Donnie Wahlberg - Musical Roots

I remember when I first started hearing rap music, I was like, in the fourth grade. And if I wasn't in the school I was, I probably wouldn't have been exposed to it. But I was in that school, and that's what the kids were listening to, and that's what i grew up on. And I loved it. My musical roots are in rap music and heavy metal music, because my brothers Artie and Paul listened to heavy metal. Artie loved Led Zepplin, Paul loved AC/DC. Artie really influenced me musically, 'cause he hipped me to the radio and all the music that I started to love, which even thn they were playing a lot of on the radio. It was good music.

But the kids in school were listening to rap and so was I. People sometimes say, "Oh, what does this white kid know about rap?" Well, what do they know about what I know about rap? That's what was in my face every day, hip hop music and I loved hip hop music, y'know? I groove off hip hop music, I appreciate hip hop music. That started way back in elementary school.

And the first time I heard a rap, I wrote a rap. The first one I wrote wasn't really about anything, it was just rap. Me and my brother did it, me and my little brother Mark wrote a rap. We just really stole the idea of "Rapper's Delight," which was the first big commercial rap song. We stole the names and changed them a little, it was funny.

I remember one called "The Ronald Reagan Rap" - that was the first real song I wrote. It was like five pages long, and I used to know it by heart. I still know a lot of it.

I always liked doing rap, writing rap or just writing rhymes, writing poetry, expressing myself through words, doing it lyrically. Whether I used it in a rock song, a folk song, or a rap song, it's just expressing myself through music.

I didn't buy too many records. The first record I bought, it was like crazy. Maurice Starr's brother's album, Space Cowboy by the Jonzon Crew. And it was before I met him. But it was crazy because I went up to the record store and I looked at these albums, and I was stuck between New Edition and the Jonzon Crew. I was discovering a connection, though, 'cause reading the album covers I kept seeing the name, Maurice Starr, on both albums. And then I saw Maurice Starr's album.

I was in a band when I was about eleven or something. That was called Risk and it was just and my friends, banging on the drums, and guitars and harmonicas in the garage. Me, Billy, Eric, and Jamie. But sometimes we did something and recorded it on cassette and it would come out good, it would come out kinda interesting.

But we weren't doing it because we thought we'd be famous. It was just fun. I was always doin' things like that, though. If I found a tape recorder, I would talk on it a lot. I always had a good imagination. When I played army, I played army - I didn't play around. I got really into it. I mean I wouldn't have all the equipment and stuff, but I believed what I was doing.

I got into Michael Jackson in the ninth grade. At first, I wasn't as into Michael Jackson as I had people believin', but it brought so much attention to me - the girls, the girls would always come up to me. His Thriller album was real popular at the time. I had sixty-five buttons and at least four hundred posters of him; pictures all over all four walls of my bedroom. See the fans today, they think they got their walls covered, but they couldn't hang with what I had of Michael Jackson. I had a "Beat It" jacket, t-shirts, hats. I used to wear loafers, dress just like him, with what I could. See, that was the thing, I didn't have money, so I didn't have the resources, so I took my father's loafers. I imitated the moves, I did the moonwalk, but I didn't sing.

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