What were you doing when you were 17? For a lot of us, we were just getting started—finishing up high school, figuring out what was next: Maybe college, maybe a job, maybe a few years spent debating between the two.
Things are a little different for 17-year-old rapper Token, who’s got some of the speediest rhymes this side of a young Busta. He’s already tackled a lifetime of adversity and lived to tell the tale. Not only that, but he’s lived to rap about it in pretty insane fashion.
For producer Jon Glass, Token’s talents have been self-evident for a while now. Glass first met Token when he was 13 and was blown away at how he was “someone so young with so much confidence and determination.” That confidence didn’t come easy, though—not by a long shot. Token had already been through a battery of neurological and psychological tests to try and address his issues with anxiety, depression, and even a little childhood obesity to boot.
But that’s where the determination Glass spoke of came into play. The first issue Token tackled was his weight. While many spend months and years trying to figure how to drop the pounds, Token’s solution was pretty simple: “I would just run and run and run until I couldn’t anymore,” he says. “It was the first moment that I decided that if I put my mind to something that I could get it done.” And get it done he did: Token wound up dropping a whopping 50 pounds.
That sort of mindset started to take hold in other areas. Though doctors had previously been concerned about Token’s language skills, he dove deep into one area that gave him a real outlet: writing. And that writing already had a true singularity of purpose: to become a rapper.
Fast forward to 2016. Token is now 17 years old and has been honing his rap skills for going on 5 years. Not only that, but he recently landed himself a pretty influential fan: rapper/producer/VJ/DJ extraordinaire Sway, who finally gave Token his shot at taking his rhymes to a wider audience.
You can see how the rest of the story plays out in the latest episode of Uncharted up above, presented by Honda.
