SD CityBeat: ‘American iD.’ Profile on iD The Poet

Photo: Matt Skow / matthewskow.com

I guess as a sort of extension on Media Week, SD CityBeat has been getting better about their coverage of local hip-hop since Peter Holslin came on as the Music Editor. This week, they just published this profile on iD The Poet. And it was written by San Diego’s most controversial/feared/hated writer, Seth Combs, no less (for those unfamiliar, he’s famously known for telling a music act in one of the past CityBeat Demo Reviews to “eat a dick”). It’s a pretty good read. There’s a grab below but you can read the rest of the iD the Poet profile here.

On a related note, iD’s jazz-tinged-but-clearly-still-hip-hop outfit, Genius of Soul, was weirdly nominated for an SDMA for Best Jazz Album. Which is about as accurate as saying Gangstarr is jazz or that like Shakespeare wrote rap lyrics. It sounds good on first listen though and actually it’s probably better than it has any business being.

Local MC, producer and spoken-word artist iD the Poet’s first freestyles weren’t on the suburban streets of L.A. where he grew up; they were in a rather unlikely place.

“Actually, I was working on an assembly line in a fish cannery in Alaska,” says iD, whose real name is Kurt Kohnen. “I just went there to work for a summer after I graduated high school, and it was some serious Laverne & Shirley-type shit, but way harsher. It was in the middle of nowhere. I’d written rhymes and poetry, but nothing ever became of it. But on the assembly line, there’s just all these characters and hooligans: guys from West Africa, ex-convicts that were 45 years old— all these different characters—and we’d just freestyle to try and make each other laugh. This was by no means a bunch of hip-hop heads; most were just old dudes who probably used to rap in prison.”

He laughs, reminiscing. “God, I would never want to hear any of my rhymes that came out of that.”

He makes it sound like he started rapping accidentally, or out of sheer boredom, but he hasn’t really stopped writing or performing since moving to San Diego in 1999. Like a lot of local MCs, iD started in the slam-poetry and spoken-word scene, but, at home, he was using his computer-programming skills to make his own beats. Eventually, he found his way to performing during hip-hop nights at places like Kadan and Landlord Jim’s, where crowds would eat up his gruff, deep voice and introspective, politically tinged lyrics.