In the Spotlight: Jesse Hershkowitz

Katie Robinson (KR): Tell me what's on your mind today?

Jesse Hershkowitz (JH): On my mind today is moving forward and getting back to 100 percent. I just finished up my last cycle of chemo a couple of weeks ago. I ended up being sent to the inpatient unit for eight days, and I'm just out of the hospital, about 10 days now, all done with treatment. I got all my scans done and have a clean bill of health to go back to daily routines. I'm just waiting for my first check-up which is in about a month and then I'm headed back to Atlanta to continue making music and trying to get a record deal.

KR: Are you from Atlanta originally?

JH: I'm from Jersey. I was born in Brooklyn, actually, but I only lived there till I was three. We moved to New Jersey when I was four, and I lived there with my parents until I was 18. I moved out at 18 to go to college in Providence, Rhode Island. I went to school for two years to get an associates degree as a chef. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. It was during that time that I met Moe Mentum, who is the other member of my rap group, and we started making music, heading to open mics, and doing shows. I ended up staying in Rhode Island for six years, which was probably a little bit too long. Just recently I moved down to Atlanta because that's where hip hop is alive right now.

KR: Hip-Hop is more alive in Atlanta than in New York?

JH: It's a different kind of vibe in New York than in Atlanta. I'm from New York, New Jersey so my style is always going to stay home. I love New York hip-hop till the day I die, but there's a lot of positive moves to be made down in Atlanta right now. There's a lot of people spending money on hip-hop, and it's just a different vibe. It reminds me a lot of how it was in New York back in the mid '90s. But I'm going to jump right back in that swimming pool and try to get a record deal. I got a job lined up for me, recording engineering, which is what I was doing before the diagnosis.

KR: Okay, so, you're finished with your treatment.

JH: Done.

KR: And you had six cycles.

JH: Six cycles. Six horrible cycles.

KR: What was your diagnosis?

JH: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma of the bone.

KR: When were you diagnosed?

JH: Late August. Mid to late August. I think it was probably the 19th or 20th.

KR: And how do you feel today?

JH: Sigh. Relieved. Happy. Thankful. And ready. Hungry.

KR: Have you been working on any music recently?

JH: During the chemo process, throughout the six cycles of chemo, I put together an album called Cancerous Flow, Lyrical Journal. It's basically 10 songs. I produced all the beats, I wrote all the rhymes, recorded it at my parents house, and it came out really well, much better than I expected it to. I've been getting a lot of good, positive feedback from it, and it's available. We're trying to make it available in a lot of different places so that people can benefit from listening to it. I'm doing whatever I can.

KR: Tell me about the music that you were making before you were diagnosed? What's the tone of that? What were your themes?

JH: It's positive music, but its grime music. It's struggle music. Before, I got the diagnosis, my partner in the group, Moe Mentum, and I had been a group since 1999 and we were trying to get it going for seven years, eight years. I've been doing this for 10 years, 11 years. He's been doing it 10 years, 11 years, and we've never had a deal, you know what I mean? We've done shows, we've put in a lot of hard work, and I think that shows in the music that we were making. We were making some commercially acceptable songs, some underground -- we didn't really limit ourselves to one or the other, we were just writing what we felt. A lot of what came out was grinding music. Basically it was about how hard it is.

Cancerous Flow Listen to four tracks from Jesse's concept-driven album go

KR: How do you think that music differs from Cancerous Flow?

JH: Well, Cancerous Flow is more of a complete concept album than anything else. The two albums we released before the diagnosis were called mixed tapes because that's basically what they were, even though we were the only artists on those tapes. If we used another artist's beat, we made up our own song to it. Those tapes were called All in Mixtape Vol. 1 & 2. That's what we were really pushing down in Atlanta. Cancerous Flow is more of a completely concept driven album. It's all about cancer and its in chronological order almost from the first song -- describing how I actually felt leading up to the diagnosis, and then hearing the diagnosis for the first time. It also includes how it felt to get chemo on my first day and how I felt after my first full week of treatment. Each song I tried to approach with a different emotion attached to it. One song I tried to approach with a positive attitude ("Positive Flow"); another song I approached with all the anger I was feeling ("The Hatred"). But really, the whole album relates to cancer -- having cancer and going through it. My dad made a good statement the other day. He said that I did a lot of the work for it, the recording aspect of it when I was feeling fine, because you get a couple of weeks off between treatments. But it was written when I was at my worst. It was written while I was inpatient, after getting blasted with chemo for a week -- mouth sores everywhere, can't eat anything, can't drink anything. That's when it was written.

KR: Right. In the suffering, comes art.

JH: Exactly.

KR: What were you're relationships like with your family and friends during this time?

JH: With my family, it was the hardest. I moved out when I was 18 and until I was diagnosed, I had never moved back. I'm 26 now. I was 25 when I was diagnosed, and I actually had my 26th birthday when I was on chemo but…it was cool. It was almost a culture shock getting plucked out of my life, and having to move back in with my parents. We butted heads a lot, but it was all just because we love each other. My friends, they helped me out. They came over every night and they came and visited me in the hospital, and helped me keep my mind off of the fact that I was going through what I was going through. I couldn't have done it without them either. Everybody really stepped up to the plate. I couldn't be more thankful.

KR: How did you find out you had cancer?

JH: I woke up one morning and I was feeling fine, on say a Monday. And Tuesday, I woke up and my arm hurt. My right arm hurt so badly. I had honestly never felt any pain like that before in my life. I mean you can probably see the scar on my head when I bashed my head open and got stitches in the front and in the back. I've broken bones but this was something else. This was something I had never felt before, and it was radiating all the way down my arm and giving me forearm pain, and hand pain, and up my neck. It was horrible. So I finally went to the ER in Atlanta, and they saw a healthy 25-year-old kid come in there with arm pain, and they didn't figure anything of it. They didn't take any x-rays because they diagnosed it as bursitis. They gave me a steroid shot, which helped for about a day or two, but then it came back even worse. It just so happened that that weekend we were having a party in New Jersey for my grandma who was turning 85. I had purchased a round trip ticket to come to New Jersey for three days and go back to Atlanta, and just get on with life. But during those three days we went to a local hospital. They took x-rays and saw there was a pathological fracture. As soon as my mom heard those words she got in touch with a cousin of mine in Connecticut who is an oncologist. I went to see him and got all the PET scans and this scans and that scans and that was the day that I was diagnosed. It all became a reality, you know what I mean? And I've been staying up here ever since.

KR: How did you end up at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center?

JH: My cousin, the oncologist, basically said to my mom that he could treat me, but he only sees three of these cases a year. He used to be a fellow at Sloan-Kettering and he said that they see hundreds of these cases a week, and it's the best place to be. He wasn't wrong.

KR: Tell me about how your illness affected your music.

JH: I was devastated at first (when I was first diagnosed). I have to be honest with you. I went into a room in my house and slept, or didn't sleep, just laid in bed for two or three days. I went through the whole 'Why me' stage, and denial. But during that time, I also tried to think about how I could get myself through it, and I could keep my mind occupied, while going through all this stuff that I knew I was going to have to go through. And finally, at that point in time, the idea of the album just came to me. I love music so much and when I'm working on it, when I'm in the studio, and when I'm writing, I forget about everything else. So I figured, if I can spend my time, when things are bad, writing, I can forget about what's going on otherwise. And then, if I could spend the time when I feel good recording, I can still forget about the fact that I have to go back in for my next cycle in three days. It would help keep me sane, and grounded.

KR: You have a song called "How Hip-Hop Saved My Life."

JH: It saved my life. I would've torn myself apart without that love of music. That's how I express myself. For more than a decade now I've been writing about how I feel. The lyrics, you know, they were horrible ten years ago, and maybe halfway decent now. But whatever people think of them is…its me that I put on the paper.

KR: What's your favorite part about that song?

JH: The bridge, I think. The bridge at the end of each verse, I just chanted along the beat. It goes "I was in fear, and my spirit was broken / Young man, unsure of how to deal with emotion, / But hip-hop saved me, it saved my soul / It brought me back to life and it made me whole." I think that is the true essence of the song, of my experience. I found energy to live in hip-hop and in making music, so it really did save me. If I didn't have music, if I didn't have that album to work on, or those verses to write, or those beats to make, I would have easily driven myself insane. And probably have made matters worse for myself and my health. (Read the complete lyrics to "How Hip-Hop Saved My Life")

KR: Expand on that phrase "unsure of how to deal with emotion." What did you mean by that, and do you think you're more able to handle emotion now?

JH. Yeah, I think now I'm much more able to handle it. To a certain degree everybody's able to deal with emotion. But emotion can come in little bits and in huge things like 'You have cancer.' I think that before the cancer, I was able to deal with emotion in moderation. But I was not able to deal with major things that would have a major impact on how I felt, on my outlook, on my psyche. That's why I think that when I first heard the news that I had cancer, I retreated to my own little hole. Like I said, I slept for two days, just stayed in the same room, didn't come out for two days. The thing that got me out of bed and got me out of that room was hip-hop. I thought to myself, I'm going to write this album: I've got to get up; I've got to get my notebook; I've got to get pens; I've got to get all my verses written; I've got to get my studio equipment. All of those things pre-occupied my mind from 'Oh my god I have cancer, oh my god, oh my god.'

KR: Did you start writing right away after you were diagnosed?

JH: Pretty much. I would say I wrote the first song "The First Five Days" before my first treatment. (Read the complete lyrics to "The First Five Days") Then I wrote "Chemo Begins." I wrote the first verse on the day of my first treatment, and the second verse at the end of the week. (Read the complete lyrics to "Chemo Begins") The album came together on its own, which is the coolest part about it because I didn't have anything planned. I didn't have specific songs that I wanted to write. If an idea came to me, and I liked its concept, I just wrote it. I wrote everything at first a cappella, without any idea of what beat I was going to use for which song. Then I made a whole bunch of beats and just picked and chose when I went into the studio to record it. There was no preparation time. I just went in and it all came together perfectly. I think every beat compliments every song in the right way.

KR: When you go back to Atlanta, do you think you'll be performing any of these songs?

JH: Yeah. I'm going to go back to the same open mics that I went to six months ago, and I'm going to say 'Hey, anyone remember me? I just beat cancer, and here is one of my songs.'

KR: What do you hope people take from your music?

JH: I hope that as far as other fellow cancer patients, it will help them. I know there were times when it was so bad for me. I told my mom at one point in time when I was being admitted into the ER 'I hate it. I don't care. You know even if it's going to save me, I'm not getting anymore of this stuff. We're stopping right now.' I didn't stop, obviously. But I know there are probably a lot of kids that have thoughts like that. I want people to understand that chemo does come to an end one day and that there's another side of the fence where the grass is greener. I just got here a couple of weeks ago, so I can't really tell you, in too much detail, what it's like. As far as non-cancer afflicted people, I hope my album raises awareness. I want people -- instead of just feeling sorry for somebody -- to actually have an idea, or a sense of what it feels like to go through it.

I'd like to add that there is one thing that I found funny about the chemo, and that is that every time the nurses would come by with the big bag or big jar of chemo that they were about to put into me, inside of me, intravenously, they would put on these thick plastic gloves. They don't want to touch it, and you can't leave the building if you have chemo because it can give you cancer. It, itself, can give you cancer. It's poison, to the definition. And when you take it, when you get it, you feel poisoned. You don't feel sick. You don't feel crappy. You feel poisoned. And that's exactly what you are. But its, its…it's the way to beat it.

KR: You talk a lot about having a positive attitude.  What does this mean for you? 

JH: Well, trying to have a positive attitude.

KR: You wouldn't say you had it all the time?

JH: Definitely wouldn't say I had it all the time. But negativity doesn't work. If I'm feeling negative, then everything I say is going to have a negative connotation to it, or a negative tone to it, which is going to rub somebody else the wrong way. It leads to a place where you can have people shouting at each other during a time when you're supposed to be getting better and recovering. It's just not good. It's not a positive environment for recovery and that's just what I was talking about. There's a line in "Positive Flow" that says "Staying positive, doesn't mean I stay smiling. It just means I haven't quit or decided I ain't trying." It just means, don't give up. (Read the complete lyrics to "Positive Flow")

KR: What is your biggest joy right now?

JH: My biggest joy right now is that I never have to get a back pack full of chemo again, and I don't have to measure my urine and PH anymore. The number of pills I have to take each day is slowly decreasing. I just feel like I'm getting back to normal. I don't need so much taking care of which is good. I need to be able to get back to that place where I can take care of myself. My parents have taken care of me enough over the last six months.

KR: Is there anything else that you'd like to say?

JH: Definitely. Chemotherapy does end. I was on it for a very short period of time. I got lucky. I know there are people here who have two year protocols, and that's a long time to be on chemo. But it does end. You do move on. If you can find something that you really love, that not only preoccupies your mind but also your time, it just makes it easier to get through it. It's hell, but it ends.