By Beth Rose
BBC Ouch
- Published
- 6 hours ago
image copyright4 Wheel City
Black New Yorkers Ricardo Velasquez and Namel Norris were shot and paralysed when they were teenagers. As rap duo 4 Wheel City they have received global acclaim and raised the prominence of Krip-Hop – a sub-genre of Hip-Hop which puts disabled matters front and centre and lets them express the “double drama” of being in two minority groups
Rick headed home from high school. It was the summer of 1996. The holidays were approaching and his sweetheart was pregnant. But in a single moment everything changed.
A gun was fired nearby and he was hit by a stray bullet.
“I don’t know who shot me, but I ended up in a wheelchair,” he says.
In the same Bronx neighbourhood was 17-year-old Namel. He was at home with his cousin.
“We grew up in the street so we were involved with guns and one day he was playing around with one,” Namel says. “It went off and the bullet struck me in my neck.”
Both teenagers, wounded at different times, were paralysed and became wheelchair-users.
They now had to come to terms with being part of TWO minority groups – black and disabled.
“It’s like you’re doing a double life sentence,” Namel says.
image copyright4 Wheel City
“Imagine that, being black and disabled,” Rick echoes. “That’s a double drama. It’s like your voice is not heard in a double way. You’ve got all these barriers.”
In 2020s language, having two ‘protected characteristics’ like this is referred to as intersectionality and could lead to double celebration – or double the discrimination.
It was Namel’s mum who first met Rick. He gave her his number and said Namel could call him.
But after Namel was discharged he simply wanted to get back to what he’d always done. He met up with his old friends, but it wasn’t the same and all the dynamics had changed now he couldn’t walk.
“One of my friends I used to rap with, wasn’t hanging out with me as much,” he says.
Namel contacted Rick who said he had experienced the same kind of thing with friends and family who no longer knew how to talk to him because he was in a wheelchair.
He began to hang out at Rick’s recording studio because it was a place he felt he would “be understood, be heard”.
The pair wrote Hip Hop tracks together as Rickfire and Tapwaterz but the rap market was so saturated that it was difficult to stand out.
At the same time, Namel was getting fed-up with the constant questions people kept asking him about his injury – “questions like, ‘Are you going to walk again?’ and, ‘Does this work?’. I was tired of people asking.”
He took his frustrations out on the page and wrote In My Shoes – a track which dealt with those personal questions.
“It felt good to be able to express myself like that,” he says.
Getting more political, the duo penned another song – The Movement – about the inaccessibility of shops in New York.