For Detroit rap-artist Courtney Bell, the summer of 2024 has been a reemergence from a four-year hiatus. He released a double dose of his Microdose project with Hip-Hop icon and living legend Royce da 5’9”.
In addition to performing at Detroit’s Backwoods and Bonfires festival, he was even in Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” video (and in attendance at K-Dot's historical Juneteenth 2024 show).
Prior to his music ventures, Mr. Bell was recognized as an intelligent kid who dabbled in the streets.
“I was smart as hell. Everybody knew me,” he says. “My nickname was Dexter [after Dexter’s Laboratory] because of how good I was with numbers. I also had a flip side to me. I grew up in gang culture. I was book smart but I was outside. I experienced that duality being in high school.”
C.B. was self-aware enough to know that he had a lot of raw lyrical talent he wasn’t nurturing - specifically, he saw Hip-Hop was something he did when he wasn’t hustling; it was a shared vocation with street life, but he didn’t embrace music as his calling.
Eventually his peers started to nudge him to pour more of himself into his music. “My big homies pulled me to the side like, ‘Yo you're still active out there and you can really rap,’” he says.
So he did that.
The result was the Hebrew Israelite-descendancy inspired 10 Commandments (2018), his first independent album, which did more than get him noticed.
A year or more later, 2020's Poverty Stricken was released via a two-album deal with RCA. However, subjective strategies clashed on how that project should be presented to the world; hence, no second RCA-related album emerged from the deal.
Deciding to move on from RCA, Courtney gravitated back to the streets - a place where he knew how to make money. Courtney also struggled with the loss of his grandmother, his brother, his sister, and his best friend within a year or two span. “Dealing with all of these deaths in a year or two span, all these people that were very close to me. I gave myself the proper time to grieve."
Around the same time, he befriended Hip-Hop's living legend and Motown's own Hall Of Famer Royce da 5’9”, and began transitioning back into music.
“I didn’t find the point where I could trust God completely until me and Royce got in the studio together in 2022,” C.B. confesses. “We started to lock in and kick it, kick it. I had to take accountability like, “You’re the reason you’re not where you can be musically.’”
Thus, injected into the world of Hip-Hop are the leap-year summer mixtapes Microdose and Microdose Darkside. Both showcase the insightful duality that Courtney Bell has had to balance most of his life. Microdose presents a more street boom-bap vibration; while Microdose Darkside projects a grittier and more trap-driven undertone.
The interlapping doses lists the incredible debuting single "Westside" ft. Royce (with a Matrix reenacted video), along with other amazing street-hop arts such as "Issues", "Banz", "Get Em High" ft. Symba & Sol ChYld, and the title track "Microdose".
● SOURCE: How rapper Courtney Bell found balance in music and life; The 29-year-old emerged from a four-year hiatus thanks to help from Royce da 5’9” and Kendrick Lamar. Detroit Metro Times > https://www.metrotimes.com/music/how-rapper-courtney-bell-found-balance-in-music-and-life-36863390
* VIDEO: Courtney Bell & Royce Da 5'9 - Westside > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTRdWUFT2OU
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