Newark Star Ledger, NJ

Music is rapper's way of striking at cancer
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Hip-hop saved me, it saved my soul,
It brought me back to life, and it made me whole ...


Pale, thin and bald, Jesse Hershkowitz sits in a patients' lounge at a cancer hospital, attached to an IV drip, painfully talking through lips gouged by mouth sores. Then, for a few moments, he recites one of his songs and he is transformed.
The song is funny, with the unlikely title "Oy,Veh!," and, while he chants it, his voice gets stronger, he smiles and his hands take on that signal gesturing that is a mark of the genre. A very sick young man reaches for health in a way that works for him:
Oy, veh! Why can't this cancer just go away?
Oy, veh! This isn't the game I'm supposed to play,
Oy, veh! I get chemotherapy all day.
Not just the Yiddish lament blended with hip-hop wordplay -- so much about Hershkowitz is unlikely. Now 26, he grew up in Westfield, the son of a lawyer and a nurse, raised with parental expectations that didn't quite turn out.
"I was always an outsider in Westfield," he says. His mother, Louise Linder, sits across from him and almost imperceptibly nods assent. There is a long and, probably, sometimes painful family history here they're not going to discuss.
"My friends were outsiders. Just not the Westfield type."
So, while many of his classmates worried about whether they'd get into an Ivy or a sub-Ivy college, Jesse Hershkowitz was not thinking much about college at all.
"He's smart, but college wasn't for him, not what he wanted," says his mother.
What he wanted was music. Hip-hop. Hershkowitz played it all night, well into the pre-dawn hours. He worked weekends at a local restaurant and, often, the music was his only social life.
He did go to college, Johnson and Wales in Providence, and earned a two-year degree in culinary arts. An acceptable profession.
"But I knew I didn't love it. You got to love it to do it for the rest of your life."
What he did love was the music. The roommate assigned to him, Moses Hernandez of Brooklyn, also loved it. They found themselves spending hours together, doing the rhymes, finding the beats, playing with the words.
"We knew," says Hershkowitz, whose nom de rap is Urbalist. He and his roommate -- Moe Momentum -- are now business partners. They own a music studio together in Atlanta and, while providing production services for other musicians, they cut their own demos, promote their own work, look for their own big label contract.
They did, that is, until the end of August, when Hershkowitz woke up with a sharp pain in his arm, a pain that wouldn't go away and wouldn't let him work. The experience is recited in his song "The First Five Days."
The pain, it turns out, was a fracture of his upper arm bone, caused by a tumor. Hershkowitz had cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
The young man, in some ways, is lucky. An uncle is an oncologist with ties to Memorial-Sloan Kettering in Manhattan. Diagnosis and treatment were quick and aggressive and he and his family are hopeful for a complete recovery.
Still, the fear is real and the chemo is tough. His body reacts badly to the therapy and he has spent several weeks as an inpatient at the New York hospital. Even when he's out, Hershkowitz -- back living with his parents in Westfield -- is weak.
But not too weak to write rhymes and work out the beats. His parents provided studio equipment in their home, and it has allowed their son to chronicle the anxiety and the depression and the anger and the hope in the way he knows best: Hip-hop.
"It really did save my life," says the young artist, who hopes to return to his studio in Atlanta. "I was able to think about it, express myself, find hope."
The result is a CD, "Cancerous Flow: A Lyrical Journal." All hip-hop, ranging from the angry "Da Hatred" to the hopeful "That's Why." It is a musical diary of a young man's confrontation with a potentially fatal disease that interrupts his career and threatens his life but, oddly, strengthens his spirit.
A spirit best captured in "Play My Cards," a rap hymn to personal determination:
I play the cards that I'm dealt and I never fold,
I can hardly accept never getting old.
He hopes to use the CD as a fundraiser for cancer research and patient support.
"I don't want to make any money. I want my music to help others, the way it helped me."
Bob Braun's columns appear Monday and Thursday. He may be reached at (973) 392-4281 or rbraun@starledger.com.