On a cool evening last Friday, Durham’s CCB plaza swelled with members of North Carolina’s creative community; the four elements of hip-hop all present. Dozens of emcees, DJs, breakdancers, and graffiti artists were gathered to rap, cry, dance, laugh, sing, pray, and grieve together. We were mourning the passing of our brother Kevin Joshua Rowsey II, known to many in our beloved community as Rowdy, who passed on Wednesday, April 17. He was 32.
Precisely at 9:19 PM on April 19th, Rowdy’s mentee and protégé JAMM (aka Just Another Master Musician) passionately called out: “CYPHER, CYPHER” and the crowd roared back: “CYPHER, CYPHER!” This was a call-and-response ritual that Rowdy himself led on countless Friday nights, marking the beginning of Med City Cypher.
A soulful choir flanked by horns serenaded the audience as the instrumental from UGK feat. Outkast’s song Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You) erupted from the speakers. A band kicked in to accompany the track with live bass, drums, violin, and guitar. The air was anointed with the sweet smell of burning Palo Santo and bouquets of flowers. An altar full of love notes basked under the glow of a brilliant moon and the flicker of candles. A crew of muralists hovered over a makeshift easel, painting a stencil of Rowdy onto a 3-foot canvas, as our intergenerational community of grievers formed a circle around JAMM and rappers started to freestyle.
This is the legacy of a North Carolina hip-hop legend.
Rowdy was the executive director of Blackspace, an Afrofuturism teen center, where he took several Durham youths under his wings. He taught emceeing, songwriting, hip-hop, and entrepreneurship at Blackspace, and stewarded other youth programs, such as spoken word, beat making, coding, and videography. Rowdy also created a space for the older artists who had aged out of Blackspace programs when he co-founded the music label and production company Only Us Media with fellow artist-educator Reem. Alongside his parents and sister, many members of Rowdy’s Blackspace and Only Us family were present at the Cypher, which was one of his flagship community events.
The Cypher kicked off at 9:19 PM in celebration of our 919 area code, where Rowdy started his hip-hop journey over a decade ago. As an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, Rowdy was a founding member of a collective of beatmakers and emcees called No9to5 Music. He started the UNC Cypher on campus, in the pit, where he unofficially broke a Guinness World Record for the longest group freestyle.
In his early 20s, Rowdy developed a reputation as an energetic, lyrical emcee with an incredible talent for improvisational freestyle rapping. He began to perform on stages across North Carolina, opening for the likes of Rakim, Murs, and Asher Roth, often with his live band J Rowdy and the Nightshift. In 2016, he released (J) Rowdy and the NightShift EP mixing elements of hip-hop, jazz, and rock. In the following years, he released two albums: Return of Black Wall Street (2017) and Black Royalty (2019).
Rowdy earned the respect of NC’s hip-hop community with his infectious and magnetic energy, and a gregarious and charming presence on and off stage. He was a towering figure, standing at 6-foot-2, a height extended by another 4-to-6 inches by his signature flat-top hairstyle, straight out of a 90s Kid-n-Play movie.
Josh was one of the rawest live performers I’ve ever seen. Living up to his moniker “Rowdy,” he was always the most energized person on stage, and wouldn’t hesitate to leap into the audience to hype up the crowd while rapping at a blistering click. Rowdy dedicated his life to the craft and culture of hip-hop and was also determined to bring young folks in his community up with him.
Rowdy became involved with Blackspace in 2016, where he began to produce and mentor young Hip Hop artists in Durham. In 2017, he founded Med City Cypher and used it as a lightning rod to attract young talent into the space. He executive produced Blackspace’s debut album, Revenge of the Afronauts, in 2018, which featured over a dozen up-and-coming teenage rappers, singers, and producers from the Bull.
He took them to WUNC to perform live on The State of Things with Frank Stasio and organized a sold-out album release party at The Pinhook. That same year, he traveled to Qualla Boundary in Western North Carolina, where he worked with 4th and 5th graders in the home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. There, he led youth in hip-hop workshops to preserve the Cherokee language.
In 2019, Rowdy earned his Master of Arts in Teaching from UNC Greensboro and, later that year, became an international Hip-Hop Ambassador through UNC’s Next Level program, co-leading a hip-hop residency in Mexico City alongside acclaimed producer Buckwild, among others. He became an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at Rankin Elementary School in Guilford County schools, all while leading weekly cyphers and workshops at Blackspace. In early 2020, Rowdy executive produced DurhamFi, a lo-fi instrumental album celebrating the Bull City co-created by Blackspace and Discover Durham.
Even the pandemic couldn’t slow Rowdy’s passion for hip-hop and youth education. Blackspace worked with PBS North Carolina to produce Classroom Connections, a TV show for families impacted by COVID-19. For this series, Rowdy helped develop educational and entertaining short-form math and literacy content, to support at-home learning for preschool through 3rd graders. Rowdy became the charismatic host of Classroom Connections as “Mr. R,” and was broadcast into millions of homes across the state.
Rowdy has many other achievements I could mention, such as his televised appearance on BET’s Freestyle Friday; being part of the Kennedy Center’s inaugural hip-hop production “Making Beats” cohort with 9th Wonder and the Soul Council; teaching the course “Rap Lab” in the Music Department at UNC-Chapel Hill; or performing as a hip-hop artist-in-residence with the Greensboro Symphony. He was a Renaissance man! He was also a generous mentor, who used his platform to amplify the voices of youth across the globe.
I spent countless hours with Rowdy at Blackspace and in classrooms, from Durham to the Dominican Republic. He often coached kids on how to access, what he called, their “God Voice”— that special space when a lyricist enters into a flow state and delivers ideas and sounds directly from their spirit, almost as if they were downloading the brilliance of God directly onto their tongue.
On Friday, I felt Rowdy’s presence speaking through the collective God Voice of the artists in our cypher. CCB Plaza was packed with youth that Rowdy mentored, their parents and siblings, other educators, artists, and creatives, as well as members of the No9to5, Only Us, and Blackspace families. Over the course of the night, folks were rapping, making live beats, playing instruments, spinning classic hip-hop instrumentals, breakdancing, and weeping.
At 11 PM, when the music stopped, I stuck around to listen to several of Rowdy’s former students recall stories about his loving spirit and generous heart. Among them was a young woman named Kayla—one of the first students to come into Blackspace when we opened our Durham studio in 2016. When I hugged her goodbye, I noticed that she was only wearing one of her giant gold hoop earrings. I asked her what happened to the other one. She grabbed her earlobe and smiled.
“Rowdy took it,” she laughed, “now he’s got his halo.”
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