It doesn’t matter if you are a “Red-Shirt Freshman” or a seasoned senior, more Baker students are throwing down rhymes in either friendly battles or in music videos and this influence is spreading onto the campus. These students conduct impromptu battles and sessions where ever and when ever they can; after meals by the Long Student Center, in between study sessions outside of Collins Library or during a sporting events at Liston Stadium or at Sauder Field.

Matt Menace

“Be educated through your music,” Matthew Maumalanga, a junior who goes by the stage name “Matt Menace,” said. These words resonate throughout the growing hip-hop community on the Baker campus. Maumalanga just released his first single “SUSpect” early in the semester.

Throughout Maumalanga’s three years at Baker, he has decided to take influences from his experience at the university rather than the big city life lyrics that other rappers so often chose.

“Over here you’re just chilling. You’re doing homework, sitting in the dorms, thinking about different philosophies that you are exploring throughout class, kind of like art history,” Maumalanga said. “You just have a lot of time on your hands to think about stuff that most people wouldn’t. I’ve taken a lot of quotes from my art history and business classes and try and incorporate them because it is a lot of stuff most rappers don’t talk about.”

Maumalanga said that making music, especially while in school, has really helped him get through a lot of things.

“I talk about being aware, socially and mentally,” Maumalanga said. “I vent through my music, and it is therapeutic for me. Baker has been a rebirth type of deal, kind of like a renaissance type of deal. Now it is one of the main things people define me as.”

EJ Carter

Maumalanga is not the only one who sees Baker as a positive influence on his music. Senior EJ Carter also sees Baker as a major influence for his music. Carter describes rapping as natural for him. He started at the age of 11 while free-styling on a Mickey Mouse karaoke machine.

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“I changed rap here at Baker,” Carter said. “When I first got here for Baker, there was a guy here who’s name was Jordan. He went by ‘Jordan Freshh,’ and he was doing rap here, but it was on a small scale. He didn’t have any type of music videos or anything like that but he was pretty good. But when I came here, I was the first guy to have multiple music videos on the internet with hundreds of thousands of views, large fan base already who weren’t from around here, and I pretty much introduced the concept of somebody who actually is making big moves in hip-hop being here at Baker.”

Carter sees himself as someone who has created avenues for others on campus to find their inner music side, including Maumalanga.

“I put Matt on,” Carter said. “He was at a time when he was like ‘I don’t know, maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t’ so I put him on my first official free mix tape and it immediately exposed him to a music video that is pushing 90,000 views right now.”

Carter then invited Maumalanga to perform with him in St. Louis at a club called “The Babylon” for his first ever show, which was in front of a crowd of about 300 people.

Carter was impressed.

“He did really well for a first performance, even better than I thought I did for my first time,” Carter said.

Carter, who has performed with such acts as Yelawolf, Twista and Young Jeezy, has tried to represent Baker in other ways in his music.

“I make it known that I’m from Baker,” Carter said. “If you look at some of the videos on the internet, I am wearing Baker stuff.”

With his videos such as “We Jammin,’” which has almost 146,000 views on YouTube since it debuted, Carter hopes to present Baker University to a audience that would have never known about the university. He hopes to raise questions like “What is Baker University?” to cause viewers to look up the school on the Internet.

Antonio Adgers

However, the local rap scene is not as accessible to everyone as what it could be. Senior Antonio Adgers, who was a disc jockey at KNBU-FM, Baker’s student radio station, for three years, said that the inability to get edited version of songs by campus rappers stopped him from playing a lot of them on his radio show.

“I wanted to expose listeners to what I like,” Adgers said about local artists.

Local artists are a huge part of Adgers’ listening library, because it exposes him to brand new music before they become popular. Like a lot of KNBU DJs, Adgers chose to play artists he liked over the more mainstream.

“With the industry songs, there are songs that the language can get pretty vulgar, but there will be a clean version that you can put on the radio,” Adgers said. “But as far as the independent artists, if they have (anything) vulgar in their songs, then you would have to either manually edit the song yourself, which can be a lot of hard work, or you can see if they have already made a clean version, which most of the time they don’t already have.”

Adgers is a senior at Baker University majoring in mass media. He is currently the assistant sports editor for the Baker Orange and has appeared a music video with both Carter and Maumalanga titled “What’s Really Good,” which was shot in Baldwin City.