By Stephen Cooney

The powder blue walls, spotlights and raised balcony reinforce the aurora of formal theater and classical concerts. The Jeanne Rimsky Theater is not the common setting for a Hip-Hop concert. Attached to the Land Mark on Main Street in Port Washington Long Island, it is far from the city and even further removed from urban culture. On Feb.14 it was forced into a Hip-Hop role and housed several underground artists.

Tai Lee Ashante walks into the theater past the security guards and straight to the small kitchen doubling as a dressing room. The room is crowded with other opening acts and there are still several hours before the curtain lifts and the show begins.

Ashante does not say much he watches the room, talks quietly to his cousin and then disappears out to the seating area of the theater. He watches the stage and his white fitted is stitched in large letters with his stage name No Gimmicks. “Just Hip-Hop” is stitched across the back.

“There is never part time with him. He is Hip-Hop.” fellow rapper and colleague from Hofstra University Rick Schwartz said. “That is what is special-he is real. There are a lot of gimmicks out there. His name is real cause that is what he is-Hip-Hop all the time.”

No Gimmicks music plays over the speakers and as the dark blue curtain is pulled to the side he walks onstage with nothing but a microphone in his hand and lyrics memorized in his head. Tai rolls through his first song, a catchy mellow beat with a T-Pain hook, and right into his second song. With only eight minutes of stage time there is no time to waste, and he needs as much time on stage as possible.

As the curtain closes he thanks the miniscule crowd for listening and tells them to listen to the rest of his music on myspace. The curtain falls and he moves out to a seat in the front row. There are still more acts and in his eight minutes on stage he managed to relay his name and enforce its meaning with nothing but music and lyrics.

Ashante embraces Hip-Hop and has been rapping since he first started on a Tennessee street corner when he was 13-years-old. Traveling the globe as the member of a military family he turned to writing music as a way to pass time. Now it is beginning to shape into a career for the budding young artist.

“I don’t like to be boxed in to one thing. It is greater than just being gangstas, it is greater than just being a thug or pimping and playing. It is not about that.” Ashante said. “It is more what you bring to the table as a gift to give others to listen to so they can be inspired.”

For the last year Ashante has been honing his gift in various different outlets. Every Tuesday he takes the Stage at Mental Supreme’s Pyramid Training Camp in the Lower East side of Manhattan and has continued to grow as both a lyricist and a performer. Before taking the stage at the training camp Ashante was rapping in open mic and small hip-hop concerts on campus and has improved drastically in the last few months.

“He is working a lot harder now.” Schwarz said. ” A few weeks ago at the Pyramid when I was there he had the whole crowd just listening and watching him. He is very interesting and people want to hear what he has to say.

People want to listen because Ashante’s lyrics cover a variety of topics and he is always trying to incorporate new styles and topics into his music. “When I do my music I have club songs and I also have songs for the sophisticated mind.” Ashante said. “Some of my songs sound like they are falling in the same category as the rest of them. Songs about guns and shooting everything up and retaliate and violence but I do that to get to a moral at the end. You really have to listen to the whole song to get to the moral.”

“I look at it from a poetic standpoint because those elements are involved when you write music.” Ashante said. “When I am in the processs of creating a song I look at it like how am I going to approach getting the meaning across the best way. I have to be able to convey the message and you have to be able to say it with a Hip-Hop swag.”

Ashante has a swag on the stage and he manages to keep it to his music. He embraces Hip-Hop and makes sure that it is the Hip-Hop he is representing in his music, holding true to his name: No Gimmicks-Just Hip-Hop.