In its’ short existence hip-hop music has found a way to captivate people of all cultures. Now Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn has bred a Bengali rapper named Brooklyn Shanti. Although he’s gained the respect of his hip-hop peers, his family has not been as open to the idea of him becoming a hip-hop superstar.

A dance studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn aims to keep African culture and tradition alive through unique dance and music classes. Produced by Scott Eidler and Sarah Munir

Robert Samuel performing "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." (Nell Smith)

The lights are dimmed and the spotlight is focused on the center of the stage. The sound of laughter lingers in the air and the bass of the music vibrates through the wooden floor and black leather couches that are positioned around the room. A sea of people surrounds the stage and awaits the next selection of the night. The 1985 hit “Saving All My Love For You” blasts through the speakers, and they erupt into cheers. As the singer takes the microphone, fans sway to the music and boisterously sing along to the words of Whitney Houston, who died suddenly last Saturday.

A few days before the late popstar’s funeral, the Denim Lounge in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, dedicated its first annual karaoke night on Feb. 15 to the singer, Whitney Houston. The owner and CEO of the lounge Wendy McLean said she wanted to celebrate the diva’s life and allow people to express what they felt about her “Brooklyn style.”

Shortly after watching the Grammys last Sunday, McLean began making phone calls to local radio stations to plan the tribute to Houston. “Tonight it’s all about Whitney,” she said “We have people here who are singing her songs, impersonating her and acting out parts of movies.”

Before Brooklyn native Robert Samuel began his selection, he told the crowd that all of his life he has found solace in listening to Houston. “No one could make me feel like they really understood my situation as I was going through it like her,” he said. As the music played, Samuel lip-synced the words to “I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” originally sung by Jennifer Holliday in 1981 for the Broadway hit musical Dreamgirls.

Samuel believes Houston’s voice transcended the original form of any song she sang. “No one else could take a song and make you forget about who originally sang it,” he said “When she sings someone’s song, you swear it’s hers.”

Lenny Green, radio host at 98.7 Kiss FM, remembers Houston’s rendition of the national anthem during the Super Bowl in 1991. “It’s unfair to say what song is my favorite, because I like all of her songs,” he said “But I liked when Whitney took the traditional American anthem and made it her own.”

During her three-decade-long career Whitney Houston sold over 170 million singles and albums worldwide and received a number of awards including two Emmys and six Grammys. She also starred in a number of films including The Body Guard, Waiting to Exhale, The Preacher’s Wife, Cinderella, and was cast in an upcoming film Sparkle. In the prime of her career rumors of Houston’s substance abuse surfaced.

Despite Houston’s fall from grace when she became addicted to drugs, fans still think her legacy should be viewed positively. “True fans know she wasn’t an angel,” said Samuel “But even in her decline she was still good.”

Radio host Green believes Black media has been more sensitive to the personal circumstances that shaped the singer’s life than mainstream news sources. “It is unfair that television media has painted a gruesome picture and highlights that negative chapter in her life,” he said.

Others in the crowd argue that Houston’s death is a wake-up call for young artists. Shemecca Fair, a performer, says when she heard that Houston had died she was shocked. “I am a church girl at heart so Whitney has always been my favorite,” she said. As an aspiring singer, she considers the only way to survive in the music industry is to stay true to yourself and to surround yourself with supportive family and friends.

On Wednesday night, the fans gathered at the Denim Lounge considered themselves friends and family of Houston. “I feel like she’s a friend. Like that’s my home girl,” said bar owner McLean. “She was as real as it gets.”

Though many view her death as a tragedy, the people at the lounge view this moment as a time to celebrate her life. Video DJ Chris Forde who works at the Denim Lounge said Houston sang “life-giving songs.”

While people waited in line for their chance to sing a Whitney Houston song, they enjoyed a hot plate of soul food and posed for pictures. Dressed in silhouetted white T-shirts that featured Houston’s face and the words “Superstar,” employees of the lounge made the night memorable for the fans.

“Next year this event is going to be much larger,” said McLean, as she greeted guests as they entered the lounge. “Whitney will forever be in our hearts and her music will never die.”

The Brooklyn Lens webcast for the week of February 10, 2012.

Residents gathered in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Not only did the festivities bring the Chinese-American community together, but it also provided an economic boost for local vendors.

Mural graffiti portrait of Notorious B.I.G. at the 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center in Long Island City. (Bevis Chin / Flickr)

Last year, Sha Stimuli, a 33-year-old Brooklyn rapper, packed up and moved to Atlanta.  He wanted to widen his audience, he says, and the South beckoned. He’s not the only one moving on.

In recent years, there is a growing sense among hip-hop heads that New York, and Brooklyn in particular, is passé. While there are still stars emerging from the borough, the action, the excitement is taking place elsewhere.

“In the last decade, New York has been left behind,” says Sha Stimuli. Although being a Brooklyn rapper may have helped his career ten years ago, today he sees it more as a disadvantage. “Me saying I’m from Brooklyn doesn’t actually help, because there is no novelty there,” he says. “People got bored of Brooklyn and New York.”

But people weren’t always bored of Brooklyn. Hip-hop may have first emerged from the Bronx in the late 1970s, but it is Brooklyn that, for a generation, has been known around the world as the genre’s incubator. Brooklyn, along with the rest of the East Coast, withstood the coming of a rival from the West Coast—and a resulting battle whose intensity escalated into bloodshed, with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. More recently, both East and West Coasts have seen the rise of southern hip-hop in such cities as Atlanta and New Orleans, which have produced a sound more focused on the beat than on the political message that made the East Coast’s success.

All the while, the names associated with Brooklyn hip-hop have remained the same—Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Busta Rythmes, M.O.P.—leading to talk that perhaps after all these years Brooklyn, once so essential in hip-hop’s evolution, has lost its touch.

But has it? As Notorious B.I.G. once rapped, “where Brooklyn at? “

 ***

Wes Jackson, president of Brooklyn Bodega and executive director of The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival believes that Brooklyn is still full of talent, but says that some people thought being “made in Brooklyn” was enough. “I think a lot of artists in Brooklyn are resting on their laurels a little too much,” he says, “Some New York artists forgot that you still have to put in work. Just ‘cause you live off the A Train, it don’t mean nothing.”

For Jackson, who was born in the Bronx, New York hip-hop never disappeared.  It’s just that everyplace else caught up with New York. “I think it’s still happening in Brooklyn as much as anywhere else, there is a ton of quality hip-hop artists here. The problem is now there are quality artists everywhere.

Artists like Sha Stimuli who have moved away say it’s hard to start a career in New York because, in their view, the local media are less than supportive. “The radio stars in New York aren’t from New York,” he says. “If you go to a club, the hottest records aren’t from New York.”

Rapper Donny Goines also made the move from New York this summer. Born in Manhattan, he grew up between the Bronx and Harlem. “Radios don’t play New York rappers,” he says, “and the bosses are going outside to get their talent.” Sha Stimuli still believes radio DJs have the power to make a rappers career. “Radio DJs can change things,” he says, “They can decide to play New York artists and show that New York is still a relevant force.”

For others, blaming that lack of support and airtime is often used as an excuse. “Mainstream radio, media and the major blogs have a tendency to look down or not support some of the artists from New York, that’s true,” says Manny Faces, founder and editor-In-chief of Birthplace Magazine, an online publication that focuses on New York hip-hop. “But let me also say that some of the artists use that as a an escape, as a cop-out. If you’re not making it but you’re from New York, is it because radio and media doesn’t support you? That may be part of it, but maybe it’s also because it’s not that appealing for the rest of the country.”

And with the rise of social media and YouTube, airtime and press clippings seem out of date as the chief marketing weapons. With websites like KickStarter, a fundraising platform for creative projects,  record deals don’t seem as essential to success as they used to be. “The music industry is changing,” says Manny Faces, “and probably across the board not just in hip-hop—it is becoming a little more indie friendly.  You see it with artists like Mac Miller from Pittsburgh, who just sold 150,000 records in his first week with no label!” Donny Goines, for example, has a direct distribution deal with iTunes. He released his latest album, Success Served Cold, in November without the help of a label, but with the support of sponsorships by big clothing brands such as Rocawear and Artful Dodger. While the Internet has opened up many avenues for undiscovered artists it has also vastly widened the market.

Wes Jackson of the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival sees a danger in this. He compares hip-hop to a young growing plant. “You want the plant to grow,” he says. “But you still have to prune it and cut the weeds out. You still want growth, lack of growth is death. The danger is that the weeds will strangle you and your death will be your own success.”

***

Corey Smyth, who grew up on 125^th Street and St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and is now a key figure in New York’s Hip-Hop world believes that location is playing an ever decreasing role in Hip-Hop success. Smyth, founder of Blacksmith Management, Blacksmith Music Corp., and Blacksmith Corporation among other companies—he has worked with De La Soul, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, whom he still manages—says that being a New York rapper is no longer sufficient to attract record labels.

“An area doesn’t make you bankable,” he says. “Being from L.A, New York, Chicago, none of that makes you hot. What makes you hot is that you are. And the way you perceive your surroundings and the way you’re able to regurgitate that back into an art form. That’s what makes you hot. You could be from anywhere.”

Still, hip-hop retains a certain regionalism—one that is no longer limited to the coasts, as Sha Stimuli and Donny Goines have discovered.

“Other regions of the country rose to prominence,” says Manny Faces, “When Cash Money first started the New Orleans thing, they were doing their thing locally and selling lots of records and mixtapes. When the music business figured this out, and when Wendy Day got Cash Money their $30 million distribution deal, then it swiveled. The music business flooded, and they all turned their heads and started signing people.”

Is that just the natural evolution of a music genre that is barely 40-years-old? Probably, says Manny Faces: “Hip-hop being such a expressive form, where you’re not blindly following a formula. It has to evolve to the point where it means different things to different people.”

***

So how did the South emerge as a strong voice in hip-hop? Arguably, one of the first southern hip-hop acts to make a difference was Outkast. “They were hot, for southern rappers,” says Sha Stimuli. “That was the way we were trained to think. When they came out, we didn’t dissect them as people who could take the crown.” A decade later southern hip-hop is topping the charts with artists like Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross, Young Jeezy… “It’s been 10 years that southern rappers are spitting fire, it’s not a novelty anymore,” he says, “but it has never penetrated New York the way it has now.”

If southern rappers are sending out messages, the meaning may not be the same and the overall sound is different. It makes the rhythm resonate in your rib cage, it sounds greasier, grimmer. New York hip-hop has the mind going in a hundred different directions to understand the meaning of the lyrics. It makes you try and dissect the meaning behind the rhyme, like poetry.  In Decoded, Jay-Z’s autobiography, he says the first reason for writing the book was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics were poetry if you looked at them closely enough.

***

Rappers are not the only artists to be moving to Atlanta; the city has become a hotspot for black entertainment. And there is a wider migration movement that has occurred in the last 10 years. From 2000 to 2010, according to a study by the Bookings Institute based on the 2010 Census, three quarters of the nation’s black population gain occurred in the South, while the black population saw a drop in northern metropolitan areas. Where even ten years ago Blacks were migrating to the North, there are moving back down to the South. With them, the entertainment industry is flourishing in the big cities Dallas or Houston, and especially Atlanta.

Donny Goines didn’t rush into his decision of moving to Atlanta. He wanted to stay in New York.

“I tried to be my hometown hero,” he says, “but I felt limited because overall, a lot of other artists are bitter and jealous of each other, they’re not working together.” After trying to be a rapper in New York, he gave up. “It became redundant and an exercise of futility,” he says, “I left to become strong and represent my city. I’m still rapping like a New Yorker.”  A few months in and there are no regrets. “This is the best career move I’ve made,” he says. Eventually, he plans to return to his hometown. He wants to make enough money to be able to donate half of his earnings to the charity he supports, as well as live in comfort, hopefully in “a nice artist’s loft” back in New York. He hopes to change the image he believes New Yorker rappers have, of not being profitable. “There is a negative connotation in being a New York Hip-Hop artist,” he says, “I want to prove people wrong.”

Still, even with the rise of southern hip-hop, New York remains a force, in good measure because of its history. In 2010, Joshua Atesh Litle directed the documentary, The Furious Force of Rhymes, for which he traveled around the world to meet hip-hop artists “New York City was the complete inspiration,” he says. “Some of the major artists who inspired these artists were Wu Tang Clan, Mob Deep, Jay-Z and Public Enemy.” All from New York.

Brooklyn rapper Sha Stimuli recently moved to Atlanta for his career.

For Sha Stimuli, fans still connect with the New York sound of the early 1990s, that of positive-minded groups like De La Soul or a Tribe Called Quest with their Afrocentric themes, although addressing society’s issues—the pioneers of conscious hip-hop. “There are still people out there who love that sound,” he says. “New York rap is still loved and adored.” In fact this year, Q-Tip, the leader of the 1990s iconic group A Tribe Called Quest filled his concert at the 2011 Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival.

But New York’s endurance is not only a matter of celebrating the past. Corey Smyth is working on Talib Kweli’s new album. A young girl from Harlem, Azeaila Banks was everywhere on the web with her song 212. And of course there is ASAP Rocky. “New York always has a moment,” says Smyth. “It may not saturate the world but there is always something out. There’s always something poppin’. And if it ain’t poppin’ today, it’ll be poppin’ tomorrow.”

In fact, this year, Harlem-born rapper ASAP Rocky achieved what Sha Stimuli or Donny Goines could not: his first album—Live Love ASAP—was played on New York radio stations. He was even taken on board by Canadian superstar rapper Drake for his next tour.  But there is something else that differentiates him from other New York rappers. He prides himself in not sounding like a New Yorker. “I don’t even like New York rappers,” he told The New York Times.

And he really doesn’t sound like them. With a slower, mushy sound, ASAP Rocky has the flow of a Southern rapper. Sha Stimuli was even surprised to find out he was from his hometown. “When I first heard him,” he says, “I thought he was from Houston!” ASAP Rocky has become a topic of conversation among Hip-Hop heads as an example of how hip-hop has widened its fan base.

“ASAP Rocky has a $3 million dollar deal even though he’s from Harlem but sounds like he’s from Houston,” says Manny Faces, who adds that ASAP Rocky proves his point that there can be local support, but only where there is talent.

***

“New Yorkers have never stopped trying to make music, and there has always been an underground scene here,” he says. “I think in recent years, it has even become more thriving. So the relevance, in terms of the business and media, is actually something very progressive and brewing.” His work, with Birthplace Magazine, is aimed at demonstrating that New York is, in fact, still relevant. “We write exclusively about New York hip-hop, to the general music world, and for the general audience, New York hasn’t had the perceived relevance as it used to have.” Birthplace regularly publishes a column called “5 Reasons Why New York Hip-Hop Doesn’t Suck.”

“New York is still very much on the cusp of what’s hot, what’s fashionable, what’s cutting edge because that’s just New York,” Smyth says. “Being a New Yorker in hip-hop is a privilege. It’s helped define me to a large degree. It’s afforded me insight that you couldn’t have gotten unless you were in New York at the time.” Having studied at Morehouse College, Smyth, too, lived in Atlanta. But, he adds, he never really left New York. “Leaving? You can move, but you can’t leave it. It’s too much to leave. It’s in you.”

***

MORE ON HIP-HOP:

- Growing up with hip-hop: a short documentary.

***

Bah Black, 15, a young rapper from Bushwick (Hannah Olivennes / The Brooklyn Ink)

A mini-documentary about hip-hop in Brooklyn’s projects.

Brooklyn has been a birthplace for hip-hop since the very beginning. More importantly, its housing developments are some of the most well-known incubators of hip-hop talent in the world. Artists like Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G., and Mos Def, all found their voice through their childhood in Brooklyn’s projects. We followed children, teenagers and adults and asked them how hip-hop influenced their lives, and how their lives influenced their hip-hop.

A collaboration between Hannah Olivennes from The Brooklyn Ink and Nic Stone of NYC in Focus.

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MORE ON HIP-HOP:

- Where Brooklyn At? Hip-hop’s travelling geographical center. 

***

Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink

In the growing darkness, they arrive, individuals at first and then in packs of two and three and then in a stream that seems to have no end. Down this desolate stretch of Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, in the shadow of the abandoned Domino Sugar factory, past the car repair shops and vacant lots, in the shadows created by bare streetlamps and the headlights of livery cabs, they come. Through the open door, passing the discarded cigarette butts and the shoddily put together wooden bench on the sidewalk, they file into GlassLands Gallery to see seven bands play all night.

This could be any night in Brooklyn. This could be any Friday night on Kent Avenue. These could be any bands at any show with any crowd, interchangeable in the Williamsburg and Greenpoint that see thousands of bands a year strive for some kind of fame. But this is a Friday night during the 2011 CMJ Music Marathon, and though it feels no different from any other autumn evening on Kent Avenue or Bedford Avenue or North Sixth Street, the major players—small as they are—feel something different in the air.

“If your band can’t stick out in this sea, they won’t make it,” Hunter Giles says, his band having just dipped themselves into the waters to float in the current. That band, Ava Luna, just finished the opening set of Friday night’s Yours Truly CMJ showcase inside GlassLands, pushing through a 30-minute set with a muscular combo of bass, keyboards and four vocalists. Giles is outside GlassLands, cigarette in one hand and a copy of an Ava Luna album on vinyl in the other. He wears a tweed blazer despite the falling temperatures. This is Ava Luna’s first CMJ show.

There are well over a hundred bands at CMJ, and finding exposure amidst the groups that are piling up buzz and the bigger names that suck the oxygen out of a venue can be a nightmarish proposition. But Giles, who describes himself as Ava Luna’s manager, isn’t scared.

“These are the kinds of festivals people come to looking to find new bands,” he says. “It’s not like Tuesday night shows during a regular week. [CMJ shows] are geared on new music and smaller bands. The audiences know that.”

What the audience knows at GlassLands is beer and liquor. The music plays on in the background, and Ava Luna, by virtue of being first, gets an audience that pays attention to the music before turning to the bar. The second band, a Prince-worshipping group named INC, has a harder time getting the crowd’s attention. By then, conversations have broken out in earnest. People keep flooding in, drawn by the free admission and by knowing someone who knows someone who knows that this band could be big or at least a good way to kill half an hour. The bar is a magnet despite its precarious position on a ledge hanging over the floor, a position that forces drinkers to maintain perfect balance with drinks in each hand as they are jostled and pushed by those behind and below. The crowd seems to regenerate on its own, as if every person who walks in spawns two new people just by entering.

I can’t hear the person next to me, and I suppose they can’t hear each other either. Despite the packed house, I find myself shivering. It was hot earlier but there’s a breeze coming from somewhere. It’s probably the venue door, propped open now to support the constant influx, bouncer harried by the people, girl at the ostensible ticket table no longer paying attention to anyone as they walk in. After all, it’s free. Why keep track?

Outside, in the chill of late October, there is smoking and laughing and a girl in a leopard-print jacket talking to someone on her rhinestone-encrusted iPhone, asking if they had puked this morning. Whatever response she gets elicits laughter. The bouncer, still harried, keeps urging people to move down the sidewalk and make room. Few people listen.

Back on Bedford Avenue, the main strip in Williamsburg, a smaller crowd gathers outside the smaller venue that is Spike Hill, smoking and laughing but with no questions about who has puked recently. Spike Hill’s CMJ showcase, this one hosted by Baeble Music, is also free but less crowded. Nonetheless, it takes all of ten seconds for someone to run into me bodily, shoulders first, once I step in.

Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink

The band on stage is unknown to me and probably to everyone else. This is how CMJ operates. You won’t know the band’s name right away, and maybe not even until their last song, when they remind you to come check them out at another showcase on another night at another venue. Maybe you’ll never know their name at all. I learn the band’s name—Jonquil, a four-piece out of Oxford, the English college town —thanks to a chance glance at a beat-up brown leather guitar case propped against the wall by the stage.

The case is held together by duct tape and bears the band’s name in blue masking tape on the front. Jonquil’s gear sits in ragged packs by the side of the stage, to make it that much easier for the members of the band to clear the space post-haste once their 30-to-45-minute set has come to an end. That’s the essence of CMJ: Speed. You have to clear the stage quickly, move to the next venue quickly, press the flesh as fast as you can and impress as many people as you can in just 30 minutes, about six or seven songs. The city’s rhythms perfectly match the hellish pace of the so-called music marathon.

Hugo Manuel is the affable lead singer of Jonquil, a pale man with a round face, thin beard and light blonde hair who is breaking down his keyboard about 30 seconds after thanking the audience for coming out to see them. We talk outside about an hour or so after their set, Hugo having initially left the venue to get a coffee and then to a nearby bar with the rest of his bandmates to do an interview for some music promotional group or another. This is Jonquil’s first CMJ show but they’ve been to New York before, supporting a number of bands as openers. The people who went to those shows knew what to expect, but Hugo believes that the people at this showcase had no idea what they were going to see. That’s what he loves most.

“What’s exciting is knowing that the people you’re playing shows to are people who have never heard you before,” he says.

He and Jonquil have done the festival circuit before—most notably South by Southwest, the giant Austin, Tex., showcase in the spring—but all four members prefer CMJ to SXSW.

“CMJ is like New York but with more bands,” Hugo says, a tremendously obvious statement that contains a deeper truth. Nothing separates CMJ from New York or Brooklyn. There are just more bands and more free shows and media and record label types who run around looking high and low for the next big thing. But the bands involved feel as if there’s something else there, an energy or desire that regular shows don’t quite reach.

“When CMJ’s going on, no one can think of anything else,” says Sam Scott, Jonquil’s bassist and occasional trumpet player. “It feels like everybody’s ready to give you a chance.”

Another four-person group from England follows Jonquil at Spike Hill. It’s a band that has seen their name begin to trend upward in their homeland despite at least two previous name changes. They’re called Viva Brother and are famous enough to warrant their own Wikipedia page, about seven or eight photographers in front of the stage who snap shots incessantly for the entire set, and a cheering section who may or may not know who Viva Brother is, but you get the sense that the band could care less. They have to go to Rochester in the morning for a show in the evening, according to their lead singer, Leo Newell, who fills in the crowd on their travel arrangements during a break between songs. “Rochester can suck a dick,” he says. “Unless they like us better, in which case New York City can suck a dick.”

Viva Brother is brash and bold on stage, churning out the kind of reliable British rock that has pervaded all music on the island since 1986. The supernovas of British pop—Oasis, Blur, Stone Roses, The Smiths—will all be name-checked in reference to Viva Brother. But they put the past aside, because they are young and full of energy and the occasional Pabst Blue Ribbon, and while they do nothing on the level of spitting on a photographer or head-butting an audience member, they radiate the give-it-your-all-or-screw-it mentality that most bands here could use more of.

On stage, Newell is no holds barred. When I talk to him just after his set, as he drags gear from the stage to the front of the venue, he is unflinchingly polite and soft-spoken. Viva Brother, like Ava Luna and Jonquil, has never played CMJ before. And like the foursome in Jonquil, Newell knows that CMJ and Brooklyn mean something big.

“There’s something special about New York City and in the air,” he says. “You could bump into someone you’d never meet. It’s a different experience and it means you’re being taken seriously on a different level.”

The difference is in the similarity. Nothing in Brooklyn changes during CMJ. Bedford Avenue is still a crowded mess and the bands dragging equipment down the street are a common sight on any weekend. That’s all that matters to these bands.

“These areas in Brooklyn feel like they’d be like this way all the time,” says Jonquil drummer Dom Hand. “It’s the true New York City experience.”

USA Today has a profile on Jane’s Carousel, which opened last month at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Take a virtual spin with their slideshow of photos.

Word, a bookstore in Greenpoint, got the New York Times treatment this weekend. The piece included a lovely photo slideshow of, you guessed it, books. Who knew words were so photogenic.

Did you hit any of the CMJ shows this weekend? If you missed it you might like the photos on Brooklyn Vegan.  Stay tuned for our story on CMJ from Jon Taylor.

JC Ortiz's tattoos incorporate his nautical and musical passions. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

For half the year JC Ortiz, 29, works on a fishing boat in Alaska. He spends the other half in Williamsburg, playing the banjo in his band, The Keeps.

Ortiz got his first tattoo three years ago in Chico, CA. He wanted a design that encompassed music as well as fishing. So he drew an anchor on a napkin with the rope in the shape of a treble clef.

When he took the napkin to a tattoo artist, he wasn’t expecting him to copy it straight from his drawing.

As a result, he says it’s a “bad tattoo.” Still he likes it because it reminds him of a “special time” in his life.

JC Ortiz's tattoo has a treble clef wrapped around an anchor, with the New Mexican Zia symbol on the base. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Ortiz’s got his most recent tattoo three months ago and it follows the same musical-nautical theme.

Spending as much time as he does at sea, he has a particular affinity with boats. They’re his home for long stretches of time. He had his tattooed ship’s sails decorated with symbols central in his life: the treble clef, the New Mexican Zia sun and a heart. Ortiz left two sails blank and called it his “heart vessel.”

See more of Brooklyn’s inked