Ozay Moore

Ozay Moore, 42, is a hip-hop artist, DJ and founder and executive director of All of the Above Hip Hop Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides hip-hop-related classes, workshops and performance opportunities for local youth. He also co-founded 2019’s Below the Stacks mural festival, which resulted in the creation of 11 murals on buildings throughout Lansing. He grew up in Seattle and lived in Portland, Oregon, for a short time before moving to Lansing to start a family in 2006.

Tell me about the work you do at All of the Above.

Essentially, we center the core tenants of hip-hop culture — breaking, graffiti art, DJing, emceeing and knowledge — and create spaces for youth, the community and our practitioners to learn from each other. Youth are learning about the whole spectrum of where hip-hop has been, where it’s come up out of. We’re giving that context to younger people, and then younger people are able to speak to where hip-hop is going. We’re teaching them, but we’re also having great conversations around personal development, youth development, community development, vocational pathways, education, activism and being a mindful community member. We really leverage hip-hop culture to kind of do all of the above, hence the name. We’re one part cultural preservation, another part skill training, and then also just trying to support the forward and upward mobility of hip-hop culture and the people who represent it in our community.

Do you have any big plans or goals for All of the Above?

This year, All of the Above will have its first home base. I mean, we’ve had a home base at the Lansing Public Media Center for about four years now, but it was more like an office that we utilized as a teaching space and classroom. A lot of the work we’ve done over the last decade has been intentionally mobile because Lansing doesn’t have any specific place where people hang out — there’s not one location where youth and teens go to spend time outside of school. The goal has always been to meet the youth where they’re at. And it feels like this year, we’re going to be able to house a lot of what we do under one roof, which is really exciting.

What do you enjoy about working with youth?

I like to be constantly learning and being challenged to grow as an artist, but also just as a community member. Having such close proximity to young, creative minds and young, creative people, and then establishing this respect that goes both ways, I love being in that space. The fact that we’re able to be intentional about fostering an environment where young people feel appreciated and whole and seen and validated but also feel like they’re getting support to be and produce and become what they want to be in the arts and in the community, I love that.

Tell me about your music. Are you working on any projects right now?

Music has always been a part of my life. It’s kind of had different places at different seasons of my life. But in this particular season, I have a project that I’m working on with my brother-in-law Sareem Poems and producer Daniel Steele. That’s been kind of a slow build. A few years ago, I put out a project with Tall Black Guy on Coalmine Records, which did really well. It was great. I felt like the pandemic provided a lot of material and things to talk about, and we were able to put it out on record. I’m also getting contracted to do a piece for ESPN through Hulu. It’s a breaking documentary where we’re going to be creating original music for the project, so that’s really exciting.

How did you get involved in making murals?

I’m one of those people that has dabbled in a lot of things. I came up in a hip-hop community where if you rapped, you were probably also breaking or DJing or doing graffiti. So, I’ve always drawn, and I’ve always done graffiti art. I had some mentors who were active graffiti artists. There’s this exchange where graffiti artists, when they meet each other, they exchange books and draw their piece in there. Over the years, I’ve collected a lot of different signatures and tags and work from folks. It helped me develop my own. The only reason I know how to do murals now is because I’ve had years of dabbling, but my dabbling is always through a pretty critical lens. As an artist, I’m hypercritical about what I do. I’m forever a student, forever trying to grow.

What else do you like to do in your free time? I see on your Instagram that you’re a coffee nerd.

I guess I’m a coffee nerd, but I try not to be pretentious about it. I’m not above some Folgers. Whether I’m using a Hario V60 or a Kalita Wave or a Chemex or whatever, the process is kind of meditative — just slowing down and calculating the measurements and weighing the beans and tasting what comes out of this slower process. Having a lot of interests tends to make for a pretty busy schedule, but brewing coffee allows me to slow down a little bit.

 — NICOLE NOECHEL