II Face
2 Faces 2 Every Story
Featuring hot beats, ill lyrics, and touching stories, the album can stand toe to toe with any major artist. The single, "Party Naughty" is a dance song that grows every week at radio and "Parkin' Lot" is slated to be the second single. Face has a cool delivery that is to the point, on "Time is On My Side", Face says, “You can hear me but don’t judge me, feel me but don’t touch me.” There are few detractors from this ambitious debut, his music is blunt, yet emotional, with features from up coming rappers and the legendary DJ Kool, 2 Faces 2 Every Story is an album that is worth listening and exploring.
We all do it. Lead an industry life, balance it with our personal life. Sometimes the result is imbalance, sometimes the challenge is too much. For rapper, T.I., this personal turmoil was expressed in the platinum album, T.I. -vs.- T.I.P. The album, set in three acts, articulated the often unsaid difficulty of being a rap artist and just being a man.
Camden native turned Virginia transplant, II Face, takes a brave look at the same issue. How does a rapper put his best face forward, without forgetting who he really is? On "2 Faces 2 Every Story", the rapper opens the album with an interlude that finds him getting ready for a show, when asked what is taking him so long, he replies, “I’m putting my face on.” His conflicting personalities are only compounded by the fact that he is a Gemini, naturally double-sided. He was born on the same day as Prince and poet, Nikki Giovanni, June 7th.
A rapper for over ten years, Miguel Martinez was motivated to rap because he felt a strong need to express his life’s story, “We (rap artists) speak from what we go through and I definitely went through something, and when you set that to music you have the opportunity to help somebody else.” Growing up in Camden, New Jersey, Martinez states that he had the “typical hood story, Mom over here, Dad over there.” Describing an all too common broken home, and an all too common lack of relationship with his father until his late teens. He was forced to grow up early surrounded by drugs and crime. “I was raised in a bootlegger house, my house in the hood was the house that people came to get the liquor and drugs.”
The turbulence of his childhood, sent Martinez from Camden to Portsmouth, Virginia to live with his grandmother, he describes the move as giving him balance and ‘tightening his loose screws.’ His grandmother, an avid churchgoer kept her grandson in church “ten days a week,” he says with a laugh. The exposure to church life brought out his instrumental side, he began to play the keyboard, and sharpened his skills as a producer, after being deemed by his friends as “too smart to be a rapper.” He was encouraged to study the business of music, he did, this study would come in handy later in his career.
Growing up in VA, Face, as he is affectionately known, was exposed to master producers like Pharell Williams, Timbaland, and the incomparable Teddy Riley. Producing became a skill that Face could benefit from and eventually he began to sell his beats locally, later getting some interest on a national level. He plans to push his production career between albums because it comes so naturally to him. “I do that like you drink water, it’s nothing.“ Keeping some of his hottest for himself as he honed his rap skills, it was the birth of his two children that when “the beast came out.” Face who describes himself as a “dude that smiles all the time.” However, he sometimes wore that smile like a mask. He realized that a rap career is not a hobby it is a lifestyle and as he put more and more time into it, he knew he was in too deep to turn back.
Creating mixtapes became an outlet for Face, he produced and wrote tracks for The Die Hard Family Mixtape Vol. 1 and Jet Noise Vol. 2, together the albums sold an incredible 75K units, independently. He was courted by major record labels only to be slept on, he chose to sign with a large independent label and be a priority rather than sign with a major and sit on the shelf. Face found a home at Black Russian Music Group/One Disc Distribution. This debut album was released on September 4th.
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