Do you think that because you’re blind, your ability to hear or distinguish sounds is better than that of sighted people?īLIND FURY: I don’t think it’s inherent like that. Once I figured out I could do that, I would just impress all of my friends and family by just playing Nintendo songs, which then turned into me learning real songs. So I can hear things and immediately pick them up and play them. Honestly, I’m lucky that I have an ear with near-perfect pitch.

When I was younger, my cousins would be playing the game on their NES and when they got to the little castle stage, there would be this little jingle or sound bite that would play.Īnd that music, it just sounded so dope to me. How did you originally start learning piano? Who got you into it and did you have a teacher?īLIND FURY: I think it was the first Super Mario Brothers that influenced me to start playing piano. Personally, I think that it’s really kind of boring trying to learn to play piano rap songs, so I eventually got into jazz, classic rock, country, and other genres as well.Ī young visually impaired fan meeting Fury for the first time. However, I typically liked to venture off into other music because I play piano a lot. Dre would incorporate all these different sounds from old school bands and samples, whereas East Coast rap was just all boom, boom, bap, ba-boom, boom, bap. West Coast music and southern music had a lot of guitars, a lot of 808s, and I was really fascinated by bass drops even back then. I tried to stay well-rounded and think I listened to more West Coast back then because G-funk was the thing, and it was very musical. I listened to a lot of West Coast hip-hop back then. Once I saw resistance from adults – people who weren’t necessarily against rap or hip-hop, I was like, “I can get in trouble for this and I like it.” Which rappers or groups were the biggest inspiration for you growing up?īLIND FURY: A lot of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, a lot of Scarface, a lot of Busta Rhymes, a lot of Cypress Hill. I liked it.īack then, you didn’t want your three-year-old, four-year-old kid listening to 2 Live Crew and Snoop Dogg.

It was a lot of yelling, a lot of cursing, and a lot of 808 beats, and things I’d never heard before, so I thought that it sounded really cool. How and when did you start rapping?īLIND FURY: I think how I really got started with rap was just listening to it, being around it, and realizing it was something that I probably shouldn’t have been a part of as a three-year-old boy from South Carolina.

Since starting in the rap game, Blind Fury has released several albums, including Gifted The E.P, Young and Gifted Always, and most recently, his new album, Ferda. He rose to fame during his 2003 appearance on the live Rocafella MC battle on MTV.Īlthough Blind Fury has a spine defect called Spina-Bifida and is blind, he doesn’t let his lack of vision get in the way of his craft. Stephen Norris, better known as Blind Fury, is a hip-hop recording artist and skilled MC battle rapper who originally hails from Camden, South Carolina. << Return to all “Faces Behind the Screen” stories Part One

Blind fury