Welcome to our first ‘Artist In Depth’

One of the aims for BeatsByWay is to highlight fresh exciting music. ‘Artist In Depth’ will be a series of posts highlighting the artists behind the music.

I am kicking off the series with a Chicago Rapper, Mari.

I came across Mari’s – Living Coloured track on my Soundcloud last week and loved it.

I decided to dive deeper to find more about him:

Demarius “Mari” Edwards began his music career at Williams College.  The Chicago-born rapper/singer/producer, is still relatively new to the music scene but is rapidly growing.

He has developed his own distinct mix of “lyrically rich raps, melodic choruses, and spacey, soulful instrumentals.”

I have read up on Mari and you can just get a real sense of the guy’s passion for what he does. You can hear in everything Mari puts out that there is deep meaning behind the lyrics. He thinks about the bigger picture stuff and tackles a lot of real issues.

When he was talking to Willaims Records, Mari said this about his 2nd EP:

‘Living Colored is an album about double-consciousness, about me trying to speak to two different things going on inside my head and it stems from my experiences of where I come from and where I went to. Those two things I guess I’m speaking to are, how do you speak to people from your community? From the hood? I’d say the second part of it is figuring out how to bring that into context with the more dominant culture. Living Colored is trying to negotiate those two consciousnesses into one voice.’

Since the album, Mari has consistently been producing and releasing tracks including a series called #MariMondays.

I want to end all of the Artist In Depth with a Playlist of my personal favourites. I went through Mari Soundcloud and these are the tracks I thought were dope. Enjoy