“Don’t Let Me Go,” could easily have been written as a plea from Penn to former student Josh Bennett, who graduated from the University this spring.
At Penn, Bennett performed with the spoken-word poetry project, Excelano, and had a substantial fan following. But this summer, he transformed verse to lyric and performance to production, writing and recording 14 hip-hop tracks in three months.
Bennett’s single, “Don’t Let Me Go,” was released online August 26 and quickly gained popularity. The track features fellow poet and musician AmJay Jimenez, who met Bennett two years ago at New York City’s Urban Word summer program.“We both found our voices there,” Bennett explained. AmJay contributed vocals, keyboard, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and bass, single-handedly creating the instrumental foundation of the song.
“Don’t Let Me Go” will constitute the first track of the larger album, the Cain Marko Mixtape. After many Gchat deliberations, AmJay and Bennett decided on the name when they realized Marvel Comic’s Juggernaut was named Cain Marko. The literary connotations of the word were deciding factors for the two poets. A “juggernaut” technically is a force regarded as unstoppable.
“Once the Juggernaut starts moving it can’t be stopped, just like I hope my music will be!” Bennett said. And placing first on Twitter charts is certainly a start.
But how does a poet find his way to hip hop? For Bennett, the progression was natural.
“I was always a freestyling machine at Penn,” Bennett said, crediting his musical inspiration to B.o.B, Electronica, Drake, and Kirk Franklin. He also cites Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco, saying, “those two made me unafraid to be lyrical.”
However, the poetry-to-rap transformation was not entirely smooth. As Bennett pointed out, “In hip hop, what is considered your weakness is your strength in poetry: vulnerability.”
But when 2008 Penn graduate Nana Kwabena offered studio time, and 2010 classmate RJ Ferguson signed on as producer, Bennett rose to the challenge.
This fall, Bennett will matriculate at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom on a Marshall Scholarship, where he plans to earn a Masters degree in Theater Study. He will then pursue a PhD in English at Princeton University.
With the Cain Marko Mixtape scheduled to drop mid-September, Bennett aims to reach more people: “I want to tell a beautiful story that people who may have never seen themselves in music before can see themselves in.”
