Gabe Killian.
Last summer, TheBurg published a profile of the Harrisburg-based rapper Gabe Killian, who goes by the stage name Capeesh. At the time, Killian was living in a dingy apartment building uptown, recording music in a home studio and raising a one-year-old son. Ambitious and self-promoting—he regularly posted about his songs on social media, often seeming preoccupied with who truly supported him—Killian nevertheless found that fatherhood and the lack of any breakout success were slowing him down. “I just feel drained a lot of the times,” he said.
Two months later, he got baptized. He hadn’t been planning on it, but his first Father’s Day as a dad had moved him deeply. “It was a profound experience, after having a son, for me to know that somebody gave up their son, knowing he was gonna die a painful death, just so we could have our kids,” he said. The ceremony took place in the Susquehanna, behind his parents’ home in Dauphin, not far from where his father had helped the Pennsylvania activist Gene Stilp install a replica Statue of Liberty. Being submerged in the water, Killian said, didn’t produce any instant transformation—his main feeling was recognition of the commitment he’d made. He thought, “Man, now I gotta live up to what I just did.”
At first, that commitment seemed to make him doubt his prior music. He felt suddenly accountable for every word he wrote. He worried about being a hypocrite, and about whether his songs promoted anything sinful. For several months, he stopped writing. But then, in January, a friend of his asked if he’d ever written about addiction. She was struggling with a heroin addiction, and she told him if he wrote something about it she would play it at her rehab center.
In fact, Killian had wanted to write on the topic for a while. In the summer of 2013, a friend of his died of a heroin overdose. “When I got the phone call, I was like, ‘I didn’t even know she was using heroin. That blows my mind,’” he said. She was the closest friend he’d lost to drug abuse, but she wasn’t the first. He had started to feel the presence of an “interconnected system”—a “very intricate and very smart network of people who are all hurting and doing a substance,” he said. “And if nobody in that realm stands up and says, ‘We gotta stop, you know, we’re losing people left and right,’ then it’s just gonna keep spreading, and it’s perpetual, you know?”
After speaking to the friend, Killian sat down one evening and wrote a new song. Called “Hero Over Heroin,” the track is a kind of rallying cry directed at current addicts, urging them to quit before it’s too late. “Be a hero over heroin and drive it out, or any other thing that tries to tie you down,” he pleads in the refrain. As in many of his earlier songs, the verses are packed with internal rhymes; at one point, he raps he’s “seen daughters lose fathers, and fathers lose daughters, couldn’t tell you who’s harder, doesn’t change who’s slaughtered.”
A few weeks ago, Killian invited me over to hear it. A lot in his life had changed since we’d last spoke. He’d moved out of the uptown apartment to a house in New Cumberland, after a dumpster fire started by some kids near his building had convinced him it was time to leave. He’d also gotten full custody of his son, Ryden, who is now two years old. He played the song for me in his new basement studio, where his speakers and monitor are set up next to a poster of Einstein.
“I think it’s gonna bring a lot of people to tears,” he said. “This isn’t, like, an elaborate plan to make a viral video. It’s like—it needs to happen. People are dying left and right.” Last September, the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative research agency, released a report on what it called an epidemic of heroin and opioid abuse. Reliable data are hard to come by; one survey of 43 Pennsylvania counties by the state coroners’ association found that heroin deaths climbed from 47 in 2009 to 124 in 2013. Another study, appearing in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2013, found an increase in the percentage of users of both heroin and prescription painkillers who had started by abusing the latter. “At the bottom of the line, it’s the pharmaceutical industry,” Killian said. “You shouldn’t make something that is that addictive a medicine.”
“Hero Over Heroin” features two voices besides Killian’s. One is Keya Wilson, a local singer, whose vocals on the refrain soar over the bass floor set down by Killian’s rapping. The other is his mother, a music teacher, who lends a wordless, haunting melody towards the track’s end. “She’s amazing,” Killian told me, adding that, musically, his mother “can do pretty much anything she wants to do.”
When we met up, Killian was in the midst of a many-pronged promotional campaign. He started a GoFundMe page to raise money for better sound engineering and a music video, and later dropped hints about an upcoming release on his Facebook page. He was also trying to get the song into the hands of lawmakers, district attorneys and health officials, on the theory that they might want to use it to connect with people needing treatment in their campaigns. (Among the lawmakers he sent it to was Rep. Mike Regan, a member of the York County Heroin Task Force; a spokeswoman said Regan “hopes the positive message of his rap song reaches others who are under the curse of addiction.”)
I asked Killian whether, for a rapper, the kind of official endorsement he was seeking might be a double-edged sword. “I don’t fear the system,” he began. “They could step on me at any moment.” He’d taken the question as asking whether he feared retribution from vested interests. I clarified—did he worry that the wrong kind of endorsement would turn his song into something like a public service announcement? “If that’s what it took, sure,” he said. “If that’s where I was meant to go in life, I would certainly do it. Because either way, I’m affecting people with my work, doing what I love.”
You can learn more about Killian’s music on his ReverbNation page. If you’re looking for a copy of “Hero Over Heroin,” you can listen to it or purchase it for download here.
