Fashawn

It’s fair to say that Santiago Leyva had it rough when he was growing up. His father was incarcerated soon after he was born, and his mother was struggling with a serious drug addiction for most of his early childhood. At the age of eight he and his sister were placed in a group home before going to live with their Uncle John, who took them in and was the father figure that both Leyva kids desperately needed at the time. Like many working class kids going through rough times, Santiago turned to hip-hop as an outlet, writing his first lyrics at the same age that he was put in the group home. By the age of 12, writing and rapping was all that the young Santiago was interested in, and he began building up a reputation for himself around the California hip-hop scene.

He debuted in 2006 with his first mixtape “Grizzly City”, a tape so acclaimed in his local scene that a fellow M.C by the name of Planet Asia invited him on tour because of it. Knowing an opportunity when he saw it, he dropped out of high school to do the tour and spent the next three years touring and releasing a series of ever more acclaimed mixtapes. This lead to a record deal with One Records, and his first studio album came out in 2009. “Boy Meets World”, like all of his releases up to this point, was massively acclaimed, earning him a spot on XXL Magazine’s Top 10 Freshmen list in March 2010. 2012 saw him and Murs team up to release a collaboration album with “This Generation” but 2014 was the year that could quite easily propel him into stardom.

Hip-hop legend Nas had been a vocal fan of Fashawn for some time, and in June 2014, the news broke that he’d been signed to Nas’ label Mass Appeal Records. If Fashawn had any doubters prior to that, they were well and truly silenced, doubly so when his second album “The Ecology” dropped in 2015. Fashawn is an artist with critical acclaim, commercial success and the approval of legends like Nas, Ghostface Killah and Murs. He also comes with a live show that can blow the roof off any venue that holds it, and for that reason, he comes highly recommended.