtapes, revealing an ear for grimy production and a gifted pen game. His grind only int |
