An artist is ultimately about an experience imparted to the audience. A friend makes you feel good and supports you. Local rapper Adrine Collins, a.k.a. Young Preach, is both.
I do not remember exactly when I met Adrine at my church, Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern, but I approached him strictly as a journalist. At this point, I would be dishonest not to call him a friend. I have watched him, with his laptop, perform numerous times at Dave’s, and he is as enthusiastic about my work as I am about his.
But what about the experience Adrine imparts as an artist? His stage name, Young Preach, hints at how it began. He is a man of testimony and of God.
“I had a fallout with one of my roommates, and then with a girl that I used to talk to, and then a situation with my family,” he said.
“And it was just like everything (was) just broken down with me. And just like everything — I held so much stuff in. And after college didn’t go well, it just felt like, ‘Well, what I am gonna do now?’ So I looked toward faith, and I started, you know what I’m saying, using my ability, and I started writing down all my thoughts from the anger and the pain that was done to me. A lot of people did a lot of stuff to me. So I held it in. I never said nothing back because I was afraid. I’ll be honest to say, I was afraid. But following, you know, having the faith that I got, I was stronger, so I began to relieve my thoughts on my paper instead of fighting with my hands.”
 

The Uncool Kid
Since fourth grade, Adrine wrote poetry but kept it hidden, even when he thought he wrote a good rhyme. He was raised in the country before he moved to Meridian with his mother, brother and little sister.
“Things didn’t go like I thought they were going to go. I thought I was going to have a lot of good friends,” he said.
A diminutive figure wearing glasses, he was treated “very cruelly” starting in the sixth grade. This treatment put Adrine on a miserable path.
“I started believing what they was telling me,” he said. “That I would never be nothing, and that, you know what I’m saying, ‘You suck’ and all that type of thing, and ‘You nerd’ and everything cause I was short. I was defenseless.”
He had many thoughts about suicide. The situation worsened when his cousin shot and killed himself.
“I still to this day don’t know why he did it,” he said.
Adrine had a somewhat religious background. His family emphasized the Bible and prayer but didn’t attend church regularly. After his cousin committed suicide, he prayed to God to make him the coolest. This prayer, he said, opened up a door for the Devil. In 10th grade, he joined a gang for payback against his enemies.
“It was like, ‘Mess with me now,'” he said.
People still took him lightly, though. This was perfectly illustrated by the fact that he had a gun, but hid it in one of his friend’s backyards. Adrine knew he wasn’t being himself, getting by with the Lord’s mercy.
“I always just felt like God was with me,” he said.
After he graduated high school, one of his oldest brother’s friends talked to him about moving to Starkville. At 17, Adrine decided to be the friend’s roommate and go to East Mississippi Community College. Things didn’t go as well as he planned. He struggled with temptation in Starkville (and continues to be extremely aware of it — I witnessed this late one night).
“When I got up here, I started drinking and partying, and I wasn’t focused, I didn’t have a goal. What was I going to do?” he said.
He only attended EMCC for one year. Then the aforementioned problems with his roommate, a girl and his family stacked up. These factors led Adrine to what he calls the most religious point of his life. He started going to church regularly and making promises to God.
 

Young Preach
Adrine also started taking rap seriously, becoming Young Preach (Lil’ Raw, his ridiculous first stage name, was quickly discarded). He now has a conviction to share his thoughts instead of hiding them and fueling his own alienation from the world. He knows to be cool, you have to respect others.
This is heavily suggested in the chorus of his song, “Love for the World”: “If you love the world, can you show me the world?/ Only thing I see is crookedness in this world/ I got love for the world, I can show you the world/ It’s a blessing to be in my world/ W.O.R.L.D./ L.O.V.E./ Can you feel me?”
Some of his songs are negative, but these songs simply reflect his past. My personal favorite is “How I Feel Inside,” a three-minute-plus track with no chorus that Young Preach wrote after his tumultuous first year in Starkville.
The song gives one a sense of his pensiveness: “Another helpless child on the road of destruction/ Mississippi too old, we need some construction/ We talking bout tha wrong thang, alien abduction?/ And they wonder why tha young people can’t even function.”
Young Preach is also a dishwasher and cook at Harvey’s. The blue-collar dedication to his work cannot be overemphasized.
“He’s a very self-motivated person,” Harvey’s general manager Pat Donahue said. “He just had that air about him (when he was hired) that he would be doing good things.”
Young Preach likes to use Harvey’s as a place to receive constructive criticism. It’s not unusual for him to bring a CD to work to get his peers’ thoughts on his music. Hell, Young Preach’s first live performance was at a Harvey’s Christmas party. His co-workers are quite supportive of his efforts; I’ve seen them several times at Dave’s open mic to watch him perform.
Young Preach recently performed his first two gigs at Dave’s, but he wants to spread the positivity to other venues.
“Dave’s, they love me, and I love them back, and I will always perform there,” he said. “But if I have an opportunity, you know, to reach a new crowd, I will take that chance. But I wouldn’t forget about Dave’s.”
One thing Young Preach always tells me, ad nauseam, is that it’s not about him but the fans.
“I hate using the word ‘I’ and ‘me,'” he said. “I always pray to God about that.”