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Artist
invrse, also known as Steven Nguyen was born into a Vietnamese family in the Regent Park projects in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He led a very hard life, baking and selling crack cocaine with his crew at the tender age of 4 and a half. On his sixth birthday his father died, middle of his life. A family friend, Lenny Chilelli helped out his mother, but he had a little daughter to raise so his sustenance couldn’t carry on for long. Shortly after his seventh birthday, Steven was in deep with many gangsters and gangbangers so him and his mother and brother were forced to hide off the map, in a small Brazilian community. They escaped under the cover of fire that Lenny had set to throw the gangbangers off, saying the Nguyen family had burned up in the blaze. Once in the small Brazilian community Steven heard the trancelike beat of the local samba squads, deriving their rhythms from Caribbean style drumming. Unlike Neal Peart of Rush, Steven did not become a world renowned drummer. Though the interest continued as he lived in the villa, it grew exponentially when his family migrated to Philadelphia when Steven was 11. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Steven’s love for Caribbean beats gravitated him towards a whole other kind of beat. The urban beat. His heritage from the Toronto projects really propelled his emcee skill. He had taken the name Ikon the Verbal Hologram as his street name for his rapping. Taking inspiration from other Philly underground rappers like Apathy, Celph Titled