Real Talk on Phamiliar Ground

San Pedro’s Local Brand of Hip-Hop Ready for Export

By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor; Photos by Phillip Cooke

Whether it’s country music, blues, rock, rhythm and blues or rap, storytelling is one of the most important and most basic elements of successful songwriting. I recently asked San Pedro rapper, Jacob “Phamiliar” Cerna of Dead Broke Entertainment who his musical idols were. He named Nas, Mos Def a.k.a. Yasiin Bey, Eminem, and Jay Z.

Aside from being masterful in stretching multisyllabic verses, turning double entendre metaphors and linguistically playing with words like gun play, these artists — whether they were telling their own stories or stories of people they knew — also are masterful storytellers.Another thing these artists had in common is that they now have legacies. For his legacy he told me he wants to be known as an artist who told the truth, and who, when he rhymes, other emcees think twice about challenging him. But more than anything, he wants to be remembered as a real artist. I started paying attention to Phamiliar after watching one of his Hot 16 YouTube videos a couple of months ago.

The videos were produced by Luke von Duke. The “hot 16” is a reference to his rhymes on a 16-bar music sheet. I watched YouTube videos going back three or four years and liked what I saw. His strongest works, at least lyrically, were the ones where the songs were hyper-localized, where basically only people who lived in Pedro would get it. [portfolio_slideshow id=11051] For example, in “Pedro State of Mind” Phamiliar raps about San pedro over the instrumentals of Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”

Phamiliar is certainly a skillful wordsmith. It’s evident in his latest mixtape, My Out-of-Body Experience, which was released in 2014. “Glass House” and “Mirror My Star” are my favorite tracks on the album. Phamiliar explained that he was going through a lot personally while he was making music for that album.

Though I poked and prodded, he wouldn’t speak in any detail, but the lyrics themselves are raw with emotion, even when he doesn’t get specific. The album vacillates between braggadocio and redemptive to inspirational and back again. “Real hip hop is about the content, not just talking about money, women and cars, about what you have and what others don’t, but about what could be done,” Phamiliar said. “That to me is real hip hop.”

At 29, Phamiliar has been rapping for half of his life. With a wife and two daughters, it’s only natural that the art reflects the maturity that comes with those life changes. Fortunately, he and his management, Dead Broke Entertainment, are on the same page on that front. Tee Pina founded Dead Broke Entertainment in 2005. In the early days his lineup included local artists Lucabrazzi, Word Play, Ill Nate and others. Today, Dead Broke Entertainment is putting all of its energy into Phamiliar.

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Pina started off as A DJ rocking the wheels of steel as far back as the mid-90s. I mentioned the last group I covered in these pages, SMCI, headed by Paul “P-Millz” Miller and Bubb Watts and even Luke Von Duke when he was still doing the rock-hip-hop thing back in the late 2000s. They either moved on creatively to some other kind of music or took a prolonged and possibly permanent hiatus from music.

I’ve always believed the reason hip-hop culture hasn’t thrived in the Los Angeles Harbor Area was the lack of space provided for it. Pina blames the lack of cohesiveness in the South Bay’s and Harbor Area’s hip-hop community for the lack of a scene supporting local artists.

“If you don’t make it as an artist, you can still write for someone,” explained Pina, noting that there are ways to contribute even when you haven’t made it to your destination as an artist. “If you don’t make it as a brand you make it as an artist. That’s too much skill to let go to waste…. We just gotta keep working.”

“There’s a lot of jealousy and people just don’t want to conform … everybody just wants to be them instead of joining together,” he said. “We’re not like other guys out here who produce something then wait for something to happen. We can’t wait for nothing to happen. We always try to have four or five shows per month, even if they’re just open-mics or whatever.”

With the growing popularity of the battle rap leagues on YouTube, I wondered why more West Coast artists weren’t taking advantage of it to gain recognition. Sure, we have Dumbfounded from Korea Town and Daylyte from Compton, but I’ve always found it surprising that more West Coast underground artists aren’t surfacing, given the growth of battle rapping culture on social media, and the money and attention that’s being generated by battle rap leagues such as King of the Dot and Ultimate Rap League.

Phamiliar has a few battles under his belt and he has shown he could be a microphone fiend, but he and Dead Broke Entertainment has kept attention on making music. Essentially their gaining market share the old fashion way–performing where they can get in and pushing MP3s and CDs. Phamiliar has already finished his first single, “Get Right,” on his still unnamed, upcoming album. Listen to Phamiliar’s and Dead Broke Entertainment’s music on Soundcloud.