WDDR FM, Your Song Dedication Station, Presents...4 U Fridays, Vol. 1: "We Gonna Make It", For My Lil Cuz Kate

Song: “We Gonna Make It”
Artist: Jadakiss featuring Styles P (and on the official remix, Eve)
Year: 2001

Salutations…This TGIF…From WDDR…Wudder FM, Your Special Dedication Station, Is A Shot Of Love Aimed Toward My Younger Cousin, Kathryn.

Last name Rhoads, like the matriarch we shared, our beloved Nana, who lived to be 98.

Kate is a Queens New York City resident, tech/acting/writing triple-threat.

The sole Ivy League graduate in our family history…with a degree in Biophysics?!?…for who knows what reason.

She and I share a unique bond, despite a significant age difference, and long geographical distance, as a nearly-book-ending pair of aspiring-and-occasionally-professional-creatives among eleven cousins.

Speaking of elevens, 9/11 is Kate’s birthday.

Which means long before she could drive (still barely can really, which might be why she stays speed-walking thru crowded city streets, navigating subway mazes in NY)…the date signifying her arrival was destined to become buried beneath the rubble, literal and figurative, of those who lost their lives, all those who caught shards of emotional shrapnel, as well as anybody else adjusting to the fallout from the aftershock.

Katie was just a kid at that time.

I was fresh-outta-college, for the first time flush with a heady combination of undeclared non-taxed cash tending bar, another on-the-books Guinness staff paycheck, an expense account, a company van, plus personal line of credit I’d later live to regret, living in a sprawling old Baltimore City row-home 2737 North Calvert Street for $250 monthly.

”We Gonna Make It” should have been the lead single that a rapper named Jadakiss, only a year or two older than me, from a Yonkers rap group called The Lox announcing their arrival on “It’s All About The Benjamins” alongside B.I.G., chose from his debut album, back in August 2001, a month before those planes hit.

The beat, cooked up by The Alchemist, is a sped-up, string-soaked, horn-stabbed, Samuel Johnathan Johnson sample, sounding wholly triumphant.

Shoulda/Woulda/Coulda been the film score for a conquering hero or heroine.

Soundscape for a grafted-gold-from-a-recently-discovered-olde-mine, classic.

But Def Jam Records instead went with a Neptunes-produced piece of turn-of-the-century fast food called “Knock Yourself Out”, while also making sure Jada got on the radio remix for “Heard It All Before”, a one-hit-wonder R&B smash by a woman named Sunshine Anderson nobody heard from again like Ruff Endz.

I can still hear the latter’s beat/melody/hook inside my head, without being sure it’s had contact with my ears, any time or anywhere, during the entire 2010’s.

I heard “We Gonna Make It” a few times pushing that van around, but not nearly as much as I heard the other two, or even City High’s “What Would You Do?”

Who knows what Kathryn was listening to between Y2K and 9/11.

We didn’t really know each other very well back then.

Kids weren’t welcome in the Fells Point spot yours truly tended bar in, nor did I need any company besides an AM/FM radio (a tape deck or CD player in a van in ‘03 woulda just been greedy) while riding around the DMV, in a company van, making sure all accounts had sufficient amounts of Guinness point-of-sale merchandising.

Whenever I did see Kate over holidays…she, her big sister Laura, plus cousin Sarah, spent time sneaking away to print anti-smoking statistics with scary graphics, stashing into my dresser drawers, underneath my pillow, or glove compartment of my ’86 Volvo GLE, in hopes that upon later discovery those black-lunged-skull-and-crossbones pics, filled with dire medical prognostications, might someday lead to cigarette cessation.

Unlike my then-Pre-Med-Major, future-surgeon Baby Sis, they either weren’t old, or familiar enough, to understand the psychology of their prospective patient.

So like everybody else in our extended family, Kate grew up enough to fall back from that attack, and began patiently waiting like 50 Cent and Eminem. 

I’d been off bogues (a term of nicotine affection all my DAWGS know) for nine days at the time of this header photo, taken on June 15th, 2017.

Kate, Laura, and myself, had just left Nana at one of her last rehabilitation spots.

When news of nine-days-no-ciggies didn’t get much reaction from our grandmother, it finally dawned on me that 100 was a number she wouldn’t see.

I slumped out of the room, holding it together until reaching the front door of the facility, where I ran headlong into my Aunt Patty.

She sent the rest of her family ahead, re-routing to walk back outside with me.

After that, my memory, like articulation at the time, or vision in my eyes, gets blurry.

My lungs recently received a reprieve, but somehow it felt harder than ever to breathe.

Eventually gathering myself, Kate and I hopped into Laura’s car, while everything around South Jersey somehow now looked like places I’d never before seen.

This picture was taken when we pulled off to the side of the road somewhere.

Kate probably doesn’t even know who Jadakiss is, not only because turn-of-Y2K NYC street rap ain’t something kids were playing around her way in Moorestown NJ, but because she’s one of the only millennial/gen-z people alive who doesn’t have any music-streaming apps on her phone, nor logs on social-media to make opinions known.

But in addition to sharing grandparents among 11 of us cousins in our generation, we share the decidedly less applauded family tradition of being artists.

Less applauded, since nobody in our family ever fed the collective we, or even the singular me, purely off creativity.

Still, as far back as we can trace, some strain of this virus, in acting called ‘the bug’, in writing better known as ‘the itch’, has been present.

Whether it be our Uncle John, the world’s first Navy nuclear submarine veteran-turned-2010’s-sexagenarian-stand-up comedian.

Or his older sister, our Aunt Ellen, who used to shake her tail-feather on a then-local-Philadelphia TV program called American Bandstand, and also met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, while according to family legend appeared on The Love Boat.

But long before camera-phones, those Rat Pack photos never made the address she gave the photographers to send home, while none of her nieces or nephews have patience to sift thru approximately 250 or so Love Boat episodes in hopes of spotting Aunt Ellen.

My cousin Kate is the only one who has officially ever actually acted on TV.

Unless you count that inspired spiel I gave in a live post-show interview exiting 2013’s BET Experience in LA at Club Nokia, but that’s more effervescent reacting.

This bug-itch goes back as far as our great-grandfather working the Boardwalk Empire of Atlantic City hotels to pay the rent, while an aspiring early movie thespian.

Great granddad like Nana lived to see 98, outliving his only son, who exited earlier due to cancer via asbestos exposure working for Owens-Corning.

Pragmatism plus familial love, in wanting to ensure a baseline of middle-class existence to provide protection, lives within us.

As does our family tree, documented with exceptionally strong genetic resiliency, especially if we try to avoid polluting our personal air space with toxins.

But so too does a burning desire to create…as an artist, while possibly armed with enough intelligence, authenticity, and ability to actually do it.

So I say all that to say this…to KATE, ME, or anybody else among the less-than-royal WE, including absolutely anybody chasing dreams others may not yet see…

Whenever wandering into your own mental wilderness…which sometimes becomes shrouded in self-doubt or fear, let Alchemist’s soundscape be that heroic theme music you hear, with Jadakiss’ mantra in your head ringing, like a fist to your ear…

“WE.GON.MAKE.IT.
WE GON MAKE IT!
WE GON MAKE IT!”

Things can and will flip…just try to stay focused and patient.