'Raptivist' The Third: "What people need is good music that is uplifting, relatable and informative."

by Suzanne Hanney

As 20-something rapper The Third discusses wordsmithing and youth activism in Chicago, he sounds like a very old soul – until you realize that he has been living his craft for almost two decades.

The Third, aka Aurelius Raines III, was raised in Chatham and now lives in Hyde Park. From babyhood, he tagged along with his poet father and actress mother (Aurelius II and Pamela Raines) to open mics and poetry performances of people like avery r young, Tara Betts and Geoffrey Watts, aka Dr. Groove, who is his honorary uncle.

Groove and his wife, Donna, were president and vice president, respectively, of the Christian Poets Society, which met weekly. Most of the time, The Third came with his parents. Groove recalls the hook to one of his own poems that really got the young Aurelius going: “I love my people. I love to hug my people.

“Because it has a cadence to it. We would actually embrace and hug one another,” Groove said in a telephone interview. “I had my hands across my chest at the first move. Then I would open my arms back up and a person would step into my space. I would go on to another person. I had the whole room going around loving and hugging each other. He was part of that. He would be singing the hook on his potty. He had to be about 2.”

A stronger memory for The Third, however, is being 5 years old and reciting lines from Dr. Groove’s latest performance, and ones that came earlier. “I listened intently to the way Groove and my father would tell stories and use their words to uplift, enlighten and weave through English,” he told Vocalo in November, shortly after he created a deluxe version of Colored, his fourth EP. The month before, his single “Soul Factor” (Purple), a collaboration with Eric Tre’von and Pivot Gang’s Frsh Waters, was on Vocalo’s “In Rotation” playlist. In late March, he expects to release his first album, South Side Sonnet.

Weaving through English, he said in a Zoom interview with StreetWise, is “any way you put words together to put a picture, to make something bigger.”

Memorizing the poem – embracing its cadence – makes it come alive. “You can do poetry and it can be blasé. That’s what I used to tell people in the Christian Poets Society. I want you to learn your poem by heart. You’ve got to be able to give your poem some life. When you learn it by heart and recite it enough, it develops a voice: tones, dips and flows.” Hip-hop’s rhythm mimics the heartbeat, which is what makes it so infectious, Groove said.

The Third has performed in public since he was 13. As much as he embraces the musicality and theatrics in poetry, his primary concern is substance. He describes himself as a “raptivist,” someone who combines rap with activism, particularly as one of the first Black Lives Matter youth organizers in 2015, when he helped coordinate actions, protests and community service events all over Chicago. He enjoyed speaking “on behalf of a lot of under-represented folks that looked like me,” as he told Vocalo.

“We had just lost Trayvon Martin and were dealing with issues that had been going on for a very long time but were becoming more prevalent to our city,” he told StreetWise. “In 2015, spaces opened up for youth to be involved that had not been open for that demographic, whether it was for racial or ethnic reasons. It was the era where people wanted to contribute to open up spaces for the rising number of youth who were dying, spaces for lively minds to speak up and facilitate, to ideate with their elders.”

The Third performed in New York recently – and he made some Paris audience members understand there’s an uplifted scene here. He credits the Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia, the first space devoted to high school teens at CPL, for this positivity.

Started in 2009 in more than 5,000-square feet at the central Harold Washington Library, the teen digital learning space has spread to 29 CPL locations. YOUmedia has resources for the entire hip-hop lifestyle – fabric for clothes design, sketchbooks for artists, 3D printers and vinyl cutters, even a recording studio that can be booked for free.

“Every artist I’ve ever known who stayed consistent has gone through YOUmedia, either playing video games after school or recording their first song,” The Third said. He has been a teaching artist there since 2018 and is now a board member. He has also hosted its weekly open mic, Lyricist Loft, which has launched many young hip-hop artists. “Of all the things it’s given me, it’s how I can give back.”

Another rapper nurtured at YOUmedia, for example, is Saba, who grew up in Austin and founded Pivot Gang, with his brother Joseph Chilliams, their late cousin John Walt and their high school friend MFn Melo.

In 2017, Walt was stabbed to death coming off the CTA Green Line in the Fulton Market District. In his memory, his mother, Nachelle Pugh, and Saba formed the John Walt Foundation to provide scholarships and mentoring to young people age 14-23 who want careers in the arts. The Third received one of these scholarships in 2019, which he used to continue his journalism education.

A lot of times, you get a narrative of South Side Chicago by people who don’t live on the South Side –or in Chicago at all – [trying] to navigate what we do. We’ve got to tell our story to give an impression for the world to see.

Two issues important to The Third are the school-to-prison pipeline and inadequately resourced schools that are the conduit for this pipeline. He has experience with this issue as a teacher on the South Side. Surroundings affect not only the way kids live, but often the amount of life they have, he said.

“I had a student who was going to school while also dealing with the pressure of being affiliated. There was a struggle for this 12, 13-year-old, urging him to stay in school and do well academically. He also had family members closer to his age who were gang-affiliated and no longer in school. The glorification and pressures of being involved with a gang were difficult for him. He would often come to school angry, which would throw him off his game in school. He would often be in fights. It took a while to break down what was going on with him outside of school; that type of intervention, scary as it can be, was super integral for his growth, for complete autonomy over how his life goes.”

A related issue is schools with inadequate infrastructure to engage students. “When the test results come around, the school gets deemed a ‘bad’ school and then sometimes gets shut down.”

Is the world ready for his message?

“The school-to-prison pipeline is not my main message in this album, but I don’t think it’s about what people are ready for. That is way too subjective to count on. All the time we ask people, ‘Are you ready for work tomorrow?’ and you [add] ‘Are you sure?’ That one ‘Are you sure?’ can change it to a ‘No.’ It’s about what people need. What people need is good music that is uplifting, relatable and informative.

“I talk about spending time with my friends, my tribe, people I met my first few months of high school and have been close ever since. I didn’t realize how rare that was until after I graduated from high school.”

In 2018, as a senior at Kenwood Academy, he was invited to be on The Daily Show when it filmed in Chicago and highlighted local artists. He was inter- viewed by Dulcé Sloan, he performed a short piece, and he met Trevor Noah.

The Third’s topic for the past two years is about growth despite the worst things life can send your way.

“I’ve really been zoning in on the idea of self-development through struggle,” he told Vocalo. “The idea that a lot of my progress and improvement as a person has happened, and can continue to happen, through heavy trial and wearing down of my spirit, has been a hard concept to grasp.”

Specifically, accidental death four years ago last May 24 claimed The Third’s brother, who was just a bit older than he was. Neither of them had yet reached 20.

It is almost too painful for him to talk about with StreetWise.

“I think learning to overcome loss, the main thing it helped me realize is that it’s not necessarily something you overcome. A lot of my growth in that specific part of my life came from dealing with it early and going through very sharp learning curves. Even though I wish it had never happened, it did result in my growth. Somebody I grew up with, shared food with since I was really young. Having to deal with that loss was very integral. Being a pallbearer at that young age was unnatural. And it took a while for me to realize that it made it very difficult to deal with losses that are not [death] but people moving on in life who were kind of your foundational upbringing, because of change in lifestyle or physical distance. It was very difficult for me, but realizing how much growth there is made me grateful.”

I think learning to overcome loss, the main thing it helped me realize is that it’s not necessarily something you overcome. A lot of my growth in that specific part of my life came from dealing with it early and going through very sharp learning curves.

The Third “is bringing light to hip-hop,” despite Chicago’s reputation for “trap and drill rap,” says Groove.

The local genre is defined by a focus on gun violence and clique warfare, which is the collateral damage of the drug scene. It’s the result, Groove says, of monied people here not investing in the music a decade ago, so that rappers instead turned to drug lords, who embraced it to tell their story.

“There is a small community like Trey that defied all the odds to be able to have nice beats with tricky lyrics and not have to be so profane or misogynist in his approach, which is refreshing to a lot of people. He uses a lot of metaphors.”

Dr. Groove

Repetition, for example, can be hypnotic like “getting high off these m………..g drugs,” Groove said, but The Third creates a positive “earworm” that will stay in your head all day. He will say some- thing like “Only 160 but fighting in heavyweight, down for the count but I’m getting up anyway!”

“I have a hook that goes when they ask me ‘what you rapping for?’-- ‘ooh, I want to hear that some more,’” The Third said. “‘All I am seeing is Black and Gold, all we needed was Black and Gold.’” The Black is for his people and the Gold for creating value amongst them.

“I try to find new ways to say things people haven’t thought about and to make connections,” The Third said. “One of my favorite lines in the last EP was to try to speak to the school-prison pipeline. I said,

“Gotta be an example for the youth

Who live in different places

Hoopin

Can’t even slap the back board

But still touch the glass at the visitation”

The young rapper disdains misogyny. He calls it a way of turning men and women against each other “to disrupt progress of that people, and also as a cover for further injustice. For the most part people in power are doing this to marginalize black people.”

Nor does he embrace what George Carlin called the “seven dirty words” among the 250,000 Groove has noted in the English language.

“In addition to the way I was raised, I believe there is a higher level of creativity that comes from not using those words. Even from artists I work with, they’ll say ‘that song of mine without the curse word took more out of me, but I liked the results.’”

Besides relationships, there is energy and inspiration in the Chicago hip-hop scene, he says. “I think that in any form of progress or revolution, there are the elders who provide wisdom and history, the youth who take these ideas and execute them.”

There is also enough writing and rapping diversity between South Side and West Side, so that “when they collaborate, it’s mind-blowing.”

But most of all, there’s a willingness to “break the mold,” inspired by the independent pioneer, Chance the Rapper.

“If ‘this is how we’ve been told’ to do something, let’s find a way to do it where it doesn’t cost us our freedom, our intellectual property, or our individuality.”