InTRoducing, COLE MONEYE...

My Story

     I started writing as a shorty, trying to get girls to like me. I loved music. My family loved music. My uncle owned a record shop. We’ve lived in Northern Jersey, where my parents were friends with the Isleys, Bensons, and The Moments aka Ray, Goodman & Brown. I learned to play, sing and read music at an early age. Then, at 8 yrs old, I heard my first Hip-Hop track, “Rapper’s Delight”, on a cassette tape my cousin had brought from a party. I was blown away at the way they used words to rhythms. I was immediately smitten. As Hip-Hop grew, I grew with it, living in the heart of its creation, but most of all, I wanted to do what the rappers did with words.

     In my teens, I wrote rhymes and even formed a rap group, but wasn’t successful. It was only years later, I realized I loved the words and stories. I loved the beats, but revered the word play. About the same time, I was exposed to my “literary ancestors”, such as Langston Hughes and Chester Himes, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. These men and women told honest stories about African-Americans, yet not about what they were supposed to be, but what they are– a collective culture created by itself for itself. Hip-Hop also did this. I felt the power of Chuck D’s Terradome the same way I felt the magnitude of Ellison’s Invisible Man.

     I was once asked why I write, and my response was “I write for those before me who gave me the gift of their words, for without them, I might not know myself”, but it’s much more simple than that. It’s just, if we don’t write our own stories, then someone else will, and will they tell it supposedly or directly? The Cole Moneye Mysteries lands squarely in the direct lane, and I hope everyone that partakes in his adventures agrees.