From rap battles to viral superstardom
PV senior doubles followers after rap goes viral
May 22, 2017
Tyler DiLorenzo and his friends, Rob Arloro and Joe Kempka, pose, imagining DiLorenzo’s future fame. DiLorenzo is an amateur rapper who has recently released his first full length song on SoundCloud.
Fourth graders’ Tyler DiLorenzo and Rita Kochakian laugh at what the other says, spitting out lyric after lyric, battling each other.
DiLorenzo never thought that his childhood hobby would one day become a talent that would gain him hundreds of fans on social media.
PV senior, DiLorenzo, began rapping seriously when his friends encouraged him to start an Instagram account this past December to share this skill. Before that, DiLorenzo never thought of actually pursuing anything with rapping. However, after constantly freestyling, both he and his friends began to realize his talent.
“Last year, my friends and I started freestyling a lot,” DiLorenzo said. “We were pretty bad at first, but as we got better my friends kept telling me that I had a talent, so I decided to start sharing my rapping.”
DiLorenzo uses Instagram as his main outlet for sharing his raps and recently began to post original songs on SoundCloud. He tries to post a new rap every Sunday.
“At first, I made my page private just for my friends thinking it was not going to go anywhere, but my page just grew and more and more people wanted to listen to my raps,” he said.
DiLorenzo looks up to Russ the Rapper who is not signed but still has millions of fans on his Youtube account.
“Russ is an influential figure in my rapping career– he is a really good rapper and I want to get my music to his point,” Dilorenzo said. “He started off doing what I did, posting raps every week, and he just kept going and doing his own thing and building his own fan base.”
Additionally, DiLorenzo played guitar his whole life and he can play piano which carries over when he makes his own beats on the computer.
DiLorenzo mainly posts raps on his page that he believes people will be connected to. He writes all his raps himself with his own beats or beats found online.
“I want to rap something that would be influential in the future,” DiLorenzo said. “The more I grow as an artist, the more experience I get, the more issues I can concentrate on.”
DiLorenzo’s most famous rap, opening him to hundreds of new fans, was the rap he wrote about his friend, Jack Farrell, who passed away in November. This gained him a lot of popularity as many people, including Farrell’s mom, shared the rap on their personal social media accounts.
This rap doubled the amount of Instagram followers he had in one day. Today, that rap still has the most views on his account.
Kochakian, a longtime friend and supporter of DiLorenzo, was especially touched by that rap as she was good friends with Jack Farrell. She shared the rap on her own Instagram account.
“Tyler’s rap about Jack touched so many people, and it expressed how everyone was feeling perfectly,” Kochakian said. “Tyler is the guy who always knows the right thing to say.”
DiLorenzo is now striving to write full songs instead of short raps. He dropped his first song on March 11 on SoundCloud and plans to upload a song every month. In addition to the videos on Instagram, he also has one original hip hop and rap song on his SoundCloud which he posted in April called “Too Late”.
DiLorenzo does not plan to have a career as a rapper but if he ends up making an income from his talents, he would be happy to become a rapper full time. To get to the professional standard of many of the famous rappers out there today, DiLorenzo improves by continuously practicing by himself or with his friends.
“Keep doing it,” DiLorenzo said. “Every time me and my friends hang out, we freestyle. The more we do it, the more our vocabulary expands, and the better we get.”
Dilorenzo committed to Quinnipiac University for this upcoming school year where he plans to use its studio and meet with the producers there. In addition, he has about ten song ideas that he plans to pursue in college once he gains access to the professional recording studio with a producer.
“I feel like Tyler is going to be one of those kids who becomes famous one day,” Kochakian said. “He has a natural talent. If you ask Tyler to stand right in front of you right now and rap something, he could do it.”