Hip Hop Music Festival Gets Windsorites Feeling The Beat

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Deana Botton performs live spray paint art at the Hip Hop festival.

Live graffiti, Hip Hop dancing, spray paint art and much more awaited guests at Windsor’s First ever Hip Hop Festival at Atkinson Park.

Organized in just a month’s time, Clarissa Guyton said she and her fellow organizers have treated this year’s event like a trial run and are hoping for even bigger things next year. Guyton said the point of the event is to bring a positive light on the Hip Hop culture.

“Right now in the media you see a lot of negativity when it comes to hip-hop,” said Guyton. “We just wanted to promote positive aspects of hip-hop culture, the community coming together. It’s an all ages event. We literally have grandma’s and babies here. It’s all about promoting and preserving hip-hop culture and the positive aspects of that.”

Guyton, a social worker by trade, is currently employed at Windsor Regional Hospital. She said while music may not be her full time career, it holds a very special place in her heart and this event was her way of being more involved in a music-related atmosphere.

“I’ve always had music in me, ever since I was little,” said Guyton. “I’ve always been singing, I’ve always been memorizing all the lyrics, music is just within me, it’s part of me. I always wanted to do something with music and it may not be my fulltime job, but it’s definitely a huge part of me and it’s all about love.”

Art and music isn’t always a part of someone from birth. But still, even for artists like Deana Botton who’s only been creating art for a year, art and music are forms of expression, and Botton certainly attracted a crowd with her spray paint art.

“I taught myself [spray paint art] by watching videos on YouTube and learning from artists there,” said Botton. “I saw a flyer on Facebook and they were still looking for artists and vendors so I asked if this was something they would be interested in. Today has been a lot of fun, I’ve done just two so far. I want to try to sell at least five.”

The event was made possible through the community support, sponsorships and out of pocket expenses which were covered by the organizers themselves. Guyton said they just wanted to do anything they could to help the community in a positive way, especially with all the negative stories often heard on a day-to-day basis.

“Hip Hop is something from very within,” said Guyton. “The roots of it all started with emotion and getting out the frustrations of everything they were dealing with. So they got in the streets and got the DJ’s going, they were dancing and rapping … so it’s an emotional thing, it’s way of expression, it’s a culture, it’s so much more than just rap music. There’s so many different elements to hip hop, it’s a love, it’s s culture, it’s an internal thing for sure … Seek out the positive aspects of it, don’t just look at the mainstream, don’t just look at the surface, it’s so much deeper than that. It’s s culture, respect it.”