FiGS was born and raised in Rochester, N.Y.’s eastside and he comes with a story all too familiar in hiphop biographies. At 7 years old, his dad left him, his mother, sister and five brothers. A few years later, he and his best friend had graduated from playing with guns to selling weed and running drugs in the neighborhood....... By 12, shorties, basketball and hiphop had become the center of his life. Late nights were spent listening to hiphop masterpieces like Nas’ “Illmatic” and Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.”....... “I studied hip hop before I started to spit. People were like you should spit. I was like, ‘No, you’ve got to understand it before you do it.’ That’s the kind of shit I was on,” says FiGS....... At the age of 13, the same time FiGS was becoming a serious student of hiphop, he bought his first rap tape: Method Man’s “Tical” album. From there it was Keith Murray, Big L, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim and KRS-One. Hiphop had become his life’s soundtrack....... “Hiphop is just everything I grew up with. It’s real: my growing up, my family, my life,” says FiGS....... A close brush with death at the age of 15 and the return of his father began to give FiGS a new perspective. He became starting point guard on the high school basketball team and graduated with the 11th highest grade point average in his school. His academic prowess and athleticism gained him a full scholarship to the University of Rochester....... But higher education wasn’t just about getting a degree....... Freshman year, FiGS began to freestyle. By the time summer hit, his day became a study in halves: a 9-to-5 job during the day and the other 12 hours were spent writing, making beats and flowing. The first paid the bills; the latter fueled his passion....... During his sophomore year, while listening to beats FiGS and a classmate had made on a computer, FiGS was told to flow over the track. From his lips came the lyrics from the Mobb Deep song, “Just Step (Prelude),” off there 1995 album “The Infamous.”....... After FiGS finished, his classmates told him that he should think about being an emcee himself. For FiGS, it was a natural matriculation—going from fan to emcee....... “It went from becoming an idea to an obsession,” remembers FiGS. “We’d be up for two days straight just writing and rhyming, walking around, going to parties, just spitting.”....... FiGS began working on his rap style, which he now calls “intelligent, real, raw hip hop with a twist of lyricism.” His music influences include Nas (“Conceptually, he’s a genius, lyrically, he’s a beast and he’s able to voice his surroundings in such a way that it becomes real.”); Big L (“He’s one of the real freestylers.”); Slick Rick (“His storytelling ability and his presence on a mic…”); and Biggie (“Just cause you can tell that when he came on the scene, he was raw talent. He was the type who would rap about the nastiest shit ever but made you love it the way he presented it.”). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.