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By DEREK REDD
Many regions of the United States have a signature sound when it comes to the hip hop music of that area. There's a New York sound, a West Coast sound, a Miami sound, a Deep South sound.
Is there a distinctive Ohio Valley hip hop sound? Maybe not yet, said local hip hop artist Isaiah Keez. The Ohio Valley scene is in its fledgling stages, so that sound hasn't developed. But Keez, born Isaiah Alford in Hollywood, Florida, would love to be the artist who helps solidify that signature sound.
Asked to define his music, the 32-year-old Keez calls it "diversely deep." He mixes old-school substance and storytelling with the beats of today.
"I like to rap about something important," he said, "a message with some type of meaning or story. Not just kind of just putting words together that sound good on a good beat."
Keez and wife Brittany, an Ohio Valley native, made the area home so Brittney could earn a master's degree at West Liberty University. Since then, the two and 7-year-old daughter Zuri have embraced the valley and all it can offer.
Keez eventually found out the Ohio Valley can offer a doorway into the music business. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic left him out of work and looking for ways to fill his time. Keez always had written poetry, and that transitioned into songs.
After writing his first single, "Plight," which talked about the plight of Black men at the time George Floyd was murdered, he received the positive feedback that led him at age 30 to jump into the music business with both feet.
"If I have something I’m interested in, I get obsessed with it," he said. "I can’t not do it. I’m just all the time into it and I naturally kind of get really good at it fairly quickly. And so with music, that’s kind of how it happened."
Keez has embraced the grind of building a music career. He works night shifts in the healthcare field, then comes home, catches a little bit of sleep and spends most of his time working on his music. He'll also bring other artists to his home studio to record, mix and engineer their music.
Sometimes sleep is fleeting, but Keez doesn't let that deter him. In those hectic periods, he'll fall back on a motto of his, which is the title of one of his songs: "It is what it is."
"I’ve been through a lot of stuff and I’ve had to overcome a lot of stuff just to get where I’m at today," he said. "And at this point in my life, my mindset is nothing is gonna get in the way of where I’m going and what I’m doing. It is what it is, and I’m gonna make the best of it."
That hard work has paid off in unique ways. Last Independence Day, Maestro John Devlin, music director and conductor of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, invited Keez to perform with the symphony during its Fourth of July concert at Heritage Port. He was able to hear his songs in a new form, backed by the power of a full orchestra.
Keez called the experience "life changing."
"It just opened my eyes up to how much music can really affect people and motivate people," he said. "And then, personally, for me it let me know that, hey, I can do this. That was like that was the last bit of doubt that I might have had in my mind at that time. After that, there was no more."
These days, Keez is working to diversify his professional life. On top of his music, he's working on rolling out a clothing line, Danger-US. Yet he'll continue his quest to help build Ohio Valley hip hop into an influential genre.
"People can make this area one that solidifies and produces hip hop artists, not to where we have to go all over the country chasing anymore, but they start to come here," he said. "You know, it only takes one. It takes one to really kick the door in and the way it works with these labels, is one kicks in the door and they’re gonna come back here like, hey, is there any other Isaiah Keez-type of artists, you know? So that’s where I feel like I can play a part in that is, you know, helping kick the door in."